April 27, 2007
My Network World column and outside links on network neutrality
Oops! It turns out Network World ran my column on network neutrality and Tariff Rebate Passthrough on April 23, not April 30 as I previously believed. So I should have gotten my list of outside links together sooner. Sorry. Confusing matters further, my post on Jeffersonet vs. Edisonet got Slashdotted, without me having provided a link to the column itself. Well, here goes.
- Ed Whitacre, CEO of SBC/AT&T, kicked things off in late 2005, arguing that he should be allowed to discriminate between, say, Google and Yahoo based on how much they paid him. He later backed down a bit, but many people are unconvinced as to his sincerity.
- Verizon said similar things around the same time.
- Om Malik made an early attempt to cover all sides of the issue, albeit with a pro-neutrality orientation.
- Jeremy Penston had an article last week arguing that bandwidth is NOT “effectively free,” at least for video.
- Scott Cleland says my thinking is “seriously flawed” because I think there’s any need for neutrality regulation. He thinks no logical case has been made for neutrality whatsoever. Perhaps we need need to spell it out for him in smaller words. Anyhow, his one-pager that is admittedly sponsored by the telecom vendors does a good job of smashing some net neutrality strawmen nobody was talking about anyway.
- Errata Security argues that network neutrality is unworkable on the backbone, and links to my article, which was only about network neutrality on the last mile.
- Richi Jennings argues that we don’t need tiering, because the speed of light has dropped from 300 million meters/second to a mere 80 million or so. Or maybe less. Or something like that … seriously, it seems that he doubts the value of super-high QOS, because latency is an inescapable fact of life.
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