Speaking of mixed feelings...

[jducoeur]

The Net Neutrality thing is coming to a head, and again I don't think it's quite black-and-white. Make no mistake: the issue matters, and I think it's important that the Net Neutrality amendment pass. I dearly wish this issue hadn't been brought to this pass -- I think the best situation is the sort of squishy gentlemen's agreement that has prevailed until now, where everyone more or less treats packets equally and there is room for experiments and violations. But the big broadband carriers turned this into a Big Problem, and that being the case, I think that official Neutrality is the best of the plausible options.

(Those options being: no legislation, in which case the carriers have expressed a fairly clear intention of using their semi-monopoly powers to screw the information providers; Net Neutrality, which skews the economics in a different but fairly even-handed way; and price regulation -- the option that no one is officially talking about, but which I suspect the carriers would *love* to present as a "compromise" alternative, and which would almost certainly be the worst of all possible worlds for the consumer.)

All that said, both sides are guilty of pretty serious exaggeration. This was driven home by the NPR report I heard this afternoon, which said (paraphrasing) that "both sides agree that the decision made here will shape the Internet for generations to come".

Oh, come on. "Generations to come"? Get real.

Let me make a bald prediction; I don't think it's by any means certain, but the odds are good. Within 15 years, this whole thing will have been written off as an irrelevant historical footnote, because the big broadband carriers will all be out of business, at least as the business is currently understood. They'll be out of business because their business model is probably doomed.

The Internet as it currently stands is all about democratization of information -- anybody can get to anybody else. But the current broadband business models are built on top of the assumption that the pipes are controlled by what amount to mostly-unregulated utilities: semi-monopolistic companies like Comcast and Verizon who mediate that information getting to the consumers. I believe that anyone who thinks that's going to be the case in the long run doesn't understand the technology picture.

Mesh computing (with end users passing packets around to each other) is in its infancy, and far from ready for prime time -- there are many theories, but no real standards yet. That's going to remain the case for a while, as the technologies compete and evolve. But once they do, the controlled-pipe model becomes tenuous at best. Just as the information revolution sent the information providers scrambling, so will the provision revolution do the same to the broadband providers. Some will transform and survive; others will cling to the fat-pipe model and fail. But either way, I think that this whole question will become fairly moot, because once those packets are mainly flying from person to person instead of from middleman to consumer, no company is going to have enough control to be able to enforce differential pricing.

As I said, this issue matters for the medium term. If Net Neutrality fails, I suspect that the next 2 - 10 years will have a lot of pain, many legal fights, and a lot of businesses forced out of business by broadband extortion. But it will also speed up the death of the broadband providers, by giving consumers and information providers an excellent economic incentive to speed up the adoption of mesh networking...

Comments

[oakleaf-mirror.livejournal.com]

Mesh networking (and we'll ignore the UUCP days that have come and gone) still needs a transport mechanism. Users can't pass packets to each other if they don't have a way to move them between their computers. That's all Comcast is for me, at the moment. I don't use their mail or web servers, or any of their other services. They're a fast way for my computer to talk to the computers I want it to, and nothing more. I don't want or expect them to be more, and I sure don't want them getting in the way by preferentially favouring the services they choose.

[jducoeur]

Well, the point is that the transport becomes primarily machine-to-machine WiFi. That's really the heart of the matter: utilities like Comcast start becoming less and less central, because less of the traffic is passing through their pipes, and instead being transported in a more peer-to-peer fashion.

Mind, I'm not talking about *grid* computing, which is about splitting a program into many parts. *Mesh* networking is about turning the whole network back into something much more peer-to-peer, with packets flowing in a much more decentralized fashion, rather than being as focused on the central backbone.

That's not easy by any means -- I expect a lot of fits and starts before the technology equation makes sense. But the benefits to the end users (if not to the big power players) are quite clear, so I consider it a near-inevitability that it will eventually happen. And it seems likely that abusive policies on the part of the bandwidth providers are likely to accelerate that...

[oakleaf-mirror.livejournal.com]

Oh, I understand the concept of what you're talking about. I did do UUCP back in the day. I still think we're a long way before we're going to replicate that at the packet level over WiFi, and it would be ugly from a technical and sociological point of view, for quite some time, particularly for people in rural areas.

[jducoeur]

Oh, sure. But "quite some time" in Internet terms is a decade or so. I mean, 15 years ago, most people had never *heard* of the Internet, and many of the key technologies in play today hadn't been invented. 15 years from now, I'm pretty confident that it will have evolved around this particular roadblock.

As for rural areas, I'm not nearly convinced. Once the range comes up, wireless generally makes loads of sense for rural areas, for the same reason why cellular is rapidly overtaking landline in developing countries -- the economics of wireless are much more appealing than laying cables when the populace is spread out. And it's not clear that having big companies lay out the necessary repeaters is necessary, or even beneficial: I would say that the economics for the end user probably argue otherwise...

[mr-teem.livejournal.com]

Betting on an order-of-magnitude improvement in WiFi to support mesh networking is a sketchy argument with which to dismiss the current Net Neutrality debate, in my opinion. (I still think there's going to be a period of time where remote/rural areas won't be able to benefit from such an increase. There are still areas in Massachusetts that can't get wired cable service, for example. On the other hand, they have satellite as an alternative.)

The danger in the short term with the so-called "two tier Internet" is that low-cost content is effectively or actually shut out by the service providers. I'll use a cable TV analogy again and recall the must-carry issues that raged starting in the late 80s and eventually got resolved sometime during the Clinton administration. Why did the cable companies fight against it? Because they were being paid big bucks by cable channel providers willing to pay for what was alleged to be limited access. (Now that Digital TV is upon us, that provision is being looked at again, for pretty much the same reasons.) After must-carry was implemented, cable rates did go up but local stations could now be received.

On the Internet, everyone and anyone can be a low-cost content provider. Any tiering based on ability to pay as opposed to simply the datatype of content is going to put some providers in a bind, if not drive them out of the business in the long run. I don't pay for any broadband connection today, but I would easily see paying less for a connection that, say, didn't allow streaming audio or video, but let me get anything else on an equal basis.

[jducoeur]

Betting on an order-of-magnitude improvement in WiFi to support mesh networking is a sketchy argument with which to dismiss the current Net Neutrality debate, in my opinion.

I'm not dismissing it, by any means -- as I said, this *does* matter for the time being. (For reasons I can't discuss, this matter has a very immediate and important impact on me, and loss of Net Neutrality would be a real blow.) But I do think that an important matter like this is done no benefit by exaggeration, and I do think the apocalyptic tones are a bit overblown. In the *long* run, I sincerely believe this is all going to change beyond recognition...

Net Neutrality was the law for 30 years

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

Justin, there was no "gentleman's agreement." Net Neutrality was the law since 1971. You can get the details from my professional blog. Start with the network neutrality primer, http://www.wetmachine.com/totsf/item/500, and work from there.

While I am also a big fan of mesh networking, I long ago stopped believing the doctrine of techno-determinism. Policy and law constrain things and make advances difficult to impossible if not vigorously opposed. The DMCA is an excellent example.

Yaakov HaMizrachi

Re: Net Neutrality was the law for 30 years

[jducoeur]

Interesting -- I'll have to look at that. Thanks for the pointer.

I concur that the technology doesn't make it by any means certain; hence my hedging. Still, I think it's pretty likely: it's definitely possible to suppress (if not entirely prevent) it through regulatory mechanisms, but it's probably not going to be an easy political sell. (I expect that spurious anti-terrorism arguments will be advanced against it, but I think that argument is likely to erode over time.) It wouldn't surprise me if regulatory forces slow it down a bit, but I think it's unlikely that they can prevent it in the long run -- and once it's entrenched, it's going to be very nearly impossible to roll back. Hence, I think it's *probably* more a matter of "when" than "if".

I believe the economics will be the trump card here, at least in the long run. But it is certainly true that powerful forces will be parlayed against mesh networking -- among other things, the bandwidth providers aren't going to go quietly, and they have good lobbyists...

Re: Net Neutrality was the law for 30 years

[mneme]

Also, mesh networking really relies on unlicenced wireless -- something that also relies on the government not getting in the way. WiFi is clearly here to stay, but for mesh networking to work for the long haul, I think you need some more frequencies (with different penetration/distance qualities) -- and many of those are currently locked away from the end-user via legislation (see some of osewalrus's other work).

Re: Net Neutrality was the law for 30 years

[jducoeur]

True -- good point. My impression is that things are slowly drifting in a healthy direction there, but that's by no means a given...