Harshing Art Brodsky’s Mellow: It’s Not About Feelings
Feelings, nothing more than feelings,
trying to forget my feelings of love.
Teardrops rolling down on my face,
trying to forget my feelings of love.- Feelings, by Morris Albert
When I first started using the Internet, in the pre-www days of 1992, back when it was all dial up on 2400 baud modems and bulletin boards like Colorado Springs Computer News Service (my personal fave), I marveled at the technological wonder of it all. I was blown away by the engineering that could connect my PC clone to a computer in another state over my POTS line and bring me together with people and information far away.
Little did I know that all that technology wasn’t what the Internet was about. The techno-magic that was my dial up connection was apparently second to my own emotions… At least that’s how Art Brodsky sees it. In his latest post at Public Knowledge, it’s all about the vibe, man.
At the heart of the debate over the open Internet is that intangible which makes the Internet what it has become – the wide-open culture that encourages investment, imagination and innovation. The imagination factor tends to get lost in all of the legal arguments about Title This or Title That and all of the engineering disputes about how much “jitter” is acceptable. For most people, the Internet is not about under which title of the Communications Act the Internet is placed. It’s not about jitter or packet prioritization. It’s about the feeling of a wide-open space that can never be filled by developers of new services and apps. It’s about the wide-open space for consumers looking for things to help inform, amuse, educate, purchase or a thousand other tasks. [bold added]
Now, I don’t mean to harsh Art’s mellow, but most people care a great deal about jitter, they just don’t know it. Any time they’re playing an online game, and that imperceptible jitter results in getting fragged by a less skilled player with a better connection, you care. You care big time.
Any time that video player spins it’s little wheel and tells you it’s buffering… buffering… buffering… You care. You care big time.
What Art and the rest of the liberal arts majors at groups like Free Press and Public Knowledge don’t understand is that the engineering they don’t understand plays a huge role in this thing called the Internet.
Art may not think it matters, but things like “non-discrimination” have tremendously negative impacts in engineering. Google’s vaunted search algorithm, for instance, is all about discrimination. If it weren’t, all search results would be random. In the words of Michael (from the movie of the same name):
That was around the time I invented standing in line… Before everybody milled around. It was a mess. So one day I said, “Why not make a line?”
The fact is, engineering matters, but good engineering should be almost invisible.
Looking at Taipei 101, you would never see the giant pendulum that hangs between the 88th and 92nd floor. Due to its height, the building is susceptible to high winds. The pendulum moves within the top of the building to offset the force of the winds and keep the structure upright. That engineering probably doesn’t enter the thoughts of the residents on a daily basis, but take the pendulum away and people living there would notice it quickly.
In much the same way, taking the engineering out of the Internet by imposing rules that would prevent network management of jitter would be immediately noticed.
Despite Art’s hippie-groove-thing approach to the Internet, engineering still matters – and its still critically important. He’d be wise to let engineers build, and stick to making tie-dye t-shirts and hemp shoes.
You are an idiot.
I thought hippies were enlightened, creative people. Yet “you are an idiot” is the best you can come up with? I guess it’s true that drugs kill brain cells.
:-)
In claiming that most people care about jitter because of online games and fps affecting their “fragging” ability, you’re assuming that most people on the Internet are playing fast, first-person shoot ‘em games. This is just not true. Most people using the Internet are NOT playing these kinds of games. And video buffering time is more a function of overall bandwidth, not milliseconds or even seconds of jitter.
You are 100% correct when you say “engineering matters, but good engineering should be almost invisible.”, and I don’t think Art Brodsky would disagree at all with that statement. I think what Art was trying to illustrate is reason why this debate is happening at all. The concept of Net Neutrality didn’t spring out of a vacuum. It didn’t become an urgent issue because of gross mass abuse by industry. The issue exploded because consumers have begun to take notice of the direction industry is heading, to more consolidation, less competition, slower innovation and speed, higher prices, and now recently to changing the fundamental open nature of the Internet itself by inserting itself as a gatekeeper of the content we choose to access on the Internet. It is this fundamental power grab by industry that is the last straw. The core principles of Net Neutrality are so important to protecting the essence of the Internet that we as nation must have firm rules, regulations, and laws to protect it.
Net Neutrality rules? Fine. Court says not with Title I classification? OK…reclassify under Title II. Congress not happy with that? Fine. give us a new Communications Act. But in the meantime we can’t just do nothing….not an option!
@Michael Chaney
So what if many if not most people don’t play games? A lot of people do use VoIP or will use VoIP or video communications now or in the future. Those are nearly as sensitive as gaming and you better believe that jitter matters and we don’t need federal regulations outlawing the management of jitter like the FCC is considering in their proposed NPRM because Free Press and others believe that there should be no “application bias”.
“It didn’t become an urgent issue because of gross mass abuse by industry. The issue exploded because consumers have begun to take notice of the direction industry is heading, to more consolidation, less competition, slower innovation and speed, higher prices, and now recently to changing the fundamental open nature of the Internet itself by inserting itself as a gatekeeper of the content we choose to access on the Internet. It is this fundamental power grab by industry that is the last straw.”
That’s a lot of nonsense. ISPs haven’t really been the gatekeepers and they won’t become the gatekeepers.
http://www.digitalsociety.org/2010/05/the-real-barriers-to-innovation-isnt-the-cost-of-bandwidth/
To add to George’s comment, I didn’t say most people play games. I said most people care about jitter, but don’t know it. The games and video buffeting were simply two examples. VoIP is another example.
If you want to think of it differently, people don’t care about engineering, but when an engineering error means your broadband, cable or phone service go out, you care. Nobody cares about engineering until it becomes an issue.
Arguing for “non-discrimination” in engineering is ludicrous. Prioritization is not inherently problematic. Google uses algorithms to prioritize search results. If it didn’t, you have nothing but random flotsam and jetsam. In that discrimination lies a business model. There are times I would prefer Google (or a competitor?) provided search results that weren’t weighted to recent results. At that point, the engineering matters.
But I’m not about to push for legislation that requires “time neutrality” because one company has 80% of the market for search.
@George
I agree that VoIP is a much more compelling argument for reduced jitter than online gaming (probably should have gone with that analogy in the article). I think it’s the ISP industry’s job to reinvest profit in their networks to offer ever better products to their customers. This is how competitive industries are supposed to work right? Part of improving their product is making their service faster and less latent to facilitate their customer’s growing need for real-time content (VoIP, streaming video, etc.). I don’t think we disagree on these statements. Where we fundamentally disagree is that I believe ISPs should make these network improvements available to ANY content that flows over their network without regard for origin, destination, or content type. I don’t want my ISP denying improvements to a website I may prefer just because they have a business arrangement to provide a “fast lane” with a competing website. The big issue is that making “fast lanes” for partnering websites necessarily means you have to create “slow lanes” for the rest. I believe this goes against a fundamental tenant of what makes the Internet the Internet, and will create huge barriers to entry for newcomers trying to get their content online.
“ISPs haven’t really been the gatekeepers and they won’t become the gatekeepers.” I wish I could just take your word for it, but ultimately there is a big profit motive for ISP to start collecting money from the content side of the communication. “Fast lane” partnerships with content providers means the ISPs, not the consumers, will get to pick the winners and losers in the content market, and this is not acceptable to me.
@Michael
Your analogy is apples and oranges. The whole point of a search is discrimination. It’s to take the words you search for and return the most often visited websites. Google (and Yahoo and Bing) may offer paid search results above or to the side, but there is a clear distinction between results that business arrangements produce and those that collective interest of consumers produce. Nothing in the ISP access model can mirror this paradigm.
If you want search results that don’t give you the most recent and popular results, then what’s the point of searching? But hey, maybe you’re right. Maybe it would be cool to have a search engine that had the option of a “random” mode or a “last first” mode. You should create that website. Under Net Neutrality rules you’ll have the same equal access to all consumers that Google, Yahoo, or Bing has, without having fork over any (protection) money to become a “partner” with the ISPs. And in the content market, it’s as easy as a few keyboard strokes and mouse clicks for consumers to choose a competitive newcomer. The same can’t be said for switching ISPs.
@Michael Chaney
“I could just take your word for it, but ultimately there is a big profit motive for ISP to start collecting money from the content side of the communication. “Fast lane” partnerships with content providers means the ISPs, not the consumers, will get to pick the winners and losers in the content market, and this is not acceptable to me.”
There are “fast lanes” today when you lease CDN services for your content. Goggle leases CDNs and also built their own private network. Banning ISP fast lanes because of some misguided “neutrality” ideology simply removes competition from the CDN market which increases costs to content providers.
@George
That argument is a non-starter. CDNs are paid for by content providers to get the source of their content as close to the ISP as possible, and to eliminate, as much as possible, hosting and backbone latency and hops customers experience. Even though most CDN servers reside at the ISP’s facilities, this is still considered part of the content provider’s network, as is any leased private network used to connect CDN servers. CDNs fall under the umbrella of content hosting. There is nothing wrong with ISP providers such as AT&T also selling hosting, application, or CDN service to content providers. This is a completely separate business transaction to last-mile “fast lane” protection service.
CDNs are NOT the same as proposed last-mile “fast lanes”. CDNs in no way affect how an ISP treats last-mile traffic.
You have no idea what the ISPs are proposing and your understanding of what the FCC is proposing to block is lacking. The FCC is proposing to ban any prioritized or enhanced delivery to content/application providers.
The enhanced QoS state, such as the one between Blizzard and TeliaSonera which some non-profitable gaming companies want to ban to force Blizzard down to a lowest common denominator, is just one of the prohibited models. An enhanced QoS state (lower jitter assurance) is not used for high bandwidth content delivery but for very low bandwidth (< 0.1 Mbps) applications like VoIP or gaming. Nobody is going to pay for enhanced jitter service for their content delivery as it is too expensive and doesn't offer the characteristics that buffered video delivery requires.
The other models that may be at risk is multicasting services or content-side paying the ISP to boost speeds on the client end beyond their contracted speeds. There's nothing with either business/engineering model but they seem to violate the FCC's proposed definition of no enhanced or prioritized delivery. The FCC allows the customer to buy this kind of access so it's silly to not allow them to indirectly buy the service which has the benefit of reduced transactional cost and improved economy of scale.
I think I do have a pretty good idea of what the FCC is proposing, but don’t take my word (or yours) as the ultimate authority. I invite anyone reading this comment to do their own due diligence and read up on the FCC’s plans themselves.
Austin Schlick, FCC General Council, on the FCC’s reclassification:
http://www.broadband.gov/third-way-legal-framework-for-addressing-the-comcast-dilemma.html
FCC’s NPRM for the Open Internet Proceeding:
http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-09-93A1.pdf
I don’t believe it’s right for any ISP to engage in paid arrangements with content providers for enhanced QoS over Internet. If ISPs want to provide low-jitter VoIP over a private network to their customers then I’m fine with that, but when it comes to services provided over the Internet access customers buy from ISPs, they can’t artificially slow or degrade the QoS (as would necessarily be the case by offering enhanced QoS) of one VoIP over Internet provider over another competing VoIP over Internet provider because of any business partnership.
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