Silicon Flatirons

Last summer saw a flurry of stories about a Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group (BITAG) put together by a consortium of tech companies under the leadership of Dale Hatfield, former FCC Chief Technologist and current Executive Director of the Silicon Flatirons Center at the University of Colorado, “to bring together engineers and other similar technical experts to develop consensus on broadband network management practices or other related technical issues that can affect users’ Internet experience, including the impact to and from applications, content and devices that utilize the Internet.”

Dale Hatfield

Now, after eight months of gestation, BITAG is about to be born. The website & blog are in place (if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to blog it, did it really happen?); an  Interim Board of Directors is in place* and its initial meeting scheduled for late December (and it presumably occurred); the membership process has been formalized; background documents have been released.

The raison d’etre of BITAG is to provide honest technical evaluation of Internet network management practices. As Hatfield states:

The BITAG’s primary purpose will be to support a balanced and diverse technical working group (TWG) of volunteer engineers and other experts tasked with analyzing and developing consensus on network management practices and other related technical issues that can affect the experience of Internet users.  As the BITAG’s Executive Director, I am strongly committed to shepherding an open, transparent, and collaborative expert technical forum that will enable engineers to do what they do best: solve problems.

In any particular instance, the TWG would study a practice brought before it and

Based upon engineers working in a “problem solving” rather than adversarial process, the TWG would publicly issue a consensus report that, among other things, sets forth both the intended and unintended consequences of the network management practice in question.  Hopefully, this engineering process and resulting report would reduce the chance of miscommunications/ misunderstanding and the chance of litigation or regulatory complaint.  However, if someone chose to go the FCC or other governmental body with a complaint or to file a lawsuit about the technique, the agency involved would have, in the TWG report, relevant technical information with which it could then address any normative decisions that might be necessary.  That is, the agency would be in a much better position to expeditiously determine whether or not the intended public benefits of the new or revised technique sufficiently outweigh any adverse impact on applications, content, or devices.

The value of this function is that it provides a mechanism for the industry to address its problems of collective action. The Internet has many players performing many different functions. Their relationships are partly cooperative, partly competitive – the term “co-opetition” is sometimes used. On the whole, over the past couple of decades the companies have done an amazing job of keeping the Internet dynamic through the mechanisms of contract, standards organizations, and community norms. For example, one company may invest millions of dollars on the promise of another that a proprietary technology will be available on RAND terms, which means “Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory” even as the lawyers are tearing out their hair because none of these terms are precisely defined. (Here is the lawyers’ view of the world.)

Inevitably, however, as the complexities of the Internet continue to grow, both the actuality and the fear that some players are trying to game the system and achieve some sneaky advantage are going to grow. So all parties will benefit from the existence of prestigious group of technical referees dedicated to assessing the technical issues without bias or interest. Such a group can be a powerful enforcer of community norms, especially because of its constitutional nature. A party may dislike a particular decision, but, as long at the process is regarded as fair, the overwhelming advantage of having an overall governance mechanism in place will mute opposition.

BITAG can also be an invaluable input into regulatory decisions. However the current FCC Net Neutrality dispute turns out, the agency is certain to receive complaints about various Internet practices, and both it and the public will benefit by having advice from a disinterested and expert outside source and not just from Washington sellswords.

The concept of BITAG is not really new. Expert industry groups have played a strong and very productive role in the history of American industry. Consider, for example the Society of Automotive Engineers or the various industry code organizations. (The antitrusters tend to denigrate these, and they can create competitive problems – viz, the NRA — but not as long as the mandate is limited to technical issues rather than “fair competition.”)

So welcome to the tech world, BITAG. Live long and prosper!

*The interim Board will consist of the following individuals:

Jeff Blum, DISH Network
Jeff Campbell, Cisco Systems
Kyle Dixon, Time Warner
Dave Farber, Carnegie Mellon University
Susan Fox, Disney
Rick Lane, News Corp.
C. Lincoln Hoewing, Verizon
Kevin Krufky, Alcatel Lucent
Brent Olson, AT&T
Marjorie Dickman, Intel
Jim Rottsolk, Microsoft
Gigi Sohn, Public Knowledge
Joe Waz, Comcast
Sally Wentworth, Internet Society
Rick Whitt, Google
Dale Hatfield (BITAG Executive Director – ex-officio, nonvoting member)