We have invited Jeff Turner, Principal/CTO of Interstream, to share his perspective on the technical implications (vs. the philosophical digressions and debates) of net neutrality. He has gained this perspective over his many years as an executive at some of the top hardware firms that built the web (including Cisco and Novell).

Video over the Internet is a relatively new phenomenon and it represents a fundamental paradigm shift in video distribution and even the architecture of the Internet. Video distribution migrated from a purely wireless medium (television) in the early 20th century to primarily a cable medium in the latter 20th century. While cable and other Multichannel Video Programming Distributors (MVPD) still dominate video distribution in the early 21st century, we are beginning to see a new migration to the Internet. This has created a number of economic and engineering challenges that the Internet is only beginning to resolve.

The Internet is fundamentally biased against long distance communications by giving them much lower speed limits in data transmissions than short distance communications. But this is a good design feature because it encourages more efficient short range file transfers and this is precisely what has happened with Content Delivery Networks.

By urging a move from non-discrimination to unreasonable discrimination, NARUC recognizes that “big dumb pipes” are a model for the Internet that was abandoned years ago. NARUC also realizes you cannot have a neutral internet if only one side of the content/access equation has to abide by those rules.

Australian broadband providers have switched to non-neutral networks that favor local content with generous usage allowances but not transit networks. This has empowered Australian broadband users for the first time but Net Neutrality proponents have gone ballistic.

In their typical juvenile fashion, the 4chan boards launched an attack against Verizon Wireless customers over the weekend and 4chan’s owners are playing victim with no mention of their own responsibility.  The 4chan board servers were sending a flood of messages to Verizon Wireless customers which could effectively degrade or even block their Internet connectivity.  Rather than acknowledge their own faults, 4chan’s only response was to complain that their boards are being blocked “intentionally” by Verizon and that their users should call Verizon support lines.
Some in the blogosphere are complaining about Verizon …

Telecom and tech bloggers were abuzz yesterday as Obama’s response to a question about net neutrality made it’s way through the ether. (video is embedded after the jump) The question, asked as part of the YouTube interview with the President, may have generated more controversy than intended.

Princeton Senior Sauhard Sahi (under the supervision of Princeton Professor Ed Felton) conducted a study of 1021 randomly selected files pulled from the trackerless variant of BitTorrent.  10 of the 1021 files were found to be likely non-infringing, which would mean that more than 99% of the files sampled were copyrighted content.
Figure 1 – Types of BitTorrent files sampled by Sauhard Sahi

While 99% of these files sampled were pirated, it doesn’t directly translate to the percentage of BitTorrent network traffic.  The network traffic number could simply be computed by weighting …

ISPs shall make no policy respecting an establishment of order to network traffic, or prioritizing the VoIP, video or game traffic; or abridging the flow of P2P traffic, or the Hulu; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and illegally download copyrighted material.

Free Press spent a lot of words in their NPRM filing to argue that the FCC’s definition of reasonable network management practices was unreasonable. One of their kinder passages states:
The Commission’s proposed definition is circular, ambiguous, and incomplete, and without further definition will create loopholes and result in future errors in policymaking.
So what does Free Press propose to use in its place?  From a blog post on their site (ironically titled “Clear Standards for Reasonable Network Management“), they have come up with wording that is rock solid and could not …