Sidecut Reports

I didn’t get to listen to all of the FCC’s Broadband Network Management Practices forum from Harvard today, but I did get to hear one excellent presentation from Internet legend David Clark, a technologist who offered some great insights on network management and bandwidth pricing — while also wondering out loud if the whole network neutrality discussion couldn’t be conducted with just a tad more civility.

“I would plead with all the actors [in the debate] that when they look over the fence, don’t say ‘enemy’ but say ‘partner,’ ” said Clark at the opening of his remarks, reasoning that if access providers and content creators work better together, there might be hope for a better Internet for all in the future. Not a bad sentiment to embrace as the new season of network neutrality debates kicks off.

Two points from Clark’s brief talk resounded with me, the first being his contention that flat-rate pricing for Internet access “is going to give,” and will lead to pricing points in the future that are tied more closely to actual bandwidth usage. Industry, he noted, will have to “train the consumer to not be afraid of this.”

And while Clark certainly knows all about how and why networks need to be managed, he made it clear that Internet inventors like himself “fought very strongly” to make sure that the Internet protocols were designed to allow for users to be able to designate both what types of packets they were sending and what quality of service should be needed.

“It [quality of service] should be my choice, not the ISP’s choice,” Clark said. ISPs who impose value judgements on certain types of traffic, he said. “are looking at their customer, and saying ‘enemy.’”

Looking forward to taking some time and watching the webcast of the first part of the forum, where it sounds like the FCC commishes were at the very least paying lip service to the idea of more transparency when it comes to network management policies. Though I will have lots more to say about these ideas in the near future, it seems like there is some consensus building on this topic around the idea that there need to be some rules to assure open connectivity and content access, while also recognizing providers’ needs to manage networks efficiently. But to that last point, there is still debate on how open providers should be about such processes — as in the Comcast case, nobody really doubts the need to manage networks clogged by BitTorrent. The main sticking point seems to be in the how-it’s-done end of things. More to come on this point, I’m sure.

This entry was posted on February 25, 2008 at 9:37 pm and is filed under Broadband, P2P, Policy. Tagged: Comcast, David Clark, FCC, Kevin Martin, Net Neutrality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.