Archive for October, 2011

Bob Frankston: Thinking Outside the Pipe

by on Oct.18, 2011, under Uncategorized

(Original at Bob’s Blog)

Monday, October 17, 2011

We’ve unnecessarily restricted the benefits that we and our economy can enjoy from [the Internet’s] abundance because of the artificial limitations of the telecommunication industry’s limited palette of services.

 

A picky eater can be undernourished amidst abundance. The Internet has given us a taste of the abundance all around us. But we’ve unnecessarily restricted the benefits that we and our economy can enjoy from that abundance because of the artificial limitations of the telecommunication industry’s limited palette of services.

Connecting a mobile pacemaker to a physician’s office is simple using Internet protocols but it becomes difficult when the telecommunications providers control the path and need to assure that they make a profit from each message. It’s similar to the problem of asking a railroad to serve a small town that doesn’t buy many tickets. Fortunately we have an alternative – roads serve the communities without having to be profitable because they benefit the community.

Cities provide roads everywhere because they don’t need every inch of pavement to be a profit center. When New York City’s private transit companies failed, the city took them over instead of letting them fail.

The wires that run along our streets cost very little by comparison to roads, so why are we investing so much effort to prevent us from communicating unless we pay a provider?

[. . .]

We need to free ourselves from the past and recognize that the Internet is based on a very different concept.

To understand this we can look at the packets, or containers, we use to ship goods across the oceans. They can be loaded on boats without the ship owner knowing what is inside. The containers can take any path across the ocean – they aren’t restricted to channels and you can even use airplanes.

If you are shipping an entire factory you split up the components and place them in containers. When they get to the destination you reassemble them in order and if some get lost you ship replacements.

One might not be so casual about delays and replacements for expensive gear; but with Internet packets that all happens within a thousandth of a second.

[. . .]

 

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Verizon Asks Federal Appeals Court to Halt FCC Open Internet Order

by on Oct.01, 2011, under Uncategorized

(Original at Reuters)

By Jonathan Stempel

Fri Sep 30, 2011 6:19pm EDT

(Reuters) – Verizon Communications Inc on Friday asked a federal appeals court to block the Federal Communications Commission from imposing new rules on how Internet service providers manage their networks.

The FCC last Friday said its so-called net neutrality rules were scheduled to take effect on November 20.

[. . .]

In a filing with the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., Verizon said the FCC was “arbitrary” and “capricious” and acted beyond its statutory authority in imposing the rules.

The rules “impose potentially sweeping and unneeded regulations on broadband networks and services and on the Internet itself,” Michael Glover, deputy general counsel at Verizon, said in a statement.

[. . .]

Some public interest groups have also criticized the FCC rules, saying they are weak and favor some phone and cable companies with large Internet presences, such as AT&T Inc and Comcast Corp.

The D.C. Circuit in April threw out a challenge by Verizon and MetroPCS Communications Inc to the rules, calling it premature.

[. . .]

The case is Verizon v. FCC et al, D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 11-1359.

[. . .]

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