Cook’s Collaborative Edge

On December 1 at after10 pm on the first day of supernova,my long time friend Eva Waskell who more than 25 years ago started a journey that morphed into the Election Integrity movement - much more about that real soon now - opened her cell phone and called her longtime friend Ed Healy also known as the Phantom Cab driver.

With less than 10 minutes we were driven back to mid town and in the aftermath i found out from Eva how she miraculously conjured up this amazing “cabbie.” I have had a couple of phone conversations with Ed since returning a want to give his two blogs a huge recommendation.

The first The Phantom Cab Driver Phites Back is a SanFran taxi industry policy blog where Ed brings into public view the machinations of San Francisco Mayor Newsom’s scheme to off set the city’s fiscal policies at the expense of long time cab drivers. Here he gives blow by blow description of the work of Christiane Hayashi who was charged with working out a solution. According to Ed she is very impressive in handling a very difficult situation.

But take a look at Phantom Cab stories. These are truly amazing reminiscenses from Ed’s 25 years of driving. Some will make you laugh, others cry.

For example: Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Star

Star was Liverpool Irish and talked just like the Beatles - whom he idolized. He could sing every word to every Beatle song that I knew as well as every word to just about every rock song that anybody else ever heard of. He could do the entire repertoire of Spooky Tooth for god’s sake.

By 1:15 one Saturday morning, he was already dead - shot by junkie, a former taxi driver, who wouldn’t believe that Star hadn’t tucked away a couple of hundred on a Friday night.

Cook’s Edge: Ed has a book here. People will buy it, I am certain. I told him he reminds me of Eric Hoffer. He didn’t quite accept the comparison but understood why i make it.

He is a WONDERFUL writer. Take a look and you will see what i mean.

It is not often that I see such delightful news. The public interest is protected in California even as it is abused in Washington DC.

Ever since the NTIA mapping program became a topic of discussion on my mail list and Sara Wedeman saw and critiqued the work of Rachelle Cong and her project manager Ann Neville, the question of the way in which NTIA would use some hundreds of millions of dollars of stimulus money to ascertain where service was and where it wasn’t became a major subject of discussion. Sara took a look at what Chong had done in California and reacted with extreme dismay. Several prominent members asked Sara how she would do it. When they saw how Sara would approach it they encouraged her to reach out and offer consulting support which sara did and which unfortunately ended very unhappily. Meanwhile I did an interview with Sara on her methodology which I summarized here. It is discussed here. This link will give you the complete interview in PDF form.

Sara submitted comments to NTIA published here and here. And the explanatory slide deck. And here.

Esme Vos was impressed by Sara’s approach, commenting that “an interesting interview that explains why mapping is important and how it should be done to ensure the final product is useful for policy… offering keen insights into why universal broadband availability is so important.”.

By the end of June Lawrence Strickling had assumed the lead at NTIA, from whence the BTOP grant program is being run. He had also brought in Ann Neville, Rachelle Chong’s mapping project manager, to direct the NTIA’s mapping program. One of the results of that we have seen written up or commented on by Art Brodsky in no less than 14 articles which are all linked to and summarized here. Millions of dollars are going to Connected Nation under the supervision of Mr Strickling and Ms Neville. This despite a very widespread opinion in the public interest community that Connected Nation has been put together by interests loyal to the incumbents and is serving their interests by producing maps that say , in effect, “this area has broadband because ATT says it does”. Oh? Where? Precisely under what terms? “Oh sorry we can tell you that. It is carrier confidential. Thank you for giving us the money borrowed from future generations of tax payers while we give those taxpayers nothing useful in return.”

The Delightful News

PUC member’s bid for second term rejected
Telephony Online
By Michael Rothfeld

The leader of the state Senate on Tuesday [December 8, 2009] rejected a controversial appointee of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger who had been bidding for a second term on the commission that regulates state utilities.

Aides to Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) informed the governor’s office that he would not hold a hearing to confirm Rachelle Chong. Chong, who has been severely criticized by consumer groups, was first appointed in 2006 and had been seeking a term that would have lasted through 2014.

The decision means she will have to leave the commission at the end of the year.

Chong, who functioned informally as the Public Utilities Commission’s main telecommunications regulator, had received support from the state’s two largest phone companies, AT&T and Verizon, which benefited from her successful push to deregulate most land-line services.

They lobbied for her confirmation, and AT&T solicited support letters from nonprofit groups and government organizations, some of which had received funding from the company. Both phone companies also donated to a nonprofit group affiliated with Steinberg.

COOK’s Edge: Chong and Ann Neville’s California mapping study found that ATT and Verizon had done a fine job of bringing broadband to 95% of the population. Darrell Steinberg disagreed and listened to his continuents. Thank goodness his actions ended Ms. Chong’s service to the incumbents.

On the other hand, I am sure Mr. Strickling would have no problem in explaining why he defended the choice of Ms. Neville rather adopting Sara’s approach. In my opinion his explanation would likely be analogous to another homily in why Wall Street counts and Main Street does not. At least in denying Ms. Chong another five years service to the incumbents rather than the people California told Washington that the interests of ordinary citizens come before those of 100 billion dollar a year mega corporations.

Today I wrote on my list: I am increasingly more skeptical that like NTIA the FCC will do ANYTHING that could be interpreted to be in the national interest as opposed to the corporate interest.

Count me with Erik Cecil in the hope that events may render the FCC irrelevant. Sheesh what will it take for us to learn?

Erik Cecil Replied with the best piece I have ever seen him write:

Gordon,

The FCC is already irrelevant * and * it is not going away. This is not unfortunate because we are in transition. Power is leaky and must go to the edges. The institutions of government and of law, however, have only begun to transition from indirectly serving people to directly serving them. This transition, however, is also already well underway.

I suspect that the tectonic nature of this shift has actually surprised the Obama team. I am sure there are those who thought they could contain and direct it. Not so. They opened up extraordinary energy pent up behind decades if not eons of government serving themselves and their cronies far better than serving everyone. No government on this planet can stop it; they are being carried by it.

The deepest truth I can detect of the matter is that the institutions of the last few centuries are no longer relevant. They lack moral authority and have zero public trust. Their actual power is waning, not growing. In order to remain relevant, government must regain its moral and ethical standing. It cannot do this by continuing to act as if the old ways and old methods are relevant.

Obama, therefore, is straddling a chasm whose breadth and depth grows daily. It is the chasm of dissatisfaction with concentrated wealth, inner circles of power, cronyism in any form no matter how polished and refined, and anything that smacks of centralized authority. He gains authority by giving back to the people actual powers to choose and influence, but his advisors and ancient interests backing him are terrified to release their grip on systems that have served them well for eons. This is not class warfare; is it far deeper and far more organic. It is a transition in the nature of civilization.

This dynamic is playing out in communications arenas as well because it is, in part, one of the primary instrumentalities of this transition. The FCC, therefore, faces a particularly intense iteration of this same dynamic. They are struggling mightily to serve their political contributors without sacrificing the integrity of the campaign that put them into power. They actually have an impossible task of simultaneously running a conventional regulatory machine on conventional terms while their very integrity depends upon deconstructing and giving away the tools of the machine they have inherited over the protests of those who wrote the largest checks to the campaign.

Larry Summers is one side of that debate; Susan Crawford is the other. Genochowski’s and Obama’s difficulty is that both Larry and Susan are correct, but Susan’s view is the only one that is sustainable over the long term. Long term thinking, unfortunately, tends to lose out to organizational thinking, the latter of which usually values short and immediate appearances over the birds of consequence who may or may not come home to roost during short term thinking’s watch.

Nevertheless, the FCC and Obama have no choice in this matter. The old ice has melted and power structures everywhere are in motion. At some levels, I sincerely believe they see this, but continue to struggle with how to mediate this apparent chaos.

Here is the good news. We can help. We can enable individuals to have power, intelligence and information in ways they never imagined possible. We can re-create the political process.

But there is a giant challenge: Government WILL NOT do it for us. We must do it for ourselves and for others. This is the lesson of the Internet. When you are given power, you must use it. If you do not use it, others will use it for you. This was the success of the Bush Presidency until the nature of the use became obvious to the majority.

2010 will see the emergence of new forms of legal practice, lobbying, information gathering, information sharing, and of exerting influence. Those who continue to exert influence using conventional methods will increasingly pay higher prices for less. Those who exploit newer approaches will create incredible leverage at extraordinary low cost.

To the extent the FCC has the courage to serve all Americans rather than serve the lowest common political denominator, they will reap historic benefit. To the extent they don’t, they will extinguish what little remains of their moral authority in the eyes of most Americans. In other words, if they are authentic to the core in their embrace of transparency, to the extent they serve up the WHOLE truth and nothing but the WHOLE truth, there is nothing but upside. To the extent they play business as usual, transparency will do what it must and will do so without hesitation and with vigor.

Transition is opportunity. Fighting it is futile. We can only embrace the transition and empower our fellow human beings.

Happy New Year to each and every one of you.

on my list:

Chris S. The information available on the Internet is a vast ocean. Google and the other search engines tell us, in effect, “here are the general coordinates of where there might be buried treasure.” What I’m talking about is hiring mercenary treasure hunters to really get down there and find it.

Doc: The opportunity consists in faith that somebody will pay for the service.

So far, the largest market (a private one) for this kind of thing is AMT: Amazon Mechanical Turk:

Questions are HITs: Human Intelligence Tasks. Amazingly, lots of people will work for remarkably close to nothing.

I know a lot, because I’ve been on the planet for 62.5 years. I also don’t work cheap, so — even though I’ve registered with AMT — I haven’t answered any questions. Draw (or re-draw) your own conclusions.

But enough people do work for close to nothing that it is possible to use AMT as both a pool of researchers and a pool of subjects.

Here at the Berkman Center, we have become quite good at using AMT for research (mostly through HITs for subjects). In fact we plan to use it for my own ProjectVRM:

Berkman’s (and Harvard Law’s) Jonathan Zittrain compared AMT to a sweat shop, when he was on stage at Supernova earlier this month. The recorded streams are still up at USTREAM: Look for “Supernova Conference, Live Stream, 2nd Hour”: It starts with Danah Boyd and continues with Amazon’s Werner Vogels, followed by Professor Zittrain at about 29 minutes in. AMT comes up at about 50 minutes in.

I had hoped, back when Technorati started during a project David Sifry and I were doing in 2003, that his new company would provide a better way to do research than the likes of Google had allowed. Toward that end (among others0 Technorati created what was for most of the next six years the best “live web” search engine, even though it barely touched its database, of every blog — then every source of RSS and Atom feeds — on the Web.

Alas, what happened to Technorati recently is what has happened to many companies, and it is discouraging.

First, it got hooked on advertising as a business model.

Second, it jiggered the service for maximized traffic.

Third, it finally realized that the best clickers on advertising weren’t bloggers. On the whole they’re downscale popular-culture types. the most down-scale: people obsessed with celebrities and sex, for example. The awful truth that will come home to roost at Google eventually is that most self-informing smart people don’t click on ads most of the time. Because they don’t need to. This fact (and others around it) leave s”search” short of “find” in way too many cases, nearly all non-remunerative for the “engines.”

This is not to say that Google’s business model is doomed, by the way, but rather that advertising-funded search as we know it has outer dimensions of success.

Ask yourself how much Google’s search has improved since it settled on advertising as a business model. The answer is, not much. Sure, it has been good enough to kill off competition, but then its competition wasn’t very imaginative. Still isn’t, Bing included.

Chris S: In the beginning I suggested that Technorati try a pay-for-research model, because I believed there should be a second tier of deeper search that cost small amounts of money. And, from the beginning, I was told in response that users expect search to be free. And that was that.

Doc: So, a couple months back, Technorati deep-sixed its enormous database — a huge loss, imho (it wasn’t the Library of Alexandria, but the analogy applies) — and dropped its old search engine as well. It even killed its highly useful API (we had used it at Berkman for our own research, and it was terrific), and became was seems to be an advertising play. I’m not sure. Whatever it is, it ain’t what it was. (By the way, I believe is now the best live web search engine.)

Still I take the long view: that we are still in the Net’s early paleozoic. Even Google, for all its wonders, is a trilobite. In its day, which lasted dozens of millions of years, trilobites ruled the Earth. They were the best evolution could do. But they were not the end of life’s line.

All species get stuck. (That’s how they become species.) The same goes for business as for life forms.

Right now Google is stuck in a search model built around PageRank, and a revenue model built around advertising. It’s working fine, but it has limits. We’re still inside the envelope of those limits, so we take them for granted. Google’s view still equals the world. But the world is much bigger than that. And deeper. There is so much more research we could do — research that goes far beyond “search” alone.

The odd irony is that we had higher life forms in research before Google showed up. We also had better ways of organizing files than the haystack the Web became. Those life forms are still around — just not on the Web. You described them well at the start of this thread, Chris. Your mom made a living modeling them. The problem is that nobody has figured a good way to make money with those models on the Net. And the biggest reason is that the giant trilobites don’t use them, and that they are therefore unproven.

So far.

Chris S.: Again, what my mom used to do, back in the day, except something like 20 cycles of Moore’s law later…

Doc: Alas, Moore’s Law applies to chip design and manufacture. Not to business innovation.

In fact, I suspect that one of Newton’s law regarding inertia — “a body at rest tends to stay at rest” — applies profoundly to business as usual.

Hat tip to Peter Ecclesine. The FCC National Broadband Plan Policy Framework was issued today. Grab it read it and send ex parte comments.

There are three public notices 2517, 2518, and 2519 that need comments by December 21, 2009.

The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation is the locus of where things will happen.

Senators Rockefeller, inouye, Kerry etc

These principles and public comments there on will be used by these men and women to craft major legislation that if the principles survive will make a huge difference.

NTIA BTOP and Mapping? A sideshow. a distraction. let them blunder on. Ask the Commerce department Inspector General to investigate them. But other than this consider them a side show. An absurd waste of time and money.

I am told that the FCC and Senate Committee can be held accountable for deliveryon these principles.

Our countries future lies with the FCC Broadband Principles…… not with NTIA.

For the past year I had some hope that the election of BHO would truly make a difference. That hope is gone. BHO is business as usual not change one can believe in.

When I read Art Brodsky’s December 14th piece on Connected Nation in Colorado yesterday I was outraged. But then this morning I though wait a minute - Mr Strickling is no fool and certainly knows how Washington works. What if he is doing precisely what the ARRA legislation envisions and the Mapping NOFA calls for as a point of administrative law? I did some checking and it seems that indeed Congress has bought Senator Durbin’s plan and that what we are likely to get - see Colorado for example - is a taxpayer funded assertion that our broadband is just fine thank you and no extra infrastructure is needed. Qwest ATT and Verizon step forward and take their bows and go merrily forward with their predatory ways. Given the hopes we had a year ago, this is a sad turn of affairs.

I remembered that Art Brodsky had unmasked Connected Kentucky nearly two years ago, so I started Googling.

Cassandra like, Art has called this one every step of the way. Follow along

January 9 2008 Connect Kentucky Provides Uncertain Model for Federal Legislation

March 4 2008 Testimony of Art Brodsky Before the House of Delegates Committee on Economic Affairs Hearing on HB 1144

December 31, 2008 This is the only entry not written by Art — Telecom industry brings Connected Nation to North Carolina by Fionna Martin “I think e-NC is the model of how you do it right,” says Art Brodsky, communications director of Public Knowledge, a Washington, D.C. public interest group. “They do their own surveys and they’re not industry-backed. E-NC has a proven track record.”

Feb 17, 2009 Connected Nation Takes Aim At Stimulus Broadband Mapping; Rural Areas Could Be Hurt

March 23 2009 Statement of Art Brodsky: NTIA/RUS Roundatable on Broadband Mapping

March 30, 2009 $350 Million In Mapping Money To Be Wasted, Unless…

June 29 2009 Texas and Tennessee Have Fun With Broadband Mapping Money

July 7 2009 $350 Million Internet Program Being Set Up to Fail

July 30 2009 Connected Nation’s Other Shoe Drops On NTIA

Aug 8, 2009 NTIA Losing Game of Data Chicken

August 31, 2009 Florida Awards Stimulus Contract to High Bidder — Connected Nation

September 9, 2009 Connecting the Dots — How Big Telecom Will Try to Squash Our Fast-Internet Future

October 8, 2009 Connected Nation Buys Off Florida Challenger

December 14 2009 Connected Nation in Colorado: Rocky Path Ahead for Broadband Mapping

December15 2009 (yet another post from Art on BHO’s selling us down a different river) Big Media Writing Joe Biden’s Script

In the torrent of information to which we are exposed — how soon we forget.

A Matter of Perspective

I am sure Mr. Strickling believes himself to be patriotic. I also love my country. But I suspect our patriotism takes a very different form. The only way I can make sense out of what is happening is that he is very firm in the belief that, if it does not get done by private industry, it should not be done. That the national interest or public interest is definable only in terms of what the private sector supports.

I will assert that I hope to live long enough to see these beliefs no longer dominate the United States of America. For in my opinion they are not shared to nearly the same extent by people in Europe or in Asia. Fukiyama may have prophesied the end of the nation state in 1999. But what happened over the next decade was hardly the triumph of a globalized corporate led society. At least not after the collapse of mid September 2008. If there can be no agreement among the 300 million residents of the United States as to a shared public or national interest, we become ungovernable and divided against each other. And in Washington DC the belief that if the incumbents want the status quo maintained, or Wall Street wants its status quo maintained, they must have and therefore will get it maintained is clearly still dominant. Watch not what BHO says. Rather watch what those he appoints do.

Fortunately there are still countless good people in the USA and elsewhere and innovation is still alive although i am increasingly concerned it is alive far more outside our own shores. I have a plate full of inspiring deeds and actions to write about that have nothing to do with out broken domestic policies. I wish the FCC luck. But I expect nothing positive to happen there. As someone who knows the FCC far better than I explained to me last August, the Commissioners are essentially puppets and their public pronouncements are essentially pre-approved by their legal staff.

So I expect lots of rumbling and the FCC “plan” mandated for delivery early next year twill change nothing. The deck is stacked against us and in my opinion any significant change will require a second economic collapse and even then i am not sure that Washington will get the message. Like Bob Metcalfe in his 1997 prediction that the internet would collapse i really hope to be proven wrong. In the mean time, since game set and match have been lost, I will focus of finding the Greg Mortensons of the Internet. I know some already and i imagine all of you do too.

PS: This is just the external face of what is going on at NTIA. There are internal issues which bear watching as well.

And by the way Art Brodsky has done us all an enormous public service. Please at least spread the bibliography of his posts wide and far.

UPDATE

NTIA is a diversion best ignored… the action is at the FCC and it is very real. More in another entry.

I want to put up a quick pointer to George Barr’s wonderful book From Camera to Computer–New from Rocky Nook: How to Make Fine Photographs Through Examples, Tips, and Techniques from Rocky Nook press.

I am working full time and regret that I have not the opportunity to do the justice that this book deserves. But let me quickly point out why it is mine personal favorite of the year. I have up-to-date versions of the basic photographic digital tools but I have been learning to use them on the fly. This means that while I have never taken a course in Photoshop i learn only by dipping into it a little here and there.

What I do have our 15,000 color negatives from Russia in the 1990s and the Himalaya from 1998 through 2003. Using an Epson V. 700 scanner and digital ice I have managed to scan these in the past year and put them into Lightroom catalogs. It is with tools like Barr’s book that I learn here and there. In this case I want to recommend Chapter 8 Stony Park from page 98 through page 109. Here Barr shows how to use digital tools to bring out blurred and hazzy mountain backgrounds and in effect step-by-step shows how to use Photoshop to improve landscape pictures especially those with the high range of light and low in contrast. In this case the Canadian Rockies and in my case the Himalaya. What Barr does is show how to take an existing photograph and guide the reader through a series of well illustrated tips on how he would use Photoshop to improve the image. What I see in this chapter makes me absolutely salivate for the opportunity to apply it large-scale to my Himalayan collection. My images… a smattering at least are here. Nepal images here. And Tibet.

For anyone in a situation remotely similar to mine where learning must be piecemeal, Barr’s instructions on making fine photographs through examples tips and techniques are quite invaluable. Without hesitation I can say that this book would make a wonderful Christmas gift.

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 02:29:33PM -0800, Richard Bennett wrote: (pardon me if this message is not formatted correctly, T-bird doesn’t like this list)

I agree that this is not the proper venue for discussion of the politics of Internet regulation; the post I wrote for GigaOm has comments enabled, and many people with an anti-capitalist bone to pick have already availed themselves of that forum to advocate for the people’s revolution. There are some technical issues that might be of more interest and relevance to operators, however.

Richard A Steenbergen So now anyone who points out the massive flaws in your statements are part of an anti-capitalist movement? Any more conspiracy theories you’d like to put forward? I can’t speak for anyone else, but personally I consider myself very pro-capitalism and it has absolutely no impact on how I feel about the blatantly wrong and baseless crap you are spewing.

Bennett * One claim I made in my blog post is that traffic increases on the Internet aren’t measured by MINTS very well. MINTS uses data from Meet-me switches, but IX’s and colos are pulling x-connects like mad so more and more traffic is passing directly through the x-connects and therefore not being captured by MINTS. Rate of traffic increase is important for regulators as it relates to the cost of running an ISP and the need for traffic shaping. Seems to me that MINTS understates traffic growth, and people are dealing with it by lighting more dark fiber, pulling more fiber, and the x-connects are the tip of the iceberg that says this is going on.

Richard A Steenbergen This is all completely irrelevant to everything else that has been discussed so far, but what the hell I’ll bite. Traffic on the Internet is indeed growing rapidly, while the predominate technology for cost effectively interconnecting the vast majority of the bits (10 Gigabit Ethernet) has remained relatively static in recent years. Without a cost effective technology for interconnecting devices in > 10Gbps increments (40Gbps OC-768 has existed for a while, but is far more expensive than simply doing 4×10GbE), the only reasonable way to scale a network is to build your links out of Nx10G bundles. In places with reasonable crossconnect pricing, it is far cheaper to simply order multiple crossconnects than it is to pay for DWDM gear, and thus you see a rapid increase in fiber crossconnects.

[pasted in from a second Steenbergen response] Oh also I forgot to mention that trying to map a direct relationship between IX traffic growth and total IP traffic growth is completely bogus. There is a significant modifier you’re missing, and it’s called “price”. Two years ago the price for an IX port at the large commercial exchange points in the US (which account for the vast majority of the traffic, no offense to the small non-comercial exchanges out there) was between 4-7x higher than the price for the same ports today. The reason for the price drop had nothing to do with changing economics of providing the service, but rather it was because of a wide-spread price war between the two largest IX operators in the US. Such a massive change in the economics for the IP network operators will obviously result in major changes to the amount of traffic delivered over IX fabrics vs private interconnection. Again, something you could have actually asked operators about rather than making up conclusons in your head.

Bennett A number of people said I have no basis for the claim that paid peering is on the increase, and it’s true that the empirical data is slim due to the secretive nature of peering and transit agreements. This claim is based on hearsay and on the observation that Comcast now has a nationwide network and a very open policy regarding peering and paid peering. So if paid peering is only increasing at Comcast, now a top 10 network, it’s increasing overall.

Richard A Steenbergen So in other words, you’re admitting that you have absolutely no basis for your claim, and you’re simply making it up based on indirect hearsay modified with your own ill-informed conclusions? First intelligent thing you’ve said so far.

If you actually bothered to ask anyone in the industry with experience dealing with Comcast, they would tell you that while Comcast initially entered the market primarily trying to sell paid peering, they have since switched their efforts to primarily selling full transit. There are only a certain number of networks who even know what to DO with a paid peering product, and a vastly larger number who know what to do with a transit product, so it makes perfect sense really.

Bennett Some other people said I’m not entitled to have an opinion; so much for democracy and free speech.

Richard A Steenbergen You are not entitled to opine an opinion on a subject matter which you do not understand, without being called out for it. Sane and rational people understand when they are talking out their ass and are being corrected by knowledgable experts, and will shut the hell up and listen. Sadly this seems to be a skill you lack.

Bennett I’d be glad to hear from anyone who has data or informed opinions on these subjects, on-list of off-. The reason you should share is that people in Washington and Brussels listen to me, so it’s in everybody’s interest for me to be well-informed; I don’t really have an ax to grind one way or another, but I do want law and regulation to be based on fact, not speculation and ideology.

Richard A Steenbergen So far none of the above statements seem to be true.

Cook’s Edge: Perhaps Mr.Bennett would say who these important people in Washington and Brussels that listen to him are? This would be VERY interesting data.

I have been aware of his posts for many months, but this is the first time i have seen him loose his temper which says a lot about the strength of his argument.

COOK’s Edge: Richard Bennett has been flaking the ITIF Foundations view on Net Neutrality for many months. He wandered into Nanog and very foolishly picked a fight there. The result at 8:39 this morning he wrote to Randy Bush

I didn’t bring this discussion over here, hippie.

COOK’s Edge: Not a wise move. Here is how it happened.

NANOG Evening of November 24: Richard Bennett wrote: I haven’t found a good source who knows what’s going on outside his own

Richard Steenbergen: Mr. Bennett,

You know when I first read your post, I assumed you were just ignorant and confused about the topic of peering on the Internet. Then I saw you actively refusing to listen to intelligent feedback by some of the most experienced network operators and peering managers in the industry, dismiss any idea that you didn’t agree with as part of the “Google conspiracy”, and further embarrass yourself with comments which proved you lacked understanding of even the most basic concepts of peering or inter-network traffic exchange. Normally I would just write you off as another Dean Anderson style nutjob, but I’m afraid that your ramblings are so wrong and your closed-mindedness is so severe that you are actually dangerous to anyone who might happen to read your comments and think that they are in any way correct. Therefore, I think it is important for all of us that you be refuted.

I’ll start with a few points from your post and comments. You said:

I’m not sure that your ‘on-net routes’ is the same product as the Paid Peering that Norton is interpreting; the Arbor study found a large increase in the traffic that moves through these transit bypass paths, and that’s the actual story. While this service may have been available for a while, its use is radically increasing. That’s data, BTW, not anecdote, so if you have a problem with the Arbor data, you’ll need some data of your own to refute it.

For starters, if you aren’t sure what “on-net routes” and “paid peering” even are, maybe you shouldn’t be trying to comment on them. Second, the Arbor study said absolutely NOTHING about an increase in traffic that moves via peering vs transit, to say nothing of paid vs settlement free peering. Arbor is completely and totally unable to identify anything about money exchanged for bits in general, and from a technical perspective there is absolute no difference between a paid and non-paid peering.

You seem to be convoluting the purported “increase in traffic between tier 2 networks” with a completely absurd belief that all traffic between tier 1’s was transit and all traffic between tier 2’s is peering. In reality, tier 2’s routinely buy from and sell to each other, peer with some tier 1’s, and sell paid peering between themselves when the business opportunities arise.

You later go on to state:

The Arbor study is evidence that traffic is shifting, and the carrier-neutral peering site managers I’ve spoken with tell me they’re making something like 300 cross-connects a month. Do you think all those cross-connnects are implementing settlement-free peering or conventional transit agreements? I’m surmising that they aren’t.

You have absolutely no basis to make the determination about what percentage of the crossconnects are peering and what percentage are transit. This is what we tried to explain to you with the “you can’t know this about any network but your own” answer, which you seemed completely incapable of understanding. The reality is that no one can know the answer for anything but themselves. For my network, I’d say much less than 20% of our cross connects are peering, with the vast majority being customers, and a significant amount being intra-network capacity (intra-pop, metro, and long-haul circuits) and transit. The number may vary between networks, but again you have absolutely zero basis to make any kind of claim about peering let alone settlement-free vs paid based on the number of cross connects in a colo.

Most of the other arguments are either meaningless or fall apart once you remove some of the fundamental misunderstandings above, but there are still plenty of other things which are completely absurd. For example, you said:

Paid peering is a better level of access to an ISP’s customers for a fee, but the fee is less than the price of generic access to the ISP via a transit network. The practice of paid peering also reduces the load on the Internet core, so what’s not to like? Paid peering agreements should be offered for sale on a non-discriminatory basis, but they certainly shouldn’t be banned.

Paid peering (or peering of any kind) is absolutely no guarantee of “better” access to any network, nor is it guaranteed (or even likely) to reduce costs. There is also no such thing as “load on the Internet core” to reduce, and this further illustrates a complete failure to understand how the Internet works in general.

Paid peering is simply another form of transit, where two networks agree to exchange money for the service of delivering connectivity. The only difference is that you’re only selling a portion of the routing table rather than the “whole thing”, for a specific subset of routes which have different properties than the rest. In the case of paid peering, the different property is that you’ll get to bill your customer on the other side for the traffic, thus allowing you to “double dip” for the same bit and potentially make more money.

Of course in practice it doesn’t work this way at all. The vast majority of the cost of operating a network is transporting the bits from one place to another, and when you sell paid peering you are guaranteed that the traffic is going to stay on your network and be hauled. This makes it some of the most expensive traffic to deliver, and typically results in prices which are higher than those of another network who is hot potatoing those bits off their network in one location, and who is sending the traffic to a settlement-free peer. There is nothing wrong with paid peering, it often has a time and a place (such as when two networks are close to being settlement-free peers, but not quite, and someone needs to sweeten the deal a little bit), but it is not the panacea you think it is. Of course nobody else seems to think the FCC Question 106 is talking about regulating paid peering (which would be absurd), so fortunately I don’t think we have anything to worry about.

Of course all of these points (and more) were already quite elegantly expressed by fine folks like Vijay Gill, Dan Golding, Patrick Gilmore, Joe Provo, and others. They tried to help correct your misinformation with free advice, and you repaid them with delusional rants. Now you simply look like a fool to everyone.

3:54 am Bennett: Thank you for your insights.

5:24 am William Allen Simpson: In summary, Mr Bennett is an unregistered lobbyist, employed by other registered lobbyists.

It’s really a waste of time to engage him, as it’s his full-time job to write his screed. We have neither the time nor manpower.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” — Upton Sinclair (1935)

[See his bio] http://www.itif.org/index.php?s=staff

He claims to have been involved in IEEE Wi-Fi for 15 years. Meaning he’s one of those responsible for the bad security (WEP, etc.), and the stagnation of ad hoc networking — because the industry has a centralized solution they want to sell, customer be damned.

His bio also says he was vice-chair for the hub standard, so prevented jumbo frames from being formally adopted — again, customer be damned.

Now, he works for a “think tank” called “Information Technology & Innovation Foundation”. Basically, he goes to conferences. He’s not responsible for operating any networks or doing any actual engineering.

ITIF doesn’t give out information about its funding, which usually means it’s industry lobbyist funded. Apparently in this case, big cable and probably big telco.

They’re opposed to net neutrality, and (based on his comments and several of the papers) still think the Internet is some kind of bastard child that needs adult supervision in the middle — by which they mean themselves /in loco parentis/.

Looking at the board, it’s populated by ultra-conservative wing-nut Republicans, and some Conservadems (as we call them in political circles, they call themselves “centrists”) from the “New Democrat Caucus” for “bi-partisan” cover. And lots of lobbyists — Federal lobbyists — who seem to list their educational clients on their bio, but not whether they are also employed by a firm that represents other clients….

7:25 am Paul Wall: Where can we find data on your group’s funding sources?

If we’re to continue this discussion, we need to establish bias and motive, which you’ve not covered on your own accord.

Aaron Cossey: Would you care to elaborate on how the investigation of someones funding sources is operationally relevant to the rest of the list?

7:47 am Randy Bush: please no we have a greedy troll. stop feeding it. procmail is your friend.

8: 39 AM Bennett:

I didn’t bring this discussion over here, hippie.

I had been wonderin about what Larry lessig would have to say regarding the obscene ACTA treaty that the Obama admins bought and paid for copyright lawyers are shepherding through.

A post from bill st arnaud provided the key to finding the answer.

the role of “fair use” in a time of CHANGE

and copyright and science a please for skeptics

An larry did mention the ACTA treaty. If i remember correctly what he said

It was to advocate some strategic workarounds rather than attempt to fight the kind of entrenched monied interests that are struggling to impose the laws of analog copyright on a digital age in which a very large amount of new knowledge is created in digital forms. My memory says he said in effect they will do what they do but in the meantime he explained what he has been doing to create many new forms of his creative Commons licensure that can be used to place new scientific knowledge in the public domain including even new material. He mentioned an example where 1000 people are placing samples of their own DNA and their medical history in the public domain to ensure that at least genome samples from their DNA cannot be copyrighted by big Pharma.

He also explains why in effect be analog rules of copyright cannot be translated into a digital world and therefore effectively contain the seeds of their own destruction.

Bill’s link from yesterday’s entry cause presentation and the two lanes I have found on Larry’s TV channel and I think I would recommend the blip TV because you will find it easier to get immediately to Larry as opposed to the preliminary material from educuse. the october 2009 talks above are good entry points to Lessig’s current thinking on these vitally important subjects. They actually give reasons for some hope rather than the take away of despair from the idiotic ACTA which regrettably the Obama administration apparently is doing nothing to stop or slow down.