FCC Commissioner: "Engineers solve engineering problems"

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Richard Bennett [richard () bennett com]
Sent: Monday, July 28, 2008 1:56 PM
To: David Farber
Subject: FCC Commissioner: "Engineers solve engineering problems"

Commissioner McDowell's Op-Ed in the Washington Post today demonstrates great clarity and insight into the way Internet 
governance has worked for the last 20 years. I hope it's widely read, because it's correct.

Who Should Solve This Internet Crisis?

By Robert M. McDowell
Monday, July 28, 2008; A17

The Internet was in crisis. Its electronic "pipes" were clogged with new bandwidth-hogging software. Engineers faced a 
choice: Allow the Net to succumb to fatal gridlock or find a solution.

The year was 1987. About 35,000 people, mainly academics and some government employees, used the Internet.

This story, of course, had a happy ending. The loosely knit Internet engineering community rallied to improve an 
automated data "traffic cop" that prioritized applications and content needing "real time" delivery over those that 
would not suffer from delay. Their efforts unclogged the Internet and laid the foundation for what has become the 
greatest deregulatory success story of all time.

The Internet has since weathered several such crises. Each time, engineers, academics, software developers, Web 
infrastructure builders and others have worked together to fix the problems. Over the years, some groups have become 
more formalized -- such as the Internet Society, the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Internet Architecture 
Board. They have remained largely self-governing, self-funded and nonprofit, with volunteers acting on their own and 
not on behalf of their employers. No government owns or regulates them.

The Internet has flourished because it has operated under the principle that engineers, not politicians or bureaucrats, 
should solve engineering problems.

(Read the whole thing at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/27/AR2008072701172.html )

RB



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