{ I second Dave djf} Richard Bennett Op-Ed in the San Francisco Chronicle

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Richard Bennett [richard () bennett com]
Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2008 5:41 AM
To: David Farber
Cc: ip
Subject: Re: [IP] Re:   { I second Dave djf}  Richard Bennett Op-Ed in the San Francisco Chronicle

It's not really conjecture that Google has been the prime organizer and source of funding for It's Our Net, Open 
Internet Coalition, and Internet for Everyone, David P., it's a matter of public record, as is their cooperation with 
Save the Internet.  Similarly, the $2 million grant by Google to the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, Lessig's 
status as co-founder, Wu's connection to Lessig, and Wu's position in Free Press, the manager of Save the Internet are 
all public. Granted, Lessig has been campaigning for his personal vision of Internet regulation for a very long time, 
and he would most likely be doing what he's doing whether Google approved or not. Lessig's personal stake in the NN 
movement as founder, saint, and hero is an interesting topic in its own right, and deserves a separate series of 
articles.

What I'm trying to explain in this article is why Google is so intensely interested in all of this, and what the 
implications are of regulating the first mile while allowing CDNs to escape regulation and scrutiny. There's a double 
standard at work in Google's position, and it just happens to advantage large, deep-pocketed companies at the expense 
of the little guy who has no chance of building a network to rival the Google infrastructure.

There are clearly two other strains of interest in net neutrality: one emanating from the Berkman Center that has a 
simplistic and idealistic view of Internet architecture's relationship with Internet operations. The real network is 
chock-full of middle boxes enforcing routing and traffic policies, but folks who think operations are defined by an 
end-to-end principle don't seem to appreciate how vital that infrastructure is to maintaining a stable and reliable 
network. And finally there are people who simply hate middleboxes because of the lock-in and architectural inelegance 
that they imply.

Most of the heated public rhetoric about NN doesn't even relate to network design or operation anyway, it's concerns 
about free speech and privacy that we would have regardless of the architecture of the network that we use most often.

So yes, I believe it's possible to support NN without being a Google shill, and I know that most of the individuals who 
support it aren't on Google's payroll. But on the political front, it's undeniable that Google is the prime source of 
money and organization in the battle for a highly-regulated first mile.

The Yahoo deal takes Google into a market-share position where we no longer have to argue about whether they're a 
monopoly or not, they are as a matter of pure definition. The remaining question is simply whether they manage their 
monopoly status in such a way as to stifle competition and abuse their power.

My reading of the underlying effects on competition that come from the kind of NN regulations Google has offered to the 
Congress suggest they have every intention of abusing their power.

I hope I'm wrong about this, but I have to go where the evidence leads me.

RB

________________________________________
From: David P. Reed [dpreed () reed com<mailto:dpreed () reed com>]
Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2008 4:35 AM
To: David Farber
Cc: ip
Subject: Re: [IP] Richard Bennett Op-Ed in the San Francisco Chronicle

Dave - Just a small response to this, since no one seems to have
responded to your posting on IP of this opinion piece.

I find it extraordinary that the author of the op-ed goes to such
lengths of rhetorical construction to imply that the broad interest in
"network neutrality" is centrally organized and orchestrated by Google
to maximize its competitive strength.

This may be an interesting conjecture that sells newspapers, but where
is the evidence that those of us who are concerned about "deep packet
inspection" (by NebuAd, Phorm, Sandvine, the NSA, ...) are all the
"tools and fellow travelers" of Google.

It sounds to me like red-baiting.   If someone has an opinion that
happens to line up with a commercial interest of Google, one is "working
for Google".

Doesn't make sense.

Note: I don't work for Google, and have in the past pointed out reasons
we should worry about Google's neutrality.

David Farber wrote:


________________________________________
From: Richard Bennett [richard () bennett com<mailto:richard () bennett com>]


Here's my piece on Google, Yahoo, and net neutrality from today's San Francisco Chronicle.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/08/EDBH11LNQS.DTL

Google's political head-fake

Richard Bennett

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

The devil's best trick is to persuade us that he doesn't exist, but Google only has to convince us that it's not evil. 
Nearing an agreement with Yahoo to grab the ailing company's search business, Google scripted a series of dramatic 
public events apparently designed to distract from the pending deal. These events emphasize network neutrality, an 
ever-changing regulatory ideal that Google thrust into the political spotlight two years ago. As entertaining as this 
spectacle is, regulators should not be fooled. They should apply traditional anti-monopoly standards, blocking the 
Google-Yahoo deal.

The deal, as currently structured, substantially alters the Internet economy. Advertising is the prime revenue stream 
for social networks, news sites and Internet aggregators of all kinds, and it's closely linked to search. Instead of a 
search market where three players compete vigorously for eyeballs, this deal would create a status quo where the top 
dog enjoys an 85 percent market share and the ability to set prices for search ads with no fear of being undercut by 
its much weaker sole competitor. This should set alarms clanging wherever antitrust and personal privacy concerns are 
held dear, but it hasn't.

The centerpiece of Google's net neutrality misdirection campaign, a new initiative to bring faster broadband at lower 
prices to American consumers, was book-ended by Google CEO Eric Schmidt's visit to Washington and a public endorsement 
of heavy broadband regulation by Internet pioneer and Google Vice President Vint Cerf. The initiative, Internet for 
Everyone, is virtually identical to earlier network neutrality organizations, It's Our Net and Save the Internet. Each 
of these organizations was fronted by rock-star intellectuals such as Lawrence Lessig, co-founder of the Google-funded 
Stanford Center for Internet and Society, and his protégé, Tim Wu, the new chairman of the advocacy group Free Press.

Net neutrality is largely seen as an obscure but noble cause, so it's a safe issue for an image-conscious corporation 
to embrace. Google had largely abandoned it in the months before the recent publicity blitz, probably because of how 
the issue had morphed in the preceding year.

Initially, network neutrality was the demand that network carriers ignore the Internet's fundamental inequality. Google 
had good reason to advocate this, because it is advantaged by a status quo in which money buys privilege. Any move by 
carriers to selectively boost speeds for fees dulls the advantage Google has secured for itself by building huge 
complexes of hundreds of thousands of computers.

These complexes exploit a flaw in Internet architecture that enables them to seize more than their fair share of 
network bandwidth, effectively giving their owner a fast lane. A richly funded Web site, which delivers data faster 
than its competitors to the front porches of the Internet service providers, wants it delivered the rest of the way on 
an equal basis. This system, which Google calls broadband neutrality, actually preserves a more fundamental inequality.

The latest turn in the network neutrality debate - emphasizing the fair management of bandwidth-intensive file-sharing 
applications - left Google on the sideline. Cooperation between peer-to-peer networks and carriers enhances the value 
of both, and creates a more powerful and less expensive alternative to private networks - which is counter to Google's 
interests.

Despite its carefully crafted public image as a naive and squeaky-clean innovator, Google is a public corporation 
managed by professionals, some of them longtime friends of Washington power brokers and fully capable of understanding 
the problems the Google-Yahoo deal poses.

The tech press has been too busy reprising its Internet Bubble era cheerleading and cooing about Google's network 
neutrality "idealism" to raise questions about the demise of Yahoo as a search competitor. Fortunately, the Justice 
Department is investigating, and Congress has planned several hearings, including one today.

Any anti-competitive concerns motivating the net neutrality movement are theoretical, as no single carrier today has 
the power to fix prices. Consumers have an increasing menu of options for broadband networks, many of them wireless. A 
search monopoly is, however, a true gatekeeper, directing Web surfers toward some sites and away from others. When that 
power is combined with the ability to set prices for advertising, it's a disaster not only for the Web but for 
democracy.

Senate hearing

What: Public hearing before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation to consider the state of the 
online advertising industry

When: 10 a.m., today

Where: Room 253, Sam Rayburn Building, Washington

Why: There is concern that tracking individual's Internet activities violates their privacy

To learn more: Go to links.sfgate.com/ZECG<http://links.sfgate.com/ZECG><http://links.sfgate.com/ZECG>

Richard Bennett is a Bay Area network architect and inventor. He was an expert witness at the FCC's February field 
hearing on net neutrality and a frequent conference speaker.




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