The Internet Can Save Itself From Ajit Pai. Just Not Here. -- Ajit Pai has the power to destroy the internet – but only in the US, not overseas

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Kimi Wei <kimi () thewei com>
> Subject: Ajit Pai has the power to destroy the internet – but only in the US, not overseas
> Date: December 18, 2017 at 12:55:54 PM EST
> To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
>
> This is heartening and scary at the same time.
>
> The Internet Can Save Itself From Ajit Pai. Just Not Here.
> By Vijith Assar
>
> http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/12/the-internet-can-save-itself-from-ajit-pai.html
>
> If there’s a silver lining surrounding the FCC’s recent vote to undermine net neutrality under current chairman Ajit 
> Pai, it may be the futility of the whole effort. There is a level on which the internet remains fundamentally neutral 
> no matter what the FCC does. That’s because it is built almost entirely atop something called the Internet Protocol 
> Suite, which was created in the 1970s by the Department of Defense. The IPS includes, among other things, a number of 
> profoundly important technical specifications for which both the implementations and underlying theories are 
> immaculate. They might even be strong enough to save the open internet. The catch is that they might not save it for 
> the FCC’s constituents.
>
> Let’s start with the Transmission Control Protocol, a part of the IPS that operates at the “transport layer” to 
> define ways to send and receive arbitrary packets of data between computing devices, no matter how they are connected 
> — with a physical cable, over Bluetooth, or using whatever else we come up with in the future. Once the packets 
> finally arrive at the intended destination, they’re usually then handed off to more specialized “application layer” 
> protocols optimized for a specific kind of task. For example, there’s FTP for file transfers, IMAP and POP for 
> storing and sending email, SSH for remotely controlling other machines, and so on — and of course there’s HTTP, 
> certainly the most widely used out of the whole gang, for loading sites, pages, and other resources over what we now 
> call the web. Modularity, encapsulation, delegation; this careful separation of concerns is precisely how complex 
> systems should be properly designed.
>
> Networks are made of computers, and computers take instruction. They do as they are told reliably until they break, 
> and for decades now, what we have told them to do is move information around as quickly and efficiently as possible. 
> This is for two reasons: practical, because at the dawn of the internet it was important to squeeze bits over the 
> limited bandwidth of dial-up modems; but also elemental, because designing any technology with intentionally 
> suboptimal performance is self-evidently idiotic, so nobody does it — aside from the current FCC, apparently. 
> Nonetheless, for the most part, the internet’s underlying application-layer protocols try to run as quickly as 
> possible. This will remain true unless the internet is completely rebuilt atop a different foundation.
>
> The language of this debate has awkwardly favored the term “fast lane” to describe preferential treatment of traffic, 
> but there is no fast lane — only our current set of regular lanes, built as always with intrinsically cooperative and 
> performant protocols. Pai is encouraging artificially slower lanes, which can certainly be built, but they will 
> almost certainly never be universal across the internet. Meanwhile, application-layer protocols like HTTP, FTP, and 
> SSH don’t ever know which type of lane they’re in, and will all continue to gobble up whatever network efficiencies 
> they can get from TCP and the transport layer. They will intrinsically seek to preserve net neutrality as it 
> currently exists whenever it is possible to do so, because that is how they were designed to communicate. 
> Preferential traffic may prove to be an uphill battle for ISPs if any corner of the internet that can be neutral will 
> remain so, any crack in the constraints exploited, every leak kept flush with flowing packets. The only way to stop 
> this subversive tendency would be to move to yet another protocol for the web, which somehow intrinsically respects 
> the biases implemented by the network within which it operates — but then the concerns wouldn’t be separated, as 
> complex systems require.
>
> Because of the way the building blocks of the internet communicate internally among themselves, net neutrality can 
> never be fully eliminated — only partially and incompletely undermined, by selecting a specific subset of the 
> internet and making things artificially wonky for the users and machines within those boundaries. Pai’s changes don’t 
> hurt the internet, they only hurt the American internet, rewarding its entrenched powers by letting its 
> internet-infrastructure companies introduce a host of new idiosyncratic restrictions that its internet-native 
> companies must then navigate. The economic argument for doing this is suspicious at best, given that currency itself 
> can now exist purely online!
>
> In a sense, Pai may be right about his actions improving competition — just not where he thinks. On a global level, 
> the very same free market Pai thinks he’s championing could easily swoop in to undermine his new changes. The entire 
> European Union has robust internet protections, and remains available to any businesses or other entities that prefer 
> to work within an environment that provides net neutrality. Maybe you’ll someday be able to afford real estate in San 
> Francisco again! Given enough time, even enterprise-grade physical infrastructure can adapt; Google already operates 
> seven data centers around the world, to its eight in the United States; and Amazon Web Services has 7 domestic data 
> centers and 15 elsewhere. The worldwide network of submarine telecom cables is far-flung and intricate. Consider that 
> Apple financially operates out of Ireland due to the tax benefits, or that the Pirate Bay once tried to buy a 
> 550-square-meter micro-nation in the middle of the ocean where it could freely supply the world with BitTorrent, and 
> when that didn’t work out, instead considered mounting servers to aerial drones. Other than the inertia of an 
> established headquarters in the United States, there’s no reason why any company — least of all the most successful 
> and lucrative ones — would have to put up with Pai’s vision. The internet is global. That is the whole point.
>
> At a certain point of maturity, the aggregate entities composed through technology — cloud, blockchain, internet — 
> develop integral properties that can no longer be controlled through paperwork. The internet was carefully designed 
> by the engineers of a previous generation with extra insulation against even our own likely eventual stupidity, so 
> its protocols still push in the direction of neutrality, even when the traffic says otherwise, like children 
> jettisoning the prejudices of their parents. Trying to run the other way, the FCC hits the limits of its jurisdiction 
> along two axes: in breadth, since its proclamations don’t apply to most of the world, and in depth, since its 
> proposed changes at the transport layer of the IPS can’t reach down far enough to penetrate the application-layer 
> protocols. Pai’s ham-handed reforms run counter to the logic encoded in the network design, so it’s unlikely that 
> they’ll be effective enough to screw up the internet at large. Thanks to the intricate resiliencies that have emerged 
> at the intersection of mathematically perfect computer-science proofs and sloppy human systems of governance, he can 
> only really do that to the United States.
>
>
>
> Kimi Wei
> kimi () thewei com  @kimiwei
> facebook.com/thekimiwei
> 862-203-8814




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