Network Engineers Speak Out for Net Neutrality

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

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: July 18, 2017 at 8:49:19 AM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Network Engineers Speak Out for Net Neutrality
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> Network Engineers Speak Out for Net Neutrality
> By ERICA PORTNOY
> Jul 17 2017
> <https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/07/network-engineers-speak-out-net-neutrality>
>
> Today, a group of over 190 Internet engineers, pioneers, and technologists filed comments with the Federal 
> Communications Commission explaining that the FCC’s plan to roll back net neutrality protections is based on a 
> fundamentally flawed and outdated understanding of how the Internet works.
>
> Signers include current and former members of the Internet Engineering Task Force and Internet Corporation for 
> Assigned Names and Numbers' committees, professors, CTOs, network security engineers, Internet architects, systems 
> administrators and network engineers, and even one of the inventors of the Internet’s core communications protocol.
>
> This isn’t the first time many of these engineers have spoken out on the need for open Internet protections. In 2015, 
> when the EFF and ACLU filed a friend-of-the-court brief defending the net neutrality rules, dozens of engineers 
> signed onto a statement supporting the technical justifications for the Open Internet Order.
>
> The engineers’ statement filed today contains facts about the structure, history, and evolving nature of the 
> Internet; corrects technical errors in the proposal; and gives concrete examples of the harm that will be done should 
> the proposal be accepted.
>
> The engineers explain that:
>
> "Based on certain questions the FCC asks in the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), we are concerned that the FCC 
> (or at least Chairman Pai and the authors of the NPRM) appears to lack a fundamental understanding of what the 
> Internet's technology promises to provide, how the Internet actually works, which entities in the Internet ecosystem 
> provide which services, and what the similarities and differences are between the Internet and other 
> telecommunications systems the FCC regulates as telecommunications services."
>
> The engineers point to specific errors in the NPRM. As one example among many: the NPRM tries to argue that ISPs, not 
> edge providers, are the main drivers for services such as streaming movies, sharing photos, posting on social media, 
> automatic translation, and so on. The NPRM also erroneously assumes that transforming an IP packet from IPv4 to IPv6 
> somehow changes the form of the payload.
>
> The engineers explain how the Internet (and in particular broadband) has changed since 2002, when the FCC first 
> explicitly classified broadband internet access service as an information service, and why that classification is no 
> longer appropriate in light of technical developments. Drawing on this background information, they then respond to 
> specific questions from the NPRM in order to correct the FCC's mistakes.
>
> The statement provides nearly a dozen different examples of consumer harm that could have been prevented by the 
> light-touch, bright-line rules—like when AT&T distorted the market for content by using its gatekeeping power to not 
> charge its customers for its DIRECTV video service while charging third-parties more to similarly zero-rate data. It 
> also gives several examples of consumer benefits that happened as a result of the 2015 Open Internet Order, like 
> mobile service providers finally removing the prohibition that was stopping customers from tethering their personal 
> computers to their mobile devices in order to use their mobile broadband connections.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>



-------------------------------------------
Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now
RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/18849915-ae8fa580
Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=18849915&id_secret=18849915-aa268125
Unsubscribe Now: 
https://www.listbox.com/unsubscribe/?member_id=18849915&id_secret=18849915-32545cb4&post_id=20170718094205:E0F7E754-6BBE-11E7-8C49-AB6D0C87FA18
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com