Net Neutrality Links

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Reader Comment on Net Neutrality (and My Rebuttal)

Reader Richard Bennett, whose own blog often articulates the telco point of view on Internet Neutrality more coherently than most telcos, posted a challenging comment to my post announcing that I’m speaking at the Berkman Center tomorrow. . . .

“* Do you believe that all applications have the same requirements from the network?”

. . . The reason we need an Internet which is network agnostic is because only an application-unaware network allows the kind of incredible innovation which has occurred on the Internet. David Isenberg (who Richard [Bennett] mislabels on his blog as a marketing person – David’s background is Bell Labs) explains why this is so brilliantly in The Rise of The Stupid Network).

My simplistic explanation is that a network which is built to be aware of specific applications may work well for those applications that the network designers had in mind but will inhibit if not absolutely prevent applications the network designers didn’t think of as well as the evolution of existing applications. The traditional phone network is a great example of that. Handsets on that network don’t even have the capability of cell phones because the network is optimized for voice and voice alone. I posted more on this here. . . .

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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