ISPs Should Fight for Net Neutrality, Against Telecom Bills, Isenberg Says
BALTIMORE -- Small ISPs should fight to keep telecom bills off the House and Senate floors, David Isenberg, founder of Isen.com, said Wed. at ISPCON here. Should the bills reach reconciliation, the closed-door sessions likely would see even a weak net neutrality provision under consideration be yanked, especially in “lame duck” session, with politicians eyeing the door. The net neutrality debate has been skewed by the “lies” of cable carriers and telcos, Isenberg said. ISPs should get into the fight and set the record straight, he said.
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Isenberg, a longtime AT&T Bell Labs staffer, advocates the “stupid network,” where data go unmanaged. He said telcos face strong business pressure to make networks “intelligent” by managing data because the current network model “begs the question ‘What does the telco sell?'” This is driving the top 20% of customers -- who drive 80% of Bell business, Isenberg said -- to other content providers. Between March 2007 and Nov. 2010, the entire group will be lost to carriers, he said, citing that shift as the reason carriers are desperate to control the network.
Desperation is driving the firms to “bullshit Congress,” with what he labeled “lies": (1) That video services will clog the Internet; (2) That it will be costly to build out the new generation network; (3) That network neutrality is a brand new concept; (4) That the Internet isn’t regulated.
The first 2 claims hold only if you assume the existence of “active discrimination,” Isenberg said. He quoted Gary Bachula on behalf of Internet 2, when, testifying in Congress, he said it’s “far more cost effective to simply provide more bandwidth” than to run a high-speed multipurpose network. Net neutrality was the law until a recent trend to deregulation at the FCC and in the courts, while neutrality principles go all the way back to the 1934 Act and even Roman common law, said Isenberg. The Bells are trying to warp historical precedent by removing the principles, he said, not the other way around. The same thinking can apply to Internet oversight, which has existed as long as the Internet has been a consumer service, he said: “Regulation made the Internet possible.”
Isenberg compared 2 of the debate’s interest groups, SavetheInternet.com and Hands Off the Internet (HOI). He said the membership of SavetheInternet.com -- which ranges from independent academics to Gun Owners of America -- speaks to the group’s impartiality, while HOI comprises Bells, cable carriers and affiliates. He disputed HOI’s claim that “only 2” examples of site blocking can be found, “both in Canada.” He asked for ISP representatives how many had experienced site blocking; about 12 raised a hand. When he asked how many had experienced Port 25 blocking, more than a quarter of those present put hands up.
“Every application we know and love” has been the result of innovation at the edge of the network, rather than by major carriers, Isenberg said. Large firms with “empires to defend” don’t innovate at the application or content level, he said. The Internet does need tweaking, he said, particularly at the provisioning level. Due to this, he said, “we need to preserve net neutrality as a do-no-harm precaution” while smaller ISPs, content providers and manufacturers experiment “like they can’t.”