Fresh thinking
I am struggling with a minor issue of conscience, so I would like to get it out of my head and into words. The problem I see is of professional charlatans involved in telecoms policymaking. Many hold academic or lobbying positions. These people do significant harm to the public. What should be my and your […]
I don’t like to boast, but… No, let me start that again. I absolutely love to boast, and knowing it’s highly unseemly, I try (and sometimes fail) to moderate the urge. Anyhow, 27 years ago this year I started a degree in Mathematics and Computation at the University of Oxford. I even graduated, three years later, with […]
I have come to the conclusion that “net neutrality” is an ethical issue at heart, one about the appropriate constraint of unfair ISP power. Some people are (I pray unintentionally) on the wrong side of a now-clear moral divide. They are claiming to prevent harmful abuse of power, when in reality their actions create fresh […]
Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense. – Carl Sagan I gave the following speech at the Freedom to Connect conference in Washington DC on April 3rd, 2006. I was on stage following Tim Wu, who coined the term “net neutrality”, and […]
As a result of intense lobbying, the EU has passed a set of populist ‘net neutrality’ laws as Regulation (EU) 2015/2120. These laws promote a false doctrine of fairness to packets, in the name of ‘non-discrimination’. This confuses an unintentional allocation of resources to packets with intentional justice for people.
It has been widely taken as “obvious” that a “no blocking” rule for ISPs is a good regulatory policy. Is this really the case? Does it save consumers from harm…or cause harm?
Science guidance for policymakers I was recently asked by a client to pull together a reading list on ‘net neutrality’. Below is the download link to the resulting PDF, plus a copy of the text for those who simply prefer to scroll. I picked out the three most important things to read, with various supporting […]
An interview with Dr Eduard Grasa, i2CAT Recursive InterNet Architecture (RINA) is a “return to fundamentals” redesign of data networking. (For an introduction, see my 2013 article “TCP/IP vs RINA”.) I interviewed Eduard Grasa of Fundacio i2CAT, a research centre in Barcelona. Eduard is a member of the European network research community who is actively leading cutting-edge research.
My article on the misguided belief in a “Moore’s Law” for networks has been republished in The Mobile Century magazine, distributed by the Global Telecom Women’s Network.
I have some bad news: the published literature on ‘net neutrality’ fails to grasp the stochastic nature of broadband and its implications. This means that the relationship of traffic management to QoE is universally misunderstood and/or misrepresented.
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