[opendtv] Re: This is why the government should never control the internet - The Washington Post
- From: Craig Birkmaier <brewmastercraig@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 04 Sep 2017 09:54:22 -0400
On Sep 3, 2017, at 7:47 PM, Manfredi, Albert E <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Craig Birkmaier wrote:
This sums it up:
"In short, the Internet is the greatest deregulatory success story of all
time - a simple fact that vexes those seeking new and unnecessary rules."
As Craig well knows by now, what he managed to dredge up from three years ago
is a canard, as they say. Nothing could be further from the truth.
That is your opinion.
It is very difficult to demonstrate how regulation has played any POSITIVE role
in the development of the Internet. Bert keeps trying to tell us that the
humble telephone is the cornerstone of what has become the Internet.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The Internet was neutral in its origins, because that's what the educational
institutions and the government needed. The general public was not aware of
it (and Craig didn't even know it existed, for a good 20 years).
Bert is about to be humbled. I am posting several articles written more than 20
years ago that clearly illustrate my involvement and understanding of the
fundamental issues, several years before I created OpenDTV.
The fundamental principle was the open interconnection of networks. That
fundament principle was what made the commercial Internet a massive success,
despite the efforts of the cable industry, AOL, Compuserve and others to build
walled garden informations services.
Note I said information services, not telephone services.
When the public was first exposed to the Internet, there was no "culture of
neutrality" that this public knew about.
No doubt this is true. Those who were exposed initially via AOL and Compuserve
saw a very different culture.
My first exposure to the Internet was as an open network where anyone could
connect to anything. It began with Applelink for e-mail then I was introduced
to Netscape Navigator and the web at NIST.
But to indulge your fantasy, there were many people who did not know about the
Internet culture, just as there is a significant percentage of the population
today that does not know (or care) what the term Net Neutrality means.
What most early adopters saw were ISPs that offered their own walled in content
and the ability to use the Internet to connect to e-mail accounts outside those
walls. After the introduction of Netscape Navigator, companies began to develop
websites. It only took a few years for the neutral culture to take hold among
consumers. Competition is a wonderful thing!
Unfortunately this did not extend to some companies in the critical path of the
Internet. The most famous was Microsoft's attempt to control the web browser
market with Internet Explorer, including the introduction of many feature that
only worked with Windows server. If we call this a Net Neutrality violation,
which I believe it was, it is instructive to see how governments around the
world dealt with this problem.
Bert certainly knows the rest of the story. Microsoft was charged with
anti-trust violations in Europe and the United States. I wonder if Bert would
try to tell us that along with the role played by telephone modems in the early
development of the Internet, we would not have the Internet without Internet
Explorer?
There was no "Internet culture" of any kind, related to commercial usage of
the Internet. It could have gone either way, and in fact, walled "Internet"
gardens did spring up. Anyone awake in those early days would know how many
people thought AOL was "the Internet," for example. How can anyone who
thought AOL was "the Internet" have possibly had a clue about a "net
neutrality culture?" That's bogus. There was no such culture.
The un-informed people who thought that AOL was the Internet got caught up in
the war to control it. This blog from 2001 is very interesting in that it
criticizes AOL - rightly so - for what are clearly Net Neutrality violations.
The author did not call it that - the term had not yet been invented - but did
undermine his case by claiming that Internet Explorer WAS the open Internet. He
claims that AOL was picking winners and losers, accepting payment from sites to
elevate their results in the AOL search features, something that Google has
perfected as a near monopoly in Internet search.
Microsoft already enjoyed a monopoly in home computers, and tried to use it to
create a monopoly in web browsers and web servers. Not much difference between
paying a company to elevate search exposure, or paying a company for the web
server needed to host a website - a server with features that only worked with
I.E.
Bottom line, please do not lecture us about Net Neutrality and collusion
between device makers and content owners - they learned this behavior from the
company and product that you continue to champion.
Fortunately, neutrality won, and you can thank companies like Apple for helping
to make this happen. Apple was primarily responsible for the shift from Adobe
Flash to HTML5, another Internet success story that forms the basis for the
standards used to stream video content today.
Need I point out that Bert was on the wrong side of this little war too?
But it does illustrate one of the remarkable strengths of the "neutral"
Internet culture. There are no limits on what a company can do with respect to
technical innovation via the Internet. Any company is completely free to create
a new proprietary technology and use the Internet to prove its worth. Both
Microsoft and Adobe invented important technology that everyone uses today.
This gave them a temporary proprietary advantage, which in turn led to popular
adoption, which in turn led to IETF standardization.
Bert noted that cellular data services were not regulated initially because the
technology was evolving too rapidly. This is a clear statement of the fact that
historically, government regulation of telecommunications served to entrench
legacy technologies and delay technical innovation.
But he is OK with heavy handed regulation now that most people understand the
Internet culture and Net Neutrality. What is extremely disturbing is that he
does not understand that the Title II regulatory regime does not enforce Net
Neutrality, it provides the regulatory authority needed for the politicians and
special interests to subvert Net Neutrality.
So, this is another one of Craig's fabrications, to rewrite history to fit
his prejudices. Any possibility of a "neutral Internet culture," for the
public, *only* came as a result of their access to it, via strictly neutral
Title II telephone lines.
What did I just say above? Bert cannot help himself. It was the "neutral
telephone lines" that created the "neutral" Internet culture. Never mind that
these lines connected to NON-NEUTRAL walled gardens, using non-neutral
front-ends and a monopoly web browser.
The only reason why AOL couldn't perpetuate their vision of an "Internet" is
that people had dozens of options for access, over neutral telephone lines.
Nope. The reason they could not perpetuate walled in culture is that consumers
wanted access to sites that they were either blocking or making very difficult
to access.
Had the public been exposed to the Internet via their cable systems, as even
Craig acknowledged in a moment of clarity, it would not have been neutral at
all. It would have been AOL models.
People were exposed to this Bert. The Time Warner Full Service Network trials
in Orlando served 4,000 homes in very large metropolitan market, and received
massive attention from the media.
I attended the launch of this service and talked to many vendors who were
working with Time Warner. Even the day it was launched you could see that it
was a dead end; there was a large demo area dedicated to the proprietary tools
Time Warner had developed to "publish content" and to support e-commerce over
the FSN. The vendors were quick to note that they were uncomfortable with the
idea that they would need to create multiple versions of their information and
e-commerce services to support each proprietary cable system.
But it was critically important for companies to participate in this trial, as
it afforded the opportunity to learn what would work, what would fail, and what
customers really wanted.
I just posted two articles, written in 1994, that expose my thinking, and the
general atmosphere surrounding "The Information Superhighway," what the
Internet was being called by it's "inventor" Al Gore.
While going back and looking at some of my articles on this subject, I did
discover a few missed calls. Like writing in 2001 that the Internet would never
be capable of replacing broadcasting and MVPD systems...
Culture forms in many ways. The Internet culture grew out of the attempts by
many industries to control its evolution they FAILED.
Now, if Craig could quit with his circular arguments, winding all the way
back to 2014, maybe he'd finally understand what's at stake here.
Why.?
Because both the commercial interests and consumers came to understand the
advantage of open and interoperable communications systems...
Today we call this Network Neutrality.
Regards
Craig
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