When I invented the Web, I didn't have to ask anyone's permission (2006)

http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/144

by vaksel • 17 years ago

80 37 17 years ago

dig.csail.mit.edu

gjm112• 17 years ago

One-para summary: Tim Berners-Lee, in mid-2006, arguing for network neutrality, pointing out that it isn't the same thing as "you shouldn't be able to pay more for better internet service" and that regulation is not always a bad thing (e.g., a market economy wouldn't work so well if there weren't laws against forging currency).

(His one-sentence summary of the network neutrality principle: if A and B both pay for access to the net with at least a certain quality of service, then they should be able to communicate with at least that quality of service.)

unalone2• 17 years ago

I know it's vogue to summarize articles in comments, though I'm not sure why, but this is ridiculous. His article is 11 short paragraphs - each one shorter than one of your two paragraphs. It fits on a single page even if you have a small screen and a narrow web browser. Why is a summary at all necessary?

vaksel2• 17 years ago

free karma

rms• 17 years ago

Most people read the comments first.

gjm112• 17 years ago

rms is right, vaksel wrong: the point is that most people read the comments first, and depending on what they see there may not even read the original article (there was a discussion of this not so long ago).

Yes, this article is short, but I think the HN title is actively misleading. I'd never have guessed from the title that it had anything to do with network neutrality; would you?

electromagnetic2• 17 years ago

I do agree with his point that the internet should be regulated, but it should be regulated to be fair. My current internet is 10 meg download and 1 meg upload... however I only get 60% of this. No matter what speed we have, we never get 100% of it and the only reason companies get away with it is that they're allowed to hide this BS in the small print with an "*up to" so it's up to 10 meg.

I wish for once I could actually get what I paid for when I use a phone company. I mean it'd be nice that when I'm contracted to pay them, they should be contracted to actually do what they advertise. This is where I'd like regulation and serious fines if they don't meet their advertisements 95% of the time.

dantheman• 17 years ago

This has absolutely nothing to do with the point he is trying to make. He's concerned over traffic shaping and giving preferential treatment to various sites/traffic.

What you are concerned with is false advertising.

palish2• 17 years ago

True, but they're both evil.

jmtame2• 17 years ago

false advertising is the oldest trick in the book for telecomms. http://www.newnetworks.com/tellthetruthverizon.htm

network neutrality is a lot more serious than any type of false advertising a telecomm can put out. as consumers, if we're smart enough to see that our service plans aren't 100mbps, ok no big deal. yes, they're both evil, but false advertising isn't really even part of network neutrality as a debate.

now if we have no say in how fast certain websites respond, depending on how much we're paying (or they're paying), that's an entirely different topic. i can walk away from a provider if they're lying through advertising. but who's going to stop them from throttling your connection based on which website you're visiting?

legislation is the only thing that can stop the big 3 from this type of thing. you'll notice that in the past, the FCC has actually punished traffic discrimination (like when comcast was shutting off bit torrent, a complete violation of neutrality rules). if there's no legislation, the duopolies can do whatever they want and all have a big orgy price gauging at the same time.

gojomo2• 17 years ago

How do you test your throughput?

Wondering, because by the nature of TCP/IP, it's hard to get the full capacity of a link with a single TCP connection -- such as an HTTP download. You'll get much closer to full utilization with multiple connections -- such as with P2P app parallel downloading.

But to further complicate things: if you are saturating your uplink (as is also typical with P2P apps) on an asymmetric service, you may impair your download connections' throughput (as upstream ACKs on the downloads are occasionally dropped). So you should also cap your upload rate to something under the uplink capacity -- the P2P app or a home router may have configuration allowing this.

With those in mind, I've usually observed my throughput on DSL or cable modem links as much more than 60% of the advertised speed -- and sometimes more than 100% of the advertised speed!

jacquesm• 17 years ago

that hasn't got much to do with the nature of TCP/IP but with the nature of the various links that your traffic will take and the limitations of the web server you are querying.

In a simple test situation (say ftp or http over a lan link) you are using TCP/IP/and some hardware link layer and you'll see close to wire speed.

pjkundert2• 17 years ago

My, how ready we all are to give up our liberty.

Regulations on the behavior of companies reduces choice (only large companies can afford the legions of lawyers required to comply with them; small competitors go out of business). The only regulation we need is the regulation to tell the truth -- you don't tell the truth, you are sued out of business. The end. Yet, this is the only regulation we do not have, or that the government is unwilling to uphold.

If governments would concern themselves with enforcing the rule of law, and upholding the sanctity of contracts, we would all be better off. But, since large companies can buy political friends (through lobbying) and legal protection against fraudulently advertising services which they do not intend to deliver (through teams of lawyers) but small, efficient companies cannot, we therefore lose our freedom of choice -- by our own hand.

electromagnetic2• 17 years ago

Your statements don't make sense. In one paragraph you're saying that regulations are destroying 'our' liberty, yet the next paragraph you want the government to enforce laws and by this all the regulations enforced by the law.

I'm sorry, but I worked as an electrician for several years in the UK. There's regulations on everything from the thickness of the cable to how low a wall socket can be mounted to how high a light switch can be mounted. The regulation book is almost two inches thick. There's no big nationalized companies except for industrial electrical work, like wiring up factories. Every single person I worked with worked for themselves or for a small company, most of which were father-son companies.

Regulations for electrical work were put into place to stop people scamming people and burning your house down. Here in Canada regulations only came around relatively recently, and from people I've talked to (many are electricians from the UK) they're utterly disgusted with what people got away with. One house had its lighting done with speaker wire attached to a 10 amp fuse, by all rights that house should have burnt down.

Here in Canada there's virtually no regulations on phone companies. They introduce new charges however they want, Bell even charges you if there's a problem with their equipment they installed. Back home that's not even heard of, BT came into our house numerous times to fix problems. There's also numerous smaller companies you can go with, in fact there's a flood of them for everything.

Speaking from experience, regulation helps people. It makes it harder for big companies to bully the little guy and allows a much more even playing field. It also prevents the whole pyramid scheme of big business, where thousands of people working for $10 an hour do all the work for a few people being paid $10,000 an hour. In fact, nearly everyone in the business makes an extremely good wage (I think our best pay was ~$4000 for ~3 days work) and incompetent people tend to go out of business through lack of business or lawsuits.

rbanffy• 17 years ago

There is no way to guarantee you get, say, 10 Mbps downstream unless you cooperate by downloading that much. If more than 10 people download from my 100 Mbps-connection server at once, they will get less than they paid for, even if the telco is totally innocent.

People need to understand their mileage may vary.

I seriously doubt people were getting their nominal bandwidth during events such as 9/11 or Obama's inauguration.

toodlestech2• 17 years ago

This is from 2006....

Hexstream• 17 years ago

It's still very much relevant, considering the recent news that content distributors want to force ISPs to violate net-neutrality.

toodlestech2• 17 years ago

Not only have many ISPs responded with a no, that is also news from a few months ago. So why post/uprate an article that was written 6 years ago that is loosely tied to news from a few months ago?

palish2• 17 years ago

Links?

bprater• 17 years ago

I believe folks in Obama's administration tend to be pro-neutrality:

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2233906/obama-appoints-net...

Allocator2008• 17 years ago

First of all, Vice-President Gore invented the Web, not this doofus. (OK, just kidding there!)

Secondly though net neutrality is immoral by Objectivist standards because it regulates free enterprise and crushes healthy competition. If my DSL from ISP 1 doesn't give me the bandwidth that a DSL from ISP 2 could give me, I have the consumer choice to switch to ISP 2. Ayn Rand would roll over in her grave at this notion of net neutrality which is pretty much close to socialism, because it ruins consumer choice and competition. If ISP 1 and 2 are forced to provide the same bandwidth then my consumer choice goes out the window, and if I am a shareholder for ISP 1 or 2 then my opportunity as a shareholder to profit from different DSL packages gets reduced to. This hurts the consumer by destroying competition and thus choice, and this hurts the shareholder by hurting profit potential by undue regulation.

Think about it this way, as Sen. Stevens of Alaska mentioned, the internet is like a series of tubes, with finite carrying capacity. I don't want to have to wait until Monday to get a video emailed to me on Friday because the government has forced my ISP to adhere to some arbitrary standard of how my ISP can utilize the tubes of the internet. No, I want my video on Friday, the same day it was emailed. I want the choice, the freedom, to choose an Internet Service Provider who can pick the biggest tube out there to use to send me my video. I do not want my ISP to be forced by the government to send me my video via a smaller tube, where it has to wait in line behind a bunch of other videos in that same tube. (Note: I am using the loose terminology here for clarity, but I actually work in tech as a software qa engineer with a background in unit testing and gui automation, I am A+ and Network+ certified, so I do understand what I am talking about, just to be clear.) I want the consumer freedom to have an ISP that chooses the biggest tube out there to send me my video and I don't want the government telling my ISP what tube to use. Period. Net neutrality hurts me as the consumer, and it hurts the shareholder. An ISP should be allowed to operate however it likes to provide value and choice to the consumer and profit for its shareholders, and big brother should not get in the way. Ayn Rand would be ashamed of this conversation. I hope for the sake of Western civilization that net neutrality is rejected, or else we will all be singing the Internationale before long.

I realize this might not be a popular sentiment, and I also realize my "karma" may be affected by it, but Ms. Rand would not let fear of karma reductions keep her from speaking out on behalf of truth, justice, and the American Way, and neither should I. :-)

fauigerzigerk• 17 years ago

All laws distort markets. Are laws therefore socialist? Are all areas not regulated by government free markets? I think the answer to both questions is no. Laws are sometimes the platform for free markets and unregulated areas are sometimes ruled by nepotism and corruption.

With regard to net neutrality we should think about how access to markets for startups would be affected if net neutrality were to go. I'm not sure, but I suspect that without net neutrality starting a startup could become a more capital intensive affair. The amount of regulation in the form of complicated contracts with telcos could dwarf the amount of regulation that a pro net neutrality law would create.

russell• 17 years ago

I hate the Al Gore snide remarks, because we owe him for what we have. He did not invent the internet in the sense of the technology, but he did help create it by sponsoring the legislation that funded the Internet, separating it from DARPAnet.

timbl DID invent the web.

rdrimmie• 17 years ago

Can we define Goredwin's Law as: 'As a technology forum discussion continues the probability of someone joking about Al Gore creating the internet approaches 1' and as a corollary stipulate that the participant who jokes immediately loses any credibility, and perhaps karma?

nathos• 17 years ago

Unfortunately, free markets don't really apply to ISP's in the US. In most areas, there is 1 DSL provider and 1 Cable provider. Possibly 1 FiOS provider (Verizon) if you're lucky. Telecoms are essentially monopolies.

Where I live, my only hardline choices are Frontier DSL and Time Warner Cable. Time Warner's service is significantly faster than Frontier's (20+Mbit down vs. 10Mbit down). If Time Warner began to prioritize packets from 'partners', and I chose to vote with my dollars, I'd have to settle for a competitor that's half as fast.

When megacorporations are involved, free markets are merely an undergrad Econ student's fantasy :)

blackguardx• 17 years ago

You are referencing Rand like she is some sort of god.

I find the best perspective on any topic can be found by merging several different viewpoints.

The flaw in your argument is that often, there is no ISP 2. How does Rand feel about local monopolies? Even if there is an ISP 2, that is not a free market.

parenthesis• 17 years ago

The average consumer probably won't be aware that certain services are being impaired by their ISP. If their provider is involved in throttling traffic to and from a competitor's website, the average person will probably just think that it's a rubbish slow site.

jmtame2• 17 years ago

if you want to get caught up and get all of the background on network neutrality, feel free to read a paper i wrote last november on it: http://jtame05.wordpress.com/2008/10/21/network-neutrality-w...

it covers as much as i could think of in <20 pages: history, the problems, the facts, the evidence, the technology, the culture. the takeaway: it really is a serious problem.

When I invented the Web, I didn't have to ask anyone's permission (2006)

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