Ed Felten’s Primer on Net Neutrality
Following up on a previous post about Google’s announcement to fight packet discrimination in court, here’s an excellent primer on the technical issues of net neutrality by Ed Felten. Ed’s observations about the broader policy context are particularly insightful:
The Internet is unusual among networks in putting most of the intelligence in the computers at the edge of the network, rather than in the infrastructure at the heart of the network. The routers in the middle forward packets with only minor processing—all the heavy lifting takes place on the transmitting and receiving computers. This approach of putting intelligence at the edge of the network is known as the end-to-end principle, and it is one of the keys to the Internet’s success thus far. … In a sense, the net neutrality debate is a fight between the edges and the middle over control of the network. Neutrality regulation is generally supported by companies that provide services at the edge of the network, and is generally opposed by companies that manage the middle of the network. Each group wants the part of the network that it controls to have most of the intelligence, because more opportunities to innovate—and profit from innovation—are available to those who control the intelligent parts of the network.Ed’s further distinction between minimal discrimination, based primarily on technical necessity, and non-minimal discrimination, based primarily on business-strategy reasons will also help focus the policy debate.
Technorati Tags: antitrust, net-neutrality, ed felten
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