Craig Allen writes in an email:

This may be common knowledge, but I learned from a brief article in Doctor Dobb’s Journal (ya gotta pay on the web, I get the print edition free, how weird is that?) that way back when the Internet was being designed, AT&T somehow forced the design to rely on a relatively small number of central routers rather than a more distributed, decentralized approach. As a result, the net is more vulnerable to various kinds of Denial of Service attacks, various unplanned disasters, and (I’m not sure if this is an assumption on my part or the article said it) less throughput. AT&T’s reason was that otherwise it would be too competitive with the phone network (most of which they owned at the time).

(Craig notes that he’s summarizing from memory and thus may be off in some of the details.)

News to me. Sounds plausible. But everything sounds plausible to me.

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[This is a draft of a column that will run in DarwinMag on Wednesday, probably.]

Who could object to quality?

Actually, you do. You object to quality every time you buy a worse-but-cheaper brand, order from the top of the wine list instead of the bottom, or reject the “pro” version of some over-featured piece of software.

And you also object to quality of service every time you get righteously annoyed at the way the waiters fawn over the well-dressed couple while barely remembering to clean up your spilled root beer. And, most important, you object to quality of service when you’re waiting on line and some perceived VIPs are served ahead of you because their quality of service degrades your quality of service.

That’s at the heart of the current debate over Quality of Service (QoS) as the Internet begins to subsume other networks. In fact, David Isenberg (who saw a draft of this column) expands the analog: “Maybe you’re pissed that they got in with no delay while you have to wait (delay). Maybe you’re pissed because they can count on getting in right away, while you never know how long you might have to wait (jitter). And maybe you never get in, thanks to those VIP a**holes filling up the place (lost packets).” One person’s Quality of Service can be another person’s Degradation of Service.

That’s what could be. As it stands, the Internet treats all bits alike. When a packet arrives at a router, it gets sent along regardless of what type of data it encodes. In fact, there’s no way to tell what type of data it’s carrying. Medical X-Ray Bits are moved just as quickly as Pamela Anderson Bits. And it doesn’t matter what order the packets arrive in: if the packets encoding Pam’s eyes show up after the ones encoding her painted toenails (assuming that it’s a photo of her vertical and rightside up), they will be put into the right order by the machine receiving them.

But many of the companies who are using the Internet as a transport for telephone calls say that their bits are different. If you’re reciting the Pledge of Allegiance over the phone (soon to be a requirement, by the way), if the “to the flag” ” bits arrive after the “under God,” your message will be unintelligible. Therefore, telephone bits deserve special treatment. Or so the argument goes.

Some very serious people disagree. Their arguments are of three types.

First, QoS is impractical. There are indeed bits in IP packets designed to indicate “type of service,” but no one uses them. There’s not even agreement how to interpret them, much less how to rank them. More important, the Internet routers would have to be set to act on thost bits which would require a massive retooling of the Net’s “operating system.”

Second, QoS is the wrong solution. According to this line of thought, QoS is only required if there’s a scarcity of bits available. It’d be far better to solve the QoS issue by opening up the sluices of connectivity: light up the “dark” (unused) fiber, open up the spectrum for public access, install more powerful routers, get with the IPv6 program. With sufficient bits and sufficient throughput, voice packets will arrive in time without having to always arrive first.

Third. QoS violates the principle of the Internet’s architecture. The Net has succeeded precisely because it does nothing but move bits from A to B. This is the “ End-to-End” theory described by Saltzer, Reed and Clark and the “Stupid Network” as described by Isenberg. Part of the simplicity that keeps the Internet humming is the fact that it treats all bits alike. Further, the fact that the Internet is not optimized for any particular applications means that it is optimized for innovation; “tune” the Internet for the VIP du jour and you will de-tune it for other applications. Let the telphone guys and gals change the way the Net works so that it’s better for voice and then tomorrow change it so that it works better for broadcasting TV shows, and soon the other types of bits we care about will have trouble getting through the line at the check-out counter.

So, even though in theory, we could provide QoS in the short term and open up connectivity in the longer term, doing so would mean obfuscating the true strength of the Internet: It’s no Strom Thurmond when it comes to bits.

Resources

Glenn Fleishman just published a helpful weblog entry on the topic.

Lawrence Lessig just posted a terrific article to Dave Farber’s mailing list, as did Karl Auerbach and Bob Frankston.

David Isenberg’s newsletter in 1999 ran a clear explanation of the issues. The article is based in part on research by Andrew Odlyzko; there’s a long interview with Odlyzko here.

This column resulted from my participating in (well, auditing) an email thread among Glenn Fleishman, Bob Frankston and David Reed. Obviously, they are not responsible for my stupidity, carelessness and poor personal hygiene.

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Adina, knowing my views on the importance of leeway, sent me mail to point to where she blogs a quote from Siva Vaidhyanathan in a slashdot interview:

I think the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) is misnamed. I don’t consider it a copyright act. I consider it an anti-copyright act. Copyright is a fluid, open, democratic set of protocols. Conflicts are anticipated by Congress and mediated by courts. The DMCA wipes out the sense of balance, anticipation, and mediation, and installs a technocratic regime. In other words, code tells you whether you can use a piece of material. Under copyright, you could use a piece of material and face the consequences. The DMCA replaces the copyright system with cold, hard technology.

It takes human judgment out of the system and drains the fluidity out of what was a humanely designed and evolved system.

Ah, leeway. What can’t it do?

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The FCC has announced it’s considering using unlicensed spectrum to provide connectivity in rural areas. This would include Wifi as well as other technologies that may arise. While this sounds promising and enlightened, some of the people I trust on this topic (AKA the evil slave masters who mold my mind) tell me that shoe-horning connectivity into unlicensed bands is the wrong way to go. Rather, Open Spectrum would not only deliver more bits — as many bits as anyone could want — but would open up the ether for the sort of end-to-end computing that enabled the Internet to flourish.

WiFi, after all, operates on two unlicensed “channels” (2.4gH for 802.11b and 5.7gH for the newly-introduced 802.11a). Why restrict access to a single frequency or two? In the old days (= now) it was assumed that signals had to operate within discrete bands because otherwise they would “interfere” with one another. But new technology obviates that model. (In fact, it turns out that even the metaphors are seriously off.) Modern devices can negotiate their frequencies as they go, like cars switching lanes, which maximizes the throughput of a highway. And Ultra-Wide Band can pack an enormous amount of information in short bursts that cut across all frequencies. Current law — permitting only those with FCC-granted licenses to use particular frequencies — is based on bad science and worse technology.

So, open the spectrum and you get: more bits than anyone can eat anywhere you get radio reception. You also give everyone with a connection many of the capabilities of the national broadcasters, which is a scary thought but only if you’re a broadcaster.

Spectrum without permission. What a concept.

(I have a white paper on open spectrum here. And my evil mind molders are Jock Gill, David Reed and Dewayne Hendricks. Don’t blame them for what I get wrong, though; they haven’t read this blog entry, for example.)

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Glenn Fleishman has an article in the NY Times today (registration required) that includes a map of the hotspots in NYC. Unsurprisingly, it maps to the racial and economic divisions of the city: “92 percent of network nodes were below 96th Street.”

Glenn mentioned this article in the hallways at Supernova a couple of days ago. Bob Frankston‘s reaction (and I hope I represent it fairly) was that the problem is really one of educating people about the benefits of getting connected: all but the very poorest in NYC have televisions, and if you can afford a TV you could have afforded a connected PC.

It does seem that connectedness would spread further down the economic pyramid if its benefits were clearer. But I think very few people, except for the upper reaches of geekdom, view TV and Internet as competitive technologies. Having a TV is close to a requirement for participating in our culture. As long as it’s an Either/Or, the digital divide in NYC will be real.

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Kevin is summing up. He’s asking us what we haven’t addressed enough.

His answer is that we haven’t talked enough about government and about digital identity. Here are some of our answers: [I didn’t get everyone’s name because the ideas were pumped out rapidly.]

Marc: The mechanisms for hooking together decentralized stuff. (This is more techie than I’d care about.)

The economic reasons for decentralization

Doc: Categorizing infrastructure, e.g., commons vs commercial infrastructure.

Dave Sifry: Business models for edge stuff

Organzational and legal models

SIP, IM and super directories

Grid computing

Gary Bolles: Inside the firewall where decentralization looks bad

Fair Use and DRM

Consumer electronics and non-PC computing

Phil Wolff: In the next Supernova, which will be in DC, we should focus on explaining this stuff to policy makers.

Excellent conference. Now I get to ride to the airport with Glenn Fleishman.

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I zoned out for the first 30 minutes of this panel. Some distuurbing email came in that I wanted to deal with. And I’m pretty much at my limit for sitting still and listening to smart people. Will someone please turn on “Friends” or “Buffy”? Thanks.

Fortunately, I was able to turn to Doc’s weblog where he’s entering something like a smart transcript. So, I’m listening to the panel while reading the blogging about it…

No wonder my head hurts.

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David Isenberg is talking about what’s happening in the world of telecommunications. He’s just back (two nights ago) from several weeks in Japan, Australian and New Zealand so he’s full of wide-eyed news of a world where broadband flows like milk and is as sweet as honey. Now he’s talking about a vanilla 802.11b system that provides better quality sound than “real” telephones.

“What HTTP did for documents, SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) will do for communications.”

“The best network is a stupid network.” That is, the best network provides nothing but connection. The services are provided by applications running on the network. (David and I wrote about this at The Paradox of the Best Network. All content came from David.) “Each of us in 2-3 years can have the bandwidth of a telephone company for a few thousand bucks. But the telephone companies believe in scarcity and are forcing it on us.”

The End to End principle, which is basically the same as The Stupid Network, says that you should keep the network simple because that preserves your options for innovating on its edges. Phone companies like to add value to their networks, for competitive reasons, which makes their networks smart. That’s fine for telephone calls, but the Internet is not specifically for phone calls or for anything else.

The Internet, says David, makes telephony just another application. This is a problem for the business model of the telephone company, for the telcos know about stringing wires and optimizing telephone switches (an expense) and make money selling the application for monthly revenues. In a stupid network, the application provides revenue. But, asks David, where’s the business model for the physical layer of the Internet? In short, who builds and runs the new network? Not the telephone companies because it’s too foreign from their business model. The cable companies are unlikely because they don’t want to enable the wholesale generation and sharing of entertainment that competes with the entertainment they’re selling. Municipalities? Sometimes. Utilities? Maybe. New companies? Customers?

There are, he notes, important political implications and obstacles. But he’s out of time.

Smart presentation on the virtues of stupid networks. But, then, I’m partial to David. I’ve learned a lot from him. (His newsletter is free and always excellent.)

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Kevin is interviewing Sergey Brin.

Google Groups (the Usenet search capability) came about because an engineer at Google, Michael Schmidt, dreamed of it. Same for the Google API: An engineer there was enthusiastic about doing it. Cool.

What’s the business model for the API? There isn’t one. Right now you’re limited to 1000 hits a day, and maybe someday they’ll charge. But they did it because it was interesting and fun. His example of an API-based app is a plagiarism checker.

Marc: Will Google support XML structures so we can get better searches. E.g., searching for images.

Sergey: Rather than making humans write better, we should work on having computers understand better what humans are writing for one another.

Dave: Do you envision Google ever becoming decentralized? A Google for the desktop?

Sergey: I’d like to be able to search my desktop from anywhere. But we haven’t written client software. Our technical competency is running large server farms.

Sergey just did a show of hands to discover that Google is indexing the blogs from most people in the room but isn’t updating as frequently as we’d like. (We are a spoiled bunch of puppies!)

[I went to lunch before posting this and somehow lost most of it. Odd. Fortunately, you have another 28 blogs covering this to choose from.]

I asked if Google has considered optimizing itself to support its use as a DNS extender (in Dan Gillmor’s sense: since bobsmith.com is owned by only one Bob Smith, I’ll use Google when I want to find my old pal Bob Smith). Sergey didn’t really answer this question, though, preferring to answer something about the difficulty of handling complex searches.

Cory gots to ask the last question: Do you Google guys ever think about the way the world is reshaping itself around Google? …Good to end on a question that’s actually a thank you.

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This should be great. The panel is Meg Hourihan, Dave Winer and Nick Denton. (In fact, it was really good. But because it was conversational, the following account is fragmentary.)

Dave is blogging the panel as he’s on it. Call it Escherblogging.

Dave says he did XML-RPC and Soap to enable people to write to the Web as easily as they write with their word processor. Weblogs and Web services are all about the human needs they serve. (Write on, Dave!)

Nick sees weblogs as a way to produce media more cheaply. “Weblogs are one way to produce media properties that distribute the editorial processs…”

Meg cares about weblogs because it enables people to connect.

Meg defines a blog as something that’s updated daily, presented in reverse chronological order, time-stamped, etc. But wouldn’t that make the AP headlines page a blog? I ask if blogging is not just a technology but also a tone of voice — a new type of rhetoric, one that’s distributed over the Web.

Meg on whether rightwing yahoos are going to take over weblogging: “It’s not like talk radio. There’s unlimited bandwidth. Anyone can have a weblog.”

What percentage of people online will have a weblog? Dave: Everyone.

Nick: Ten times as many people writing in public than in the world of print. And that’s a big deal.

Dave: In 10 years, every member of Congress will have a weblog.

Mitch Ratcliffe: There’s no point in arguing in what is or is not called a weblog. What matters is that more and more people are communicating in their own voice.

Cory:”Blogging allows people to write who couldn’t write before… It’s not the usual suspects.” What makes it easier is the informality of blogs as well as the ese of use of the technology. For example, EFF set up a blog so they could get past the barrier of having to have every pronouncement be official and thus have to go through all the official poicies and controls.

Final question: What do you want from blogs in the next few years?

Meg: Push. She wants to have the content come to her.

Dave: What does the audience want? Doc: Search. Me: Blogthreads. Marc Cantor: We’re doing a “topic server” that will enable blog threads.

Nick: Go to one page and see the buzziest items of the hour, recommended by my social network.

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