October 17, 2007 | Posted By : Liam Eagle at 9:19 PM PERMALINK | Blog Comments (0)

ISPCON: Dave Schaeffer, Day One Keynote

The way Jon Price (ISPCON organizer) introduced it, I got the impression that getting Dave Schaeffer (Cogent Communications Founder/CEO) to keynote at this event was a big coup for him. That is, he said he’d been working on it for a while, and he seemed pretty happy to have him here.

I can see why he’d feel that way, though. Shaeffer’s presentation had that feeling of significance. There was nothing rote about it – it was a well-reasoned argument on a subject about which he is clearly passionate.

The presentation was particularly articulate, too. As conference keynotes go, it was one of the most free-flowing and confident I’ve seen. Here is a guy who clearly knows what he’s talking about.

Despite the fact that we were given a warning in advance, I found myself less than 100 percent able to keep up with Schaeffer, who – as Jon described in his introduction – says a lot in a few words.

That, and the presentation dealt very specifically, and in a great deal of detail, with an issue of particular importance to the ISP and access business – and did so in some very specific access-related terms.

The crux of the presentation was Schaeffer’s attempt to answer the question at the heart of the net neutrality debate – is bandwidth a commodity?

His answer was, unequivocally, yes. Everything Cogent does, he says, (in particular designing its network) is done with the understanding that the network is a commodity.

The network itself is a very large system for delivering content. And for certain kinds of content (the kinds that require a two-way means of communication), it’s the only way to reliably deliver them.

The problem with the large, incumbent carriers on the other side of the neutrality debate, he says, is that they’re a monopolistic business that has been allowed to ride for a long time on assets that were long ago paid for by their rate base.

Efforts against neutrality, for closed-off networks and prioritized traffic, are based on a desire by those incumbent carriers to keep per-bit rates high – preserving the old model of network and application packaged together, and moving into higher-margin services.

Obviously, this is one side of an argument, provided by the head of a controversial enough company with a clear agenda. But it is a well-reasoned and impassioned argument, which at the very least, makes for a hell of a keynote.

In case it’s not perfectly clear, Schaeffer thinks it’s critical that service providers support net neutrality.

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June 20, 2007 | Posted By : Liam Eagle at 3:18 PM PERMALINK | Blog Comments (1)

FCC Finished Receiving Net Neutrality Comments

Last Friday (June 15th) was the final day for the FCC’s public comment period on the issue of net neutrality.

The issue should be a familiar one to anyone even remotely involved in telecommunications by this point, but long story short (in the interest of being complete), the FCC was seeking public comment on whether it should regulate bandwidth pricing. The issue shakes out, roughly, content companies in favor of regulation and telcos against it.

For anyone unfamiliar with the issue, there’s more than a little bit of information available on, unsurprisingly, the net - including a pretty exhaustive Wikipedia entry.

Of course, that kind of request for public comment can sometimes double as an initiation for corporate grandstanding. And certainly, many of the companies subject to the outcome of the FCC’s decision in this regard have spent parts of the last several years on their respective soapboxes. And not all of them strictly interested in the financial impact on their own business. Some of the folks with a passionate interest in this debate are legitimately loyal to their principles, or interested in the integrity of the Internet. It has been a captivating argument.

On Friday, right under the wire, we received some comment in the form of a press release from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a group “dedicated to advancing the principles of free enterprise and limited government,” outlining that group’s acceptably predictable stance on net neutrality.

According to Wayne Crews, VP and director of technology policy at CEI:

“Cable and DSL speeds are a trickle compared to the Niagara needed tomorrow, before even addressing the security and delivery requirements vastly beyond today’s capabilities. Freezing today’s Internet into a regulated public utility via net neutrality’s price-and-entry regulation would obviously slow investment and innovation - meaning fewer new companies, networking deals, products and technologies - but will ultimately hurt content companies too.”

There is a PDF of the organization’s complete (16-page) comment here.

Personally, I find this particular argument interesting mostly because there isn’t (from my perspective) a cut-and-dry right and wrong. As is most often the case with divisive issues involving business and regulation, both sides are pretty understandably motivated by finance, but are arguing in terms related to what’s “best” for the Internet. And there are compelling, if not altogether sincere, arguments on both sides.

Mark Sullivan of PC World offered some very salient commentary in a blog entry posted Friday. He says the comment period, and indeed the FCC’s deliberation, falls a little short of relevant to the debate. The likelihood of the FCC passing any regulations that go against the telco lobby is slim. For one thing, the FCC’s purpose is to carry out the mandate of congress. And net neutrality matters were largely the reason why congress’s most recent effort to revise the 1996 Telecommunications Act was killed.

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