[Cerowrt-devel] a start at the FCC filing

Thu Mar 4 22:54:15 EST 2021

I am planning to take my time on this. I would like for example, to
at least communicate well with a republican senator and a democratic one.

Admittedly, if we can upgrade everybody to 100Mbit, everybody can have
all 4 home members being couch potatoes in front of HD netflix and
there won't be much motivation to do anything else.

https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/03/04/1722256/senators-call-on-fcc-to-quadruple-base-high-speed-internet-speeds

Anybody know these guys?

On Sun, Feb 21, 2021 at 8:50 AM David P. Reed <dpreed at deepplum.com> wrote:
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> This is an excellent proposal. I am happy to support it somehow.
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> I strongly recommend trying to find a way to make sure it doesn't become a proposal put forward by "progressive" potlitical partisans. (this is hard for me, because my politics are more aligned with the Left than with the self-described conservatives and right-wing libertarians.
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> This is based on personal experience starting in 2000 and continuing through 2012 or so with two issues:
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> 1. Open Spectrum (using computational radio networking to make a scalable framework for dense wireless extremely wideband internetworking). I along with a small number of others started this as a non-partisan effort. It became (due to lobbyists and "activists") considered to be a socialist taking of property from spectrum "owners". After that, it became an issue where a subset of the Democratic Party (progressives) decided to make it a wedge issue in political form. (It should be noted that during this time, a Republican Secretary of Commerce took up the idea of making UWB legal, and fought off lobbyists to some extent, though the resulting regulation was ineffective because it was too weak to be usable).
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> 2. Network Neutrality or Open Internet. Here the key issue was really about keeping Internet routing intermediaries from being selective about what packets they would deliver and what ones they would not. The design of the Internet was completely based on open carriage of all packets without the routers billing for or metering based on end-to-end concerns. Again, for a variety of reasons, this simple idea got entangled with partisanship politically - such that advocates for an Open Internet were seen to be promoting both Democratic Party and Silicon Valley Tech interests. In fact, the case for Open Internet is not primarily political. It's about scalability of the infrastructure and the ability to carry Internet packets over any concatenation of paths, for mutual benefit to all users. (That "mutual benefit" concept does seem to be alien to a certain kind of individualist libertarian cult thinking that is a small subset of Republican Party membership).
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> If this becomes yet another Democratic Party initiative, it will encounter resistance, both from Republican-identified polarizing reaction, and also from the corporate part of the Democratic Party (so called Blue Dog Democrats where telecom providers provide the largest quantity of funding to those Democrats).
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> Some "progressive" Democrats will reach out to add this to their "platform" as a partisan issue.
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> It may feel nice to have some of them on your side. Like you aren't alone. But by accepting this "help" on this issue, you may be guaranteeing its failure.
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> In a world where compromise is allowed to generate solutions to problems, polarizing would not be effective to kill a good idea, rather merely raising the issue would lead to recognizing the problem is important and joint work to create a solution. In 1975, the Internet was not partisan. Its designers weren't party members or loyalists. We were solving a problem of creating a scalable, efficient alternative to the "Bell System" model of communications where every piece of gear got involved in deciding what to do with each bit of information, where there were "voice bits" and "data bits", "business bits" and "residential bits", and every piece of equipment had to be told everything about each bits (through call setup).
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> But today, compromise is not considered possible, even at the level of defining the problem!
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> So this simple architectural approach to clearing out the brush that has grown like weeds throughout the Internet, especially at the "access provider" will become political.
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> Since in the end of the day it threatens to reduce control and revenues to edge "access providers" that come from selling higher-rate pipes, the natural opposition will likely come from lobbyists for telecom incumbents, funded by equipment providers for those incumbents (Cisco, Alcatel Lucent and their competitors), with Republicans and Blue-Dog Democrats carrying their water. That's tthe likely polarization axis. I can say that Progressive members of the Democratic Party will love to have a new issue to raise funds. I can make the argument that it should be supported by Republicans or Independents, though. If so, it will be opposed by Democrats and Progressives, and the money will flow through Blue Dogs to them.
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> Either way, you won't get it adopted at scale, IF you make it a Party Loyalist issue.
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> So please look that "gift horse" of Democratic Party support in the mouth when it comes.
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> Accept the support, ONLY if you can be assured it isn't accompanied by a use in polarization of the issue. In other words, if you can get support from Republicans, too.
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> Since I am neither an R or a D, I'd be happy to support it however it is supported. Personally, I don't want it to be affiliated with stances on abortion rights, or defunding the police, etc. I have views on those issues, but they aren't issues that should be conflated with openness of the Internet.
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> (Since many seem to think the world is a dichotomy between Left and Right or Democrat or Republican, let me explain. My core political view has always been that centralizing functions in government unnecessarily is the same thing as despotism, that the ends don't justify the means, but that organization of functions in society "organically" is better than any governmental approach. This view is compatible with the Internet's founding principles. I view the Democrats and the Republicans as centralizers of power, each in their own way. Which is why I will not be loyal to either. That Socialists want to create centralized power just as much as Conservatives do. But making decentralized structures work isn't just a matter of creating a distributed ledger or a free cryptocurrency, in fact those things lead to centralizing power very efficiently.)
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> On Thursday, February 18, 2021 11:23am, "Dave Taht" <dave.taht at gmail.com> said:
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> > Link below:
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> > If anyone would care to edit or comment. I really struggled with a
> > means to present an
> > "upgrade in place" in a uniformly positive manner. I had to cut out a
> > lot of cusswords.
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> > https://docs.google.com/document/d/1T21on7g1MqQZoK91epUdxLYFGdtyLRgBat0VXoC9e3I/edit?usp=sharing
> >
> > Secondly, I also decided that I didn't care so much about having to
> > submit this in the context (and noise) of the rural broadband thing,
> > so the pressure came off me to get it done by feb 20, with the
> > inevitable outcome of me not getting on it til this morning. :/
> >
> > Getting there, but it's been kind of lonely... I can do a
> > videoconference today between now and 11AM
> > if anyone would like to join in at:
> > https://tun.taht.net:8443/group/bufferbloat and will be back online
> > tonight after 6PM.
> >
> > That said, it would be good to fire this off there, and/or do an "open
> > letter", do a press release, and open up more shots at whatever
> > government orgs we can aim at.
> >
> > PS It would help my focus a lot if some folk tossed some dough into my
> > patreon. https://www.patreon.com/dtaht and longer term, if this
> > develops into something good, we can do a bake sale for a press
> > release.
> >
> > --
> > "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public
> > relations, for Mother Nature cannot be fooled" - Richard Feynman
> >
> > dave at taht.net <Dave Täht> CTO, TekLibre, LLC Tel: 1-831-435-0729
> > _______________________________________________
> > Cerowrt-devel mailing list
> > Cerowrt-devel at lists.bufferbloat.net
> > https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/cerowrt-devel
> >

-- 
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public
relations, for Mother Nature cannot be fooled" - Richard Feynman

dave at taht.net <Dave Täht> CTO, TekLibre, LLC Tel: 1-831-435-0729