[NNagain] Some backstory on the nn-again mailing list

[Dave Taht]

I am pleased to see over 100 people have signed up for this list
already. I am not really planning on "activating" this list until
tuesday or so, after a few more people I have reached out to sign up
(or not).

I would like y´all to seek out people with differing opinions and
background, in the hope that one day, we can shed more light than heat
about the science and technologies that "govern" the internet, to
those that wish to regulate it. In the short term, I would like enough
of us to agree on an open letter, or NPRM filing,and to put out a
press release(s), in the hope that this time, the nn and title ii
discussion is more about real, than imagined, internet issues. [1]

I am basically planning to move the enormous discussion from over
here, titled "network neutrality back in the news":

https://lists.bufferbloat.net/pipermail/starlink/2023-September/thread.html

to here. I expect that we are going to be doing this discussion for a
long time, and many more issues besides my short term ones will be
discussed. I hope that we can cleanly isolate technical issues from
political ones, in particular, and remain civil, and factual, and
avoid hyperbole.

Since the FCC announcement of a proposed NPRM as of Oct 19th... my own
initial impetus was to establish why the NN debate first started in
2005, and the conflict between the legal idea of "common carriage" vs
what the internet was actually capable of in mixing voip and
bittorrent, in
"The Bufferbloat vs Bittorrent vs Voip" phase. Jim Gettys, myself, and
Jason Livinggood have weighed in on their stories on linkedin,
twitter, and elsewhere.

There was a second phase, somewhat triggered by netflix, that Jonathan
Morton summarized in that thread, ending in the first establishment of
some title ii rules in 2015.

The third phase was when title ii was rescinded... and all that has
happened since.

I, for one, am fiercely proud about how our tech community rose to
meet the challenge of covid, and how, for example, videoconferencing
mostly just worked for so many, after a postage stamp sized start in
2012[2]. The oh-too-faint-praise for that magnificent effort from
higher levels rankles me greatly, but I will try to get it under
control.

And this fourth phase, opening in a few weeks, is more, I think about
privacy and power than all the other phases, and harmonization with EU
legislation, perhaps. What is on the table for the industry and
internet is presently unknown.

So here we "NN-again". Lay your issues out!



[1] I have only had one fight with the FCC. Won it handily:
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2993112/vint-cerf-and-260-experts-give-fcc-a-plan-to-secure-wi-fi-routers.html
In this case this is not so much a fight, I hope, but a collaborative
effort towards a better, faster, lower latency, and more secure,
internet for everyone.

[2] https://archive.org/details/video1_20191129
-- 
Oct 30: https://netdevconf.info/0x17/news/the-maestro-and-the-music-bof.html
Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos