Sunday, May 7, 2006

Tim Berners-Lee : Anyone can build a...: Tim Berners-Lee: 'Anyone can build a new application on the Web, without asking me, or Vint Cerf, or their ISP, or their cable company, or their operating system provider, or their government, or their hardware vendor.' (Via Scripting News.) As clear a statement of what net neutrality means as I've read. 8:00:38 PM

radio open source on net neutrality: Radio Open Source is on my iPod just in case something interesting comes up - the hosts manages to lure interesting guests and the topics are often fascinating. Unfortunately they tend to fall apart when science and technology is discussed (the host is weak in those areas)... Net Neutrality is the topic of the current podcast, so I decided to listen. Sadly the guests picked were combative and control of the discussion quickly evaporated. (Via tingilinde.) Chris Lydon seemed totally unprepared for this show. The questions he asked were superficial. He did not ask the guests to keep clear the distinction between backbone and local access. The FedEx analogy was terrible. FedEx takes the package door to door. What the local incumbents are threatening to do is to discriminate by packet origin, even though they carry packets only over the last mile. He did not dig down into the quality-of-service pretext, which is totally bogus when packets cross multiple, independent domains of authority from source to destination. Unless, of course, local access discrimination also kills independent backbone operators, as it might well do. 9:04:34 AM