Net Neutrality means more government controls, what we need is Silicon TCP
New Technology removes much of the argument from ISPs that they need to be able to throttle content in order to provide the highest value to their big corporate clients. by Michael McDonnough
(libertarian)
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Net Neutrality is in my view mostly about legislating the ISPs, and big corporate content providers to keep them from teeming up and implementing something like this,
"Selective Packet Drop - (aka priority, RED, class of service based diffserv) various techniques triage the packet drop problem by selectively dropping packets or by altering the drop profile randomly so as to minimize the cascade failure of multiple congestion recovery events. Selection criteria may include policy-based, class of service based, or capacity threshold. Some even include anticipating the congestion with avoidance algorithms of the protocols so as to apportion damage to traffic without real-time significance (text, images, e-mail) in favor of real-time video/audio streams where quality loss is immediately apparent. These schemes seek to minimize the collateral damage of the drops, but the problem is not in eliminating drops entirely it is that the effect of these techniques is localized and subject to the kind of traffic present at any given time - as the use of the network changes, the mechanism requires external management and configuration to adapt the technique to obtain the benefit. Our mechanism is independent of these quality enhancements, as it does not judge the content or traffic being transmitted, nor does it impose additional queuing beyond that required to generate duplicate packets downstream of the recovery path entry endpoint."
This legislation proposed in the USA is nothing more than a fear based reaction to an implied threat to internet democracy based on content controls proposed by the ISPs mainly to prevent degraded service that this type of bandwidth management system is designed to address.
The bottleneck at the edges of the internet where the ISPs are located provide a potential vector to greater regulate content in order to serve the best paying content providers interest it seems.
I am with Ron Paul and Robert Kahn in my view when it comes to Net Neutrality legislation in the USA. I think that it opens the door to the government being put in a position where they can make the decision as to what content gets throttled down to avoid bottlenecks while serving the large content providers and associated corporate clients.
This Silicon TCP technology provides a hardware solution to relieve this bottleneck point on the edges of the internet by handling the data packet transfer in a remarkably effective manner while reducing TCP/IP's CPU load on the servers by as much as 95%. The system is best described by the inventors on their site FAQ so I will not try and improve on their work here but from my reading of the subject they have invented what I think is a technology solution to the bottlenecks at the last mile of the internet which should if widely adopted end much of the cause for the debate in the US about Net Neutrality by removing the fear from the ISPs that they are losing big money by not making certain their best paying corporate clients are getting the bandwidth they feel they need to serve up their multimedia content to subscribers. At the same time of course we all get to begin seeing our internet delivered to us at light speed. If this technology is widely adopted we will see I am sure a 100 fold increase in speed of content delivery on the internet within the next decade.
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