16th
Net neutrality: un (autorevole) punto di vista tecnico
clipped from www.circleid.com
Good morning and welcome. My name is Richard Bennett and I’m a network engineer. I’ve built networking products for 30 years and contributed to a dozen networking standards, including Ethernet and Wi-Fi. I was one of the witnesses at the FCC hearing at Harvard, and I wrote one of the dueling Op-Ed’s on net neutrality that ran in the Mercury News the day of the Stanford hearing.
I’m opposed to net neutrality regulations because they foreclose some engineering options that we’re going to need for the Internet to become the one true general-purpose network that links all of us to each other, connects all our devices to all our information, and makes the world a better place. Let me explain.
The neutrality framework doesn’t mesh with technical reality: The Internet is too neutral in some places, and not neutral enough in others.
The IP suite is good for transferring short files, and for doing things that are similar to short file transfers. It’s less good for handling phone calls, video-conferencing, and moving really large files. And it’s especially bad at doing a lot of different kinds of things at the same time.
This problem is not going to be solved simply by adding bandwidth to the network, any more than the problem of slow web page loading was solved that way in the late 90’s or the Internet meltdown problem disappeared spontaneously in the 80’s. What we need to do is engineer a better interface between P2P and the Internet, such that each can share information with the other to find the best way to copy desired content.
[…] some people believe that the Internet’s core protocols have reached such a refined level of perfection that we don’t need to improve them any more.
I know that’s not true. The Internet has some real problems today, such as address exhaustion, the transition to IPv6, support for mobile devices and popular video content, and the financing of capacity increases. Network neutrality isn’t one of them.



