My Network World column and outside links on network neutrality
Oops! It turns out Network World ran my column on network neutrality and Tariff Rebate Passthrough on April 23, not April 30 as I previously believed. So I should have gotten my list of outside links together sooner. Sorry. Confusing matters further, my post on Jeffersonet vs. Edisonet got Slashdotted, without me having provided a link to the column itself. Well, here goes.
- Ed Whitacre, CEO of SBC/AT&T, kicked things off in late 2005, arguing that he should be allowed to discriminate between, say, Google and Yahoo based on how much they paid him. He later backed down a bit, but many people are unconvinced as to his sincerity.
- Verizon said similar things around the same time.
- Om Malik made an early attempt to cover all sides of the issue, albeit with a pro-neutrality orientation.
- Jeremy Penston had an article last week arguing that bandwidth is NOT “effectively free,” at least for video.
- Scott Cleland says my thinking is “seriously flawed” because I think there’s any need for neutrality regulation. He thinks no logical case has been made for neutrality whatsoever. Perhaps we need need to spell it out for him in smaller words. Anyhow, his one-pager that is admittedly sponsored by the telecom vendors does a good job of smashing some net neutrality strawmen nobody was talking about anyway.
- Errata Security argues that network neutrality is unworkable on the backbone, and links to my article, which was only about network neutrality on the last mile.
- Richi Jennings argues that we don’t need tiering, because the speed of light has dropped from 300 million meters/second to a mere 80 million or so. Or maybe less. Or something like that … seriously, it seems that he doubts the value of super-high QOS, because latency is an inescapable fact of life.
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Link list for network neutrality
My April 30 Network World column is scheduled to be on network neutrality, with this post linked out as a guide to further research.
Some of my own writings on the subject include:
- This post today separating the Internet into “Jeffersonet” and “Edisonet”, where Jeffersonet needs extreme net neutrality but Edisonet can and must endure tiered pricing. I’d have loved to get that point into the column, but there wasn’t room.
- This post today calling for extreme net neutrality specifically in the area of search.
- Two posts last June (with links to additional prior ones) spelling out the Tariff Rebate Passthrough idea. These cover mainly the same material as the column, but are part of group incorporating to some discussion of the idea last spring among a variety of commentators.
I’ll supply some outside links on the subject later on.
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The two Internets, Jeffersonet and Edisonet, and why they need to be regulated differently
Edit: This post was Slashdotted, along with Richi Jennings’ reply.
In a way, proponents and opponents of network neutrality are both correct! That is, they are each correct about different aspects of the Internet.
Net neutrality is both necessary and workable for what I call Jeffersonet, which comprises the “classical”, bandwidth-light parts of the Internet. Thus, it includes e-mail, instant messaging, much e-commerce, and just about every website created in the first 13 or so years of the Web. Jeffersonet is the greatest tool in human history to communicate research, teaching, news, and political ideas, or to let tiny businesses compete worldwide. Any censorship of Jeffersonet – even if just of the self-interested large-enterprise commercial kind – would be a terrible loss. Net neutrality is workable for Jeffersonet because – well, because it’s already working just fine. Jeffersonet doesn’t need anything beyond current levels of bandwidth and reliability. So there’s no reason to mess with what’s working, other than simple profit-hungry greed.
Read more
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Check Point Systems UTM-1 and Crossbeam Systems – resolving the confusion
When Check Point Systems first briefed me on their new midrange UTM-1 appliance, they neglected to mention that their hardware designs were first worked out by Crossbeam Systems. Actually, it turns out that they even buy the hardware through Crossbeam. It took a comment here from Crossbeam’s Chris Hoff for me to realize the true story. Today, I connected with Paul Kaspian of Check Point to straighten things out. Here’s the scoop. Read more
| Categories: Check Point Software, Computing appliances, Crossbeam Systems, Hardware, Platforms, Security and anti-spam | 3 Comments |
Business intelligence — technology and vendor strategy
The most recent Monash Letter – exclusively for Monash Advantage members — spells out some ideas on BI technology and vendor strategy. Specifically, it argues that there are at least four major ways to think about BI and other decision support technologies, namely as:
- A specialized application development technology. That’s what BI is, after all. Selling app dev runtimes isn’t a bad business. Selling analytic apps hasn’t gone so well, however.
- An infrastructure upgrade. That’s what the BI vendors have been pushing for some years, as they try to win enterprise vendor-consolidation decisions. To a first approximation, it’s been a good move for them, but it also has helped defocus them from other things they need to be doing.
- A transparent window on information. As Google, Bloomberg, and Lexis/Westlaw all demonstrate, users want access to “all” the possible information. BI vendors and management theorists alike have erred hugely in crippling enterprise dashboards via dogmas such as “balanced scorecards” and “seven plus-or-minus two.”
- A communication and collaboration tool. Communication/collaboration is as big a benefit of reporting as the numbers themselves are. I learned this in the 1980s, and it’s never changed. But BI vendors have whiffed repeatedly at enhancing this benefit.
The Letter then goes on to suggest two areas of technical need and opportunity in BI, which may be summarized as:
- “Play very nicely with portals.”
- “Do a much better job of managing personal metrics customization.”
Good launching points for my other research on these subjects are this recent post on analytic technology marketing strategies and two high-concept white papers available here.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Usability and UI | 4 Comments |