The Senate hearings on network neutrality were going on this week. I'm hoping like hell that Congress understands the ramifications of mucking with the network, but testimony like the following [pdf] (from Vint Cerf, now at Google, like everyone else) may not be particularly persuasive to most Senators:
Network neutrality need not prevent anyone – carriers or applications provider – from
developing software solutions to remedy end user concerns such as privacy, security, and
quality of service. The issue arises where the network operator decides to place the
functionality in the physical or logical layers of the network, rather than in the application
layer where they belong. Such a move is contrary to many of the fundamental architectural
principles of the Internet. In particular, attempting to solve applications issues at the physical
layer violates the layered, modular nature of the Net. With a few very narrowly-tailored
exceptions – such as defending against network-level denial of service attacks or router
attacks – altering or blocking packets within the network is inconsistent with the end-to-end
design principle. The end result is the insertion of a gatekeeper that – even arguably under
the best of intentions – disrupts the open, decentralized platform of the Internet.
It's amusing to picture the Senate getting down with the 7-layer model. I would love to flip on CSPAN-2 and catch a Senator saying, "Mr. Whitacre, I really don't understand why AT&T insists on making this a layer 3 issue, when this is clearly a layer 7 issue!"
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