David Weinberger is liveblogging the event.
Kevin Parker is liveblogging the event.
Wendy Seltzer is liveblogging the event.
Drew Clark is liveblogging the event.
Join the live IRC Chat in the room.
Post a question for discussion here.
Listen to the live webcast here.
FCCBoston08 Del.icio.us Tag Stream
Statement from Adelstein (PDF)
(These notes are by no means complete and comprehensive – and represent a summary, not a transcript, of the event)
4:00: Kevin Parker writes:
“Back to questions…
C. Martin: Should we investigate usage caps over time? P. Clark: Yes, you need to be careful, but we should recognize that there are costs associated with usage. This allows ISPs to have a postive engagement with customers instead of a negative one. This is simillar to the way things work in wireless.
P. Clark: The models don’t work very well. How do we quantify what is acceptable congestion? This is hard and Comcast has tried to say that it is what doesn’t interfere with others. How do we impose fairness among users? Nobody can send bits faster than anyone else at the same time (this is the historical approach). There has to be some way to deal with congestion.”
3:50: Playback of submitted selected video comments from the public
3:30: Via David Weinberger:
“Daniel Weitzner of MIT says the entire Web is peer-to-peer, although not technically. People use the Net in a synchronous, P2P manner. E.g., pages are pulled together from info all over. We depend on the open nature of the Web to enable that.
Richard Bennett (network architect): Does free speech require abandoning the active mgt of net traffic? If so, then we have to shut down the Internet. Is it legit to manage the Net by discriminating by application? The Net and its constituent nets serve different apps. E.g., VOIP needs to avoid jitter. It makes sense to move apps that don’t care about jitter (e.g., email) to the back of the queue. BitTorrent is insensitive to jitter; you care about the time between first and last packet, but not jitter of individual packets….except for apps like Vuze, but RB doubts Vuze’s business viability. If we abandon app discriminatory we have to get rid of IP because it includes info about the app in the packets. Get rid of Wifi because QoS discriminates among apps. Get rid of difference between UDP and TCP. We have to get rid of discrimination within their own homes. Even on Ethernet we have to discriminate among apps, e.g., WoS for audio systems to avoid lipsynching issues If you add capacity to a network, you’ve only moved the bottleneck from the first hop to the second hop. NN would inhibit rural delivery since it depends on wifi. So, sit back. We’ll solve it with more bandwidth and with revisions of the apps that use it, like BitTorrent.
David Clark says that TV is central here because it increases the traffic and it’s a collision of pricing models. We should be partnering, not fighting. Let’s talk about business model. The usage cost to Comcast for a month of user usage might be around $0.50. TV usage is 40 times as much (taking reasonable estimates), i.e., $20/month to cover your user costs. What’s going to give is the all you can eat flat rate pricing. We have to find a way that will be acceptable to the user. David likes selling tiers of consumption.”