Craig McTaggart
Craig McTaggart (of TELUS) paper is Was the Internet Ever Neutral? Here's a rough paraphrase of his presentation. All mistakes mine.
He asserts that the internet of today has many forms of discrimination and preferential arrangements — caching, peering, filtering, and traffic management. Points to Christian Sandvig saying that Lessig view is a myth.
Since the time that the public has been able to access the internet, it's been evolving in response to consumer demands, and we shouldn't stop now. Internet's user population has changed dramatically since Arpanet etc. days. It wasn't designed to support realtime bandwidth intensive applications. In McTaggart's view (points to Ohm paper re myth of superuser), a lot of literature assumes that internet users are sophisticated, run their own routers. But that's not true. But those superusers have far too much importance in the policy discussion. That's a problem for the mass market view.
Commercial ISPs have always served customer needs. Meeting those needs may require changes to the internet's architecture.
Third: a neutral internet won't best serve consumer interests. Mainstream users today have interests that are more important than historical architectural issues. NN authors don't know better than users, and they keep patronizing users, who can act for themselves. Consumers won't accept changes to the way their internet works. But they'll love differentiated offerings. So a non-neutral internet may better satisfy user demand. But we don't really know yet.
So — while law professors are extolling virtues of the original architecture, tech community is long past this, and knows that architecture needs to change significantly. End to end is a sacred cow. Points to newarch, funded by DARPA, including Dave Clarke. See “developing a next generation internet architecture” and GENI. They want to create new core functionality, etc.
He says that NN proponents have an “end of history” way about them.
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