Worldviews
With everyone talking about network neutrality, with all the heat, it didn't feel good to have to be in NY today and miss the goings-on in Washington. I watched part of the late afternoon markup session online, with Rep. Barton sounding awfully effective as he marched steadily through Title III — quickly taking votes, soothing congresspeople who were suggesting soon-to-be-rejected amendments, and sounding confident. The only substantive work I heard was the rejection of an amendment that would have left in place all state laws that regulate the subjects of the bill — like muni wireless networks.
But the real news had already happened by the time I started to watch: the House network neutrality amendment had been defeated largely along party lines. Now it's on to the Senate, where arguments about the future of the internet may be more effective.
There are some compensating things about being in NY today. It's the city Jane Jacobs had in mind when she wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities (a book that is comfortably applicable to online life). Jane Jacobs died yesterday, and it's good to walk down the streets she wrote about. She would have understood the arguments that will be made in the Senate.
From a 2001 interview with Jane Jacobs:
JJ: Well what was getting immediately under my skin was this mad spree of deceptions and vandalism and waste that was called urban renewal. And the way it had been adopted like a fad and people were so mindless about it and so dishonest about what was being done. That’s what ticked me off, because I was working for an architectural magazine and I saw all this first hand and I saw how the most awful things were being excused.
. . . . I’ll tell you something that had been worrying me: I liked to visit museums that showed old time machines and tools and so forth. And I was very struck. There was one of these museums in Fredricksburg, Virginia, which was my father’s hometown. He was from a farm near Fredricksburg. I was very struck with the way these old machines were painted. They were painted in a way to show you how they worked. Evidently the makers of them and the users of them cared about how these things were put together and how what moved what so that other people would be interested in them. I used to like to go to the railroad station in Scranton and watch the locomotives. I got a big bang out of seeing the locomotives and those pistons that moved the wheels. And that interested me how they were moved by those things and then the connection of that with the steam inside and so on. In the meantime, along had come these locomotives that had skirts on them and you couldn’t see how the wheels moved and that disturbed me. And it was supposed to be for some aerodynamics reason, but that didn’t make sense. And I began to notice how everything was being covered up and I thought that was kinda sick.
. . . Everybody’s got a worldview whether they know they have it or they don’t. They might even get it when they are little tiny kids. Suppose they get it when they are in college which is often the case, or in high school, whatever. Everything they learn after that or every thing they see after that, they fit it into that worldview. And they are making coherence of what’s good, what’s bad, what will work, what won’t work, what’s noble, what’s ignoble, and so on…all through this filter.
There are two ways you encounter things in the world that are different. One is everything that comes in reinforces what you already believe and everything that you know. The other thing is that you stay flexible enough or curious enough and maybe unsure of yourself enough, or may be you are more sure of yourself—I don’t know which it is—that the new things that come in keep reforming your world view. . . . And a lot of these people [who build private Garden Cities] —what I am getting at—they learn something and they are so sure of it and it’s a terrible threat to them—an emotional threat. I don’t think it’s so much of an intellectual threat even. But an emotional threat that their whole worldview will have to go through that upsetting thing of being confused. . . .
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If our view of the world is composed of the beliefs we hold to be true, then it would seem there are abundant volumes of work to advise us on what and how to add new beliefs, volumes of work which exist in such quantities as to at times overwelm. But is more better, or is less more? Look at the smile of an infant, and the practiced smile of a politician. One warms the soul in a way that teases out an near-sacred optimism about all that is, while the other arguably does just the opposite. What does the infant have the polititian doesn't? Perhaps the better question is what does the infant not have. With so much advice on what to believe, where can we find advice on how to let go of the beliefs that frame our view of the world?
As for net neutrality, its all fine and well, but what happens when your VOIP 911 call gets dropped because your neighbor just started watching the latest 'West Wing' on their computer? Drop a few beliefs about who are the good guys and bad, what people deserve and what they don't, and what the internet is and what it isn't, and what it can do and what it can't. Maybe what we need are rules about what traffic really *does* need to be prioritized.
Or maybe what we need first are people who intuitively understand that fiber cuts, equipment failures, router misconfigurations and other faults occur on a statistically significant basis. Then we can begin to rationally discuss assurances of reliability and capacity for “critical” services, and the engineering methods to achieve acceptable risk levels.
…Without just assuming that traffic prioritization schemes must necessarily be the economically efficient approach.
Perhaps more bothersome is that the entire debate seems to suffer from a lack of information about the how prioritization will practically affect traffic. I think the place where prioritization will make the most difference is at the local ISP, as opposed to backbone providers. The local ISP can simply choose to ignore priority tagging, and even if priority get set one way on backbone links, if the local ISP doesn't want to honor those prioritizations, the benefits of prioritization I think will be significantly reduced. Yes, the prioritized traffic will make it through the backbones with better throughput, but it can still be bogged down at the local ISP if they choose to ignore priority.
If voice service over wireline facilities to a local E911 call center is a critical service, then why do we really care about prioritization or capacity reservation anywhere besides the path(s) between the subscriber's fixed endpoint and the local emergency dispatch office?