Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
The FCC’s next CTO is a net neutrality expert (washingtonpost.com)
67 points by Libertatea on Aug 31, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments



His publications on net neutrality: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~sjordan/research/net%20neutrality.ht.... I'm not sure what it means to be a "net neutrality expert." As far as I can tell, it's mostly an ideological viewpoint. Jordan uses the phrase "philosophy of Internet architecture." I'd argue that the internet is just a set of technologies and doesn't come bundled with any particular philosophical viewpoint.


There are some influential developers of such technology that would disagree with you on that. Tim Berners-Lee for example has stated that:

"The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect — to help people work together — and not as a technical toy. The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world. We clump into families, associations, and companies. We develop trust across the miles and distrust around the corner." [1]

Certainly in the United States it could be useful to have a "philosophy of Internet architecture", mostly because of the market failure in ISPs for the last decade or so.

1. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee#Quotes


The design of any technology is ultimately informed by an implicit philosophy.

In this case, "End-to-end arguments in system design" [SRC84] disagrees with you.

In fact, I'd say the whole "net neutrality" issue comes about from last-mile ISPs fighting the simple-network philosophy, as content-aware "services" have much higher margins. Without competition there is no pressure to keep their costs down, so instead they spend more to build a complex network for the goal of decommoditizing their offerings.


If anyone can suggest a more accurate title, we'll change it.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: