IEEE Computer and Communications Societies and GBC/ACM
7:00 PM, Thursday, 16 October 2014 MIT Room E51-315Beyond Neutrality - enabling a world of connected things Bob Frankston
Network Neutrality and related policy issues are framed by the assumption that intelligence is inside a network and (tele)communications is a service. Today that intelligence is now in our devices which can communicate by exchanging packets using any means available. This shift in intelligence has also moved value creation outside of networks.
In this talk I'll trace the history of this fundamental transformation and the technical and policy implications and what it means to "communicate". This shift has opened up new opportunities for how to cooperate in creating a 21st century infrastructure. By paying for the infrastructure as a common facility we will not be limited to messages that profit intermediaries be they telecom providers or chip makers.
Mr. Frankston's statement that the net-neutrality debate starts out by assuming that the issues "are framed by the assumption that intelligence is inside a network and (tele)communications is a service" doesn't make sense to me.
Nobody I've heard speak on net-neutrality has advocated this view of the Internet: the assumption is that the network has very little intelligence, and that the "service" the Internet provides /is/ moving packets from A to B without imposing any judgements as to the worth of one bit vs. another.
The intelligence, be it a blog, a company catalog, a list of phone numbers, or a web site such as the Telecom Digest online page, is at the network customers' nodes: that's the reason for the net-netrality debate. The /service/ of moving bits from A to B doesn't not add any intelligence to them, nor does it justify the actions of the tele- communications dinosaus we once thought extinct, when they start demanding a tithe from those whom have created the content that exists both outside their world, and beyond their world-view.
Bill Horne Moderator