Ethernet inventor welcomed into Hall of Fame
Published: 08 May 2007 17:54 BST
…I have not bumped into. But I have a hunch that Vint and his intelligentsia may just be alarmist. But that is just a hunch. I haven't really looked at the details, and I wouldn't put it past the Bell system, now refurbished, to be up to no good in Washington, because that is what they are good at.
But you are someone who really understands how the internet operates. Would it be fair for one of the phone companies to give priority or charge companies a fee for priority on their network?
Now you have opened a different topic, which is what is wrong with the internet. It's not necessarily about net neutrality.
Should the internet be free to all people at all times equally, network neutral?
Bob Metcalfe
Well, what is wrong with the internet, in your opinion?
The network that we have built — that Vint built — is broken. It lacks three things: it lacks security, it lacks economics and it lacks dedicated bandwidth. It's the last point that you've touched on.
Priority isn't good enough. This best-efforts stuff — have you heard that term? It was coined in my PhD dissertation in 1973, I might add. So I am an expert on best efforts. The internet was originally designed to carry teletype packets across the US in half a second. But now it's carrying full-length feature films. That is a different thing. So the internet, in addition to its other two bugs, needs quality-of-service improvements. In particular, it needs to depart from the best-efforts model at its core and allow for the reservation of the bandwidth and not merely priority.
The intelligentsia would argue: "Let's just keep what we've been doing for 30 years. We'll just throw bandwidth at it." An excess of bandwidth means you can get away with best efforts, because best efforts will suffice.
But I disagree. I think that we need to have bandwidth reservation and not merely priority. So then go back to network neutrality. You could have these evil Bell people, not to mention the MSOs [cable industry], not to mention the ISPs, who are just as evil as — well I don't want to go too far. Anyway, if they can allocate dedicated bandwidth to their particular properties, that would be a major attack on so-called network neutrality.
Once again, I'm not an expert, but my hunch is that isn't really a big problem. In fact, it could be that what we are doing is fixing the economics problem of the internet. The internet was developed by grad students who didn't know from money. Still, economics has for some time been invading the internet. Advertising is the big one now. But eventually we're going to have to pay for things like in a real economy. And what happens in order to have a real economy is that people have to own things and pay for them and buy and sell them.
So network neutrality may be an issue all tangled up in the fixing of the economics of the internet. And that is an ideological question. Should the internet be free to all people at all times equally, network neutral? Or should it be a place where value is exchanged and investments are made and profits are earned? I'm a big fan of the latter model.
How do we monetise the internet? You don't think advertising is enough?
No it isn't. You also want to have access to content that can't be advertising-supported or government-supported. Content that is not supported by foolish venture capitalists.
At the moment advertising does seem to work pretty well. It's what is paying my salary.
Yes, but there is a lot of content which is not supportable by advertising. CNET works because there are enough people in the world who buy enough computer equipment that you can influence their purchase decision. And, therefore, you can get people to advertise there. But there are a lot of things…
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