Comments for Richard Bennett

Comment on Is Blogging Journalism? by Seth Finkelstein

Seth Finkelstein — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 14:57:16 +0000

Ah, but part of the issue is the meaning of “journalism” is deliberately and intentionally fogged and confused in the service of destroying the public-interest system.

I think what you’re going around is the issue that “journalism” can mean

1) Stenography of obvious facts (“The President said in a speech today …”)
2) Investigating non-obvious public facts (“Exclusive report on the xyz scandal ..”)
3) Interpretive Analysis “(“The action of the Federal Reserve will likely …”)
4) Prioritization (“Here’s what’s happening in the world today”)
5) Pontification (“The President must do the follow to win re-election …”)

The bogosphere is very much #5, pontification, especially the “drama” part. People who excel at that, want it to be what matters, because that’s their business. They’d like to destroy the quasi-public #2 and #3 parts and essentially strip-mine the territory. The TechCrunch issue is basically about making #3 and #4 directly subservient to the business interests (again, the obvious reply is it’s already pretty bad. But there’s forces which want to make it even worse).

Oh, for public funded journalism, see BBC. And note how it is absolutely hated by a certain crowd exactly because of being public funded.

Comment on Is Blogging Journalism? by Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 17:17:48 +0000

I meant to raise a different question, namely “what do we mean by the word “journalism?”

However it’s funded, there are lots of things called by the name journalism that didn’t exist only a few years ago. If there were to be a system of public financing for journalism, it would be crucial to know what does and doesn’t qualify for support, but there’s not going to be one.

Comment on Is Blogging Journalism? by Seth Finkelstein

Seth Finkelstein — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 13:12:53 +0000

Nah. The string of words “Is blogging journalism” or “Are bloggers journalists” are terms of art for an issue – roughly, “Should the current system of journalism as a quasi-public institution be destroyed and replaced with purely market-driven players?” Note – the obvious reply of “There’s already much market aspects, see “entertainer” above”, misses the point. The question is the entire destruction of any public aspect. Sort of like Paul Ryan’s plan to destroy Medicare (as we know it), or the ongoing attacks on Social Security.

Comment on Has the FCC Created a Stone Too Heavy for It to Lift? by Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 04:25:40 +0000

Net neuts argue, naively, that allowing operators to sell prioritized flows reduces their incentive to invest in raw bandwidth.

A quota system is a fair approximation of a system in which the sale of prioritized flows increases the incentive to invest in raw capacity, as the more bandwidth in the system, the more prioritized flows the operator can sell.

The NN args are full of either/or choices like this that come from network engineering ignorance.

Comment on Has the FCC Created a Stone Too Heavy for It to Lift? by Dan Grossman

Dan Grossman — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 01:05:51 +0000

Thanks for the clarification on content vs communications. Now that I understand it, your framework is useful. I was thinking about the same thing in a different way, but working under the framework articulated in the ATM Forum Traffic Management spec, amplified by the fact that we don’t live in an “end-to-end arguments” world. My more concrete argument has been that prioritization – in the context of content apps, under your framework – has an inconsequential effect on end users. The common complaint about Fox News colluding with network providers to somehow make their content more easily accessed than anybody else’s is moot: it is already accelerated by Akamai, and any incremental number of microseconds of latency reduction from priority queueing is not going to be perceptible.

On admission control, I still think you’re getting into the weeds of policy vs mechanism. I don’t think that either of us want the FCC micromanaging mechanism (noting how good a job they did on CableCard, for example). If the policy is that new “AS” or “GS”-like flows don’t get admitted if they will impact advertised minimum performance of “BE” flows, then it doesn’t matter whether mechanism to implement the policy is pre-computed quotas, or some more sophisticated algorithm. Whatever it is, the FCC doesn’t have to be in the business of engineering or adjudicating it.

Comment on Has the FCC Created a Stone Too Heavy for It to Lift? by Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 22:14:47 +0000

Thanks for the comment, Dan. The distinction between content and communications apps is meant to capture the difference between apps that can be accelerated by a CDN and those (like video conferencing) that can’t. The means of accelerating communications apps are overlay networks and QoS.

You’re right that admission control isn’t strictly a quota based system, although all the running systems I’ve seen do work that way. If the rules said “quota limit or a similar system” I think we’d get where we need to be.

The comment about the telecom background of the Freepers and PKs was meant to suggest that they’re steeped in telecom law, not technology. I don’t get a good feeling that they understand any of the technologies.

Comment on Has the FCC Created a Stone Too Heavy for It to Lift? by Dan Grossman

Dan Grossman — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 22:06:38 +0000

Richard,
Congratulations on the first article or blog post I’ve read (and I’ve been reading a lot of them) that shows actual engineering and policy clue. I’ll admit that I’m struggling a bit with this distinction between “content applications” and “communication applications” (the latter seems like an oxymoron to this old OSI bigot), but I agree with your larger point. It’s also kind of difficult to think of the Freepers or Common Knowledge crowd as being steeped in Telecom culture — that would require more technical sophistication and bias toward centralized architectures than I’ve seen evidenced in their pronouncements.

One slight disagreement, though. Admission control is more complex than a “simple quota limit”. More than one good PHD dissertation has been written on admission control algorithms for multi-service networks. A quota would be overly prescriptive. Instead, I’d have the FCC build on their transparency principle, and require broadband operators to publish worst-case performance objectives for best-effort service. The requirement for new flows with QoS guarantees would be they not be admitted if doing so would degrade packet loss and/or delay variance for best-effort service below the published objective.

But to your larger point, I strongly agree that the FCC has gotten it mostly right from a policy perspective. However, I remain slightly skeptical that this will stand up in the DC Circuit. Time will tell.

Comment on Nostalgia Blues by Brett Glass

Brett Glass — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 23:51:11 +0000

I’m sure he’d take that as a compliment.

Comment on Nostalgia Blues by Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 11:01:45 +0000

I used to work with Howeird at Starlight. Odd fellow.

Comment on Nostalgia Blues by Brett Glass

Brett Glass — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 19:05:29 +0000

When I was a boy all our networks
Were for hauling in fish from the sea–
Our bawd rate was eight bits an hour (and she was worth it!),
And our IP address was just 3.

And you kids who complain that the World Wide Web
Is too slow oughtta cut out your bitchin’,
‘Cuz when I was a boy every packet
Was delivered by carrier pigeon….

–Frank Hayes (More at the link above)