Michel Biezunski ‘Owner, Infoloom Brooklyn NY (718) 921-0901 mbiinfoloom.com hutp://www.infoloom.com November 20, 2009 About Net Neutrality During my first visit to New York, as a teenager coming from Paris, France in the late 1960s, what impressed me the most was... that there was only one class in the subway! I got from that first contact the idea that the American society was more egalitarian, that everyone was offered the same level of opportunity. I always fel that the strength of this country is its openness and the fact that for some time it has been able to establish fair rules for conducting business. I would like this to continue and to be reinforced. Internet has been extraordinarily successful because the cost of entry is low. Everybody can become a publisher, a news originator, play music, create a community, etc. These opportunities have caused major disruptions for existing businesses, like the music or the newspaper industries for example, which still have not yet figured out how to survive in such a modified environment. However, nobody is seriously proposing to go back and shut down the Internet! This is a situation for American ingenuity to figure out a Way to prosper. The telecoms should not receive special protection from disruptive changes that benefit society as a whole, nor should they be allowed to inhibit such disruptive change from occurring. Enabling the Future to happen: who owns the clouds? ‘A new paradigm is called “Cloud Computing”: this strange metaphor is intended to evoke large numbers of computers cooperating together to do very complex tasks very rapidly. For example, Google and Amazon rely on cloud computing, But they own their clouds. We can imagine a future where clouds emerge as voluntary associations among Internet users, with disruptive applications and benefits for society as a whole that we can scarcely imagine today. Everybody would be able share resources, including their Internet telecom resources. For example, consider how the peer-to-peer BitTorrent protocol works. BitTorrent allows many computers to voluntarily participate in the distribution of data to other computers There is no centralized control over the distribution process. It’s a way of using the Web to allow data to be distributed, via resources that the telecom companies would like to restrict in such a way that ordinary Internet users would be unable to join forces in this way.‘The telecommunication companies want to be in control of the fluxes in order to charg depending on the speed connection. They want to be able to slow down traffic emanating from individuals and businesses that don't have business relationships with them. And then to charge more for higher speeds and specialized communication protocols (such as BitTorrent). We don't want to empower them to be in a position to decide who wins who loses and how much you have to pay to be a winner. BitTorrent would die if there would be no network neutrality. ARPAnet and TCP/IP were developed as a telecommunication network without any ingle point of failure, in which there information would be automatically rerouted along whatever pathways remain after a nuclear attack. The Internet results from this project, and this is another reason of its success and pervasiveness. Today we need to guarantee that the networks remain reliable, even after it has been so widely expanded, with ways to flow information between people and organizations. The control that telecommunications ‘want may eventually weaken the network, that will depend on the success or failure of the company that runs it. Here, without net neutrality, we are potentially creating another another instance of a company “too big to fail”, because so many others would depend on them. Liberty demands that the people be allowed to form voluntary associations, in which they share information in any way that they please. Society needs plentitude, telecoms need scarcity. Once upon a time, there was too much bandwidth, briefly, when Sprint's and MCI's new fiber optic networks came online During that period, prices fell, and the telecom business model was under heavy pressure. They found ways to create artificial scarcity, to support their old model to be toll takers The broadband providers are telling us that the costs are daunting and in order for them to maintain a profitable business, they have invented this notion of premium services. But the problem is that the value of their business is marginal compared to the revenue that could be generated by letting everybody thrive on an egalitarian Internet. So is it worth to sacrifice the ability to innovate just to allow a few gatekeepers to increase their profit? personally don't think so. ‘Telecoms don’t want to provide a utility. I think that's exactly what they should do. ‘Therefore I support the net neutrality proposed resolution.