Dan Weinreb’s blog

Why This Is Interesting

On Thursday, I wrote about the alleged Google/Verizon deal, which was being said to be against the concept of net neutrality. This was remarkable, both because it was so far from that one would expect, and because it was published in many major media despite total denials from both companies.

This kind of journalistic train wreck doesn’t happen every day! Usually I’m annoyed when the reporting of the news is bigger news than the news itself. But in this case, I think it sheds a fascinating light on how technology reporting works.

Technology affects ordinary people profoundly these days. But major news outlets are under extreme time pressure to get stories out, and also don’t always have the technical expertise to fully understand the implications of a story in such a short time. The combination of these factors can lead to a lot of confusion.

(You can skip to the last section if you want to get to the exciting punchline.)

Even More Coverage

Many, many web sites picked up the Google/Verizon story.

eWeek first ran a story, by Clint Boulton, similar to the ones I referred to. It also said was that the FCC had been having talks with Google, Verizon, Skype, and AT&T, which they cut off on 8/6, citing too much disagreement.

In The Huffington Post, on Thursday morning, Josh Silver wrote a story entitled Google-Verizon Deal: The End of The Internet as We Know It. He completely believes that net neutrality is now dead. He does not even mention the denials from both companies. Maybe they hadn’t come out at the time he wrote this, but if so, that shows a serious weakness in our “24-hour news cycle”! This, in turn, was picked up in other blogs.

Later that afternoon, Huffington published a story Bianca Bosker published Alleged Verizon-Google Deal: Who’s Saying What, which leads with the denials from Google and Verizon, then the stories from the big newspapers.

Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, D-Menlo Park, who sits on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, spoke as if she took the story as true. She’s entirely right about net neutrality, other than the specific recent news story. I can sympathize with her and her staffers for feeling that if a story has been ruin The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, then it’s not necessary to do costly and difficult research to make sure it’s true. The resources of a congressperson are not infinite, and you have to draw the line somewhere before you decide that something is worth believing. I hope that her constituents will be sympathetic about this; her heart is obviously in the right place.

The Cringely Theory: A Content Distribution Network

Then the New York Times called out a famous tech journalist, Robert X. Cringely. Actually there is no such person; it’s just one of the people who writes under that pen name, maybe Mark Stephens and maybe not.

The op-ed piece by Cringely hypothesizes (entirely as a guess, as far as I can see) that Google would set up mirror servers around the world at Verizon backbone routers. Strangely, he doesn’t mention that this concept has been around for years. It’s called a Content Distribution Network. The most famous is Akamai (generally considered the premium service) but there are many others. Does this Cringely actually think he just invented the idea? And why does he think that’s what Google and Verizon are doing? This guess sounds entirely inconsistent with what we know.

The Cringely story got slashdotted in the late morning of Sunday Aug 8 (twelve hours before I now, as I write). Most accept the CDN theory.

One commenter points out that CDN’s are like network non-neutrality in that he who pays more gets better bandwidth and latency, and this has been true for years. Whenever one hears something simple and think, “Why didn’t I think of that?”, one must pay attention!

But then there’s a thoughtful reply, by Stephen Friederichs, which is worth reading in full:

This is different in that Google actually paid for something physical and not just a “It’d be a shame if your nice Internet caught on fire” protection scheme. What I feared about a lack of net neutrality wasn’t Google getting faster because they paid, but everyone else getting slower. These large communication companies have a history of trying to sell the same infrastructure as many times as they can. This is different in that new infrastructure was created instead of old infrastructure unfairly and arbitrarily reapportioned.

The Wayne Rash Theory: Technical Improvements

Today eWeek published a long story. by Wayne Rash. He says Google and Verizon are simply trying to work out how to give everybody good service on audio and video, in light of the latency issues on the Internet.

Indeed, although audio and video are rather jittery, I’ve been amazed that they even work as well as they do, since the Internet was not at all designed for such services. Go back and read the debates about how “packet switching” (what the Internet does) is inferior to “circuit switching” (what the phone system does). It’s a lot more complicated than that in real life.

Rash goes on to say that the New York Times was “swayed” by the advocacy group called Public Knowledge, who he says are very hard-line about net neutrality. He says: “In other words, we’ve gone through two days of kerfuffle based on sloppy reporting, lazy journalism and technology coverage from a publication that doesn’t understand technology.”

The comments on the article are thoughtful and interesting, too.

I find Wayne Rash’s theory to be, by far, the most plausible explanation, in light of
what we know now. If this story be true, it means:

• The change helps to set proper priorities and handling for network traffic of certain kinds, not from different providers.
• Network neutrality is helped, rather than hindered, since some of the network neutrality arguments get confused and veer off into this separate issue.
• Google isn’t evil, after all.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 8th, 2010 at 11:53 pm and is filed under Corporations, Google, Internet, Journalism, Law, Net Neutrality, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.