This note represents my personal comments as a citizen and Internet expert regarding today’s decision by the FCC in the matter of Comcast’s use of Deep Packet Inspection and RST packet injection to interfere with certain customer traffic.

I was one of the witnesses who testified at the FCC en banc hearing on the subject of reasonable network management practices at Harvard Law School in February. Portions of my testimony and written statement are cited in the order, so there is no need to repeat them here.

However, I would like to commend the order and the process that led to it. Lawyers and policy experts will have their own point of view, but as an engineer and architect, I’d like to commend the Commissions decision on technical and architectural grounds.

As an engineer and scientist, I was impressed by the Commission’s process in this matter, particularly its interest in coming to an understanding the particular technological structure of the Internet design. The FCC clearly invested a great deal of effort to the end of understanding the complex technology of the Internet. As a former member of the FCC Technological Advisory Council, I have seen the need for accurate and state-of-the-art technical input to the Commission that is not colored by the interests of the regulated parties. In this decision, the Commission should be commended for its efforts to seek inputs from the Internet technical community.

The decision rendered by the FCC today shows that the agency understands the importance of the technological principles of the Internet’s design. The core ideas of that design were shaped by a desire to create a system that could both scale to the size it has reached today and evolve through massive changes in infrastructure technology and applications. The decision and order reinforce those core ideas -- they do not mandate that ISPs support particular applications or implement speciric solutions, but instead reinforce the concept that companies that claim to offer the Internet must conform to the Internet’s framework.

The Internet is a world-wide system that does not belong to any one operator, whether providing access lines or backbone transport. This is the essence of internetworking. The Internet is not just “another network” owned and operated by a private concern for a set of customers. The Commission order clearly comprehends that special quality that transcends the interests of Comcast or any other access provider.

The strongest part of the order, for me personally, is that it navigates the tough path between heavy-handed regulation and disciplining misbehavior. To me, this is the challenge that separates government by “sound bite” and the difficult work of making our country work. The key technical and architectural issues are twofold:

•The design of the Internet Protocols specifies clear limits on what operators can and cannot do to Internet Protocol datagrams when those operators are acting as part of the Internet.

•Not obeying those limits poses a serious risk to the continued success of the world-wide Internet. Happily, the FCC recognized and exposed Comcast’s transgressions of those limits.

These are not in themselves legal issues. Nor are they guaranteed by “the market” because the short-term behavior of certain actors with market power can break the “technical covenant” that keeps the Internet running. For the most part, so-called “network externalities” make misbehavior by any one participant in the Internet self-defeating -- cutting the misbehaving participant’s customers off from many of the benefits provided by others. However, certain participants in the Internet are in a position to control or to deceive customers using their market power and government-granted exclusivity. Access providers are one such category.

The Commission made a wise decision today, taking a decision that sends a notice to Internet service providers that the Commission is watching, that it understands that the Internet involves a new set of technical challenges, and that the Commission is willing to act in a way that reinforces the success of the Internet as a whole.

[Note: in addition to filing this comment formally with the Commission, I am also posting it on my personal blog -- happy that blogs and the blogosphere are one of the many applications that would never have happened, had Internet access providers in the past two decades attempted to control what services and applications their customers could use in the name of “network management”]

said by markofmayhem :

As comcast is my only broadband option for internet, the future cap and throttle announcement saddens me greatly.

The Commission also reiterated that its interest is in protecting consumers’ access to lawful content. Blocking unlawful content such as child pornography or pirated music or video would be consistent with federal Internet policy.

We also note that because “consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice,”providers, consistent with federal policy, may block transmissions of illegal content (e.g., child pornography) or transmissions that violate copyright law.