Networks are Difficult, Business Models Stressed, Net Neutrality Makes it Worse

Comcast’s David L. Cohen noted at his Brookings Institution Center for Technology Innovation speech that "the courts … the FCC … and the Congress [are] all valuable institutions filled with capable, conscientious people … but few of them [have] the background to work out consensus on what are essentially complicated technical issues.”

Cohen noted broadband policy is dominated by lawyers and lobbyists, not engineers who know how things really work: “No offense to anyone here,” he said. “I’m a lawyer and have done my share of politics. But that kind of experience doesn’t make me, or anybody else like me, an authority on the Internet."

That is not a call for decision making by technocrats or engineers; simply an acknowledgement that network management is unavoidable when running a network that must take a statistical approach to usage. And all public networks are oversubscribed, intentionally.

That always means there is potential for some actual blocking of access or degradation of service, because no company can afford to build a large network that is engineered to support every conceivable level of demand.

Net Neutrality Is a Bad Marriage of Government, Internet - by Bruce Edward Walker