Richard Bennett offers his assessment of Net Neutrality advocates as members of a cargo cult led by those charismatic Davids, Weinberger and Isenberg. Since meeting DW for the first time in 2024 and DI a year or so later, I’ve sat at their feet, signed over the farm to them, gone on a pilgrimage to Haight Ashbury and I have to admit that I am no closer to understanding why the Telco monopolists should be allowed to operate as if this were a free market than I was before I met them and still believed in QoS as the mystical method by which streaming traffic would ride in the fast lane while print jobs and FTP transfers would be shuttled off to a siding so the video could go through!
I was raised in the church of switched voice, paid homage to the gods of scarcity, mumbled prayerfully regarding the avoidance of contention on the thin copper strands. However the gurus David have shaken my faith in QoS as a meaningful concept in a network with abundant bandwidth. BigCo, the corporate outfit that buys a chunk of VPN throughput sweetly parsed via MPLS may be interested in chopping up its traffic using a QoS model, but us hippies just want access to a big pipe that’s always on and the stinking telcos can just get out of the way.
