The normally reliable and interesting (if not always technical or incredibly detailed) Robert X. Cringely allowed a recent column to be marred by painful errors and misconceptions. Which is really too bad, because the point he was trying to make about net neutrality is pretty much exactly the point that I made in a previous blog.
Essentially, both Cringely and I (although he is much more famous, of course) are saying that this issue is substantially more complicated than the foolish politicians commenting on it are saying. As I wrote: "So is a two-tier Internet coming? From a performance perspective, it's already here. Any carrier can offer a "normal" quality of service (speed, latency, jitter, whatever) to everything and an "enhanced" quality of service to some special things." As Cringely writes: "Last week's column pointed out how shallow are the current arguments, which ignore many of the technical and operational realities of the Internet, especially the fact that there have long been tiers of service and that ISPs have probably been treating different kinds of packets differently for years and we simply didn't know it." So there you go. So what's my beef? It all boils down to one paragraph.
