October 2006 Archives

After just spending a month of virtually non-stop travelling for work, I began to reminisce about the last actual vacation I took, and to wonder just how different it was.

Cast your thoughts back to the late-summer. The afternoon was finally cooling off, two-year-old Agatha was blissfully asleep in the bedroom, people were enjoying themselves at the pool right next to our cabin and on water skis down on the lake, and I was catching up on email. Sigh.

Such are the joys of the Internet. As network connectivity marches steadily towards ubiquity, there is a palpable loss. I suffer less from this than most people in that I enjoy my work and manage to integrate it (mostly) successfully into my daily life and even my vacations. But I have to admit that it was with mixed feelings that I saw the "Wifi now available" on the office door at Gobblers Mountain Resort. One more connection made. One more refuge lost. There are definitely down sides to all of this networking stuff.

What makes modern Internetworking hard to cover is that you have to actually understand a fair bit about the underlying technology and economics to make sense of it. This turns out to be difficult for the press, public and politicians. A recent Light Reading article includes an amusing quote attributed to Chris Sacca, Google's head of special initiatives:

"We have one peering point in San Francisco and some journalists say that we're trying to take over the world," Sacca says. "That's the thing that a lot of journalists don't get," he says, "is that one peering point does not a telecommunications network make."

This was said in the context of a story about Google's use (or not) of dark fiber and the relationship between Google and AT&T. Now, either the GOOG has a much smaller network infrastructure than just about everyone thinks it does, or this quote isn't saying what it appears to be saying. I'm not blaming Mark Sullivan, the intrepid Lightreading reporter who wrote the story, for getting it wrong. I do think it's inconceivable that Sacca said and meant this, so there must have been some serious miscommunication. Topics about wide-area networking and peering are sophisticated and hard to talk about in plain language, both for the interviewee and for the reporter. But the confusion and misunderstandings are doing nothing to help the current national debate about net-neutrality, which is obviously an important topic that many people in the US care about.

You may be asking yourself: what does this story about Google and AT&T have to do with net-neutrality? I'll take a stab at an answer.