Recently in Politics Category

We've received enough interest about our previous notes on Iranian Internet connectivity that I wanted to give a brief update, and some reflections.

Seventy-five years ago today, on May 29th, 1934, Egyptian private radio stations fell silent, as the government shut them down in favor of a state monopoly on broadcast communication. Egyptian radio "hackers" (as we would style them today) had, over the course of about fifteen years, developed a burgeoning network of unofficial radio stations. They offered listeners an unfiltered, continuous mix of news, gossip, and live entertainment from low-powered transmitters located in private houses and businesses throughout Cairo.

It couldn't last. After two days of official radio silence, on May 31st, official state-sponsored radio stations (run by the Marconi company under special contract) began transmitting a clean slate of government-sanctioned programming, and the brief era of grass-roots Egyptian radio was over.

An open market for buying and selling IPv4 Addresses is coming. Soon. As I wrote previously, IANA is running out of unallocated IPv4 addresses. Estimates vary, but by 2010 (or 2012 at the latest) the world will be out of unallocated IPv4 addresses.

Sometimes it is hard for the general public to understand what this might mean. Essentially, after 2010 or so, if you want to start a new company and get connected to the Internet or just are growing and have more devices that need to have IP addresses, things won't be the same as they are now. Right now what happens is that you go to ARIN, if you're in North America and document your need for IP addresses, you pay a modest administrative fee, and then they allocate them to you. If you grow and you need more, you document how you've used up the ones that you have, and they give you more of them.

All of this assumes that you want your own IP addresses that are not tied to any particular provider (this is an important point that we'll get back to). But even if you get your IP addresses from some provider, they have to get them from somewhere. If you want to be reachable from the Internet, you need an IP address—an IPv4 IP address in particular. And very shortly those are going to get much harder to get.

So let's talk about what happens after the IPv4 addresses are all "used up."

So after the massive, content-free debate about network neutrality, there is finally something concrete to discuss. Recently, several people have been writing about ESPN360: a website that attempts to block subscribers arriving from an ISP who is not a subscriber. Essentially, they are trying to replicate the cable subscription model (get your ISP to pony up money so that you can see this stuff) only on the web.

It would be hard to overstate just how foolish (and wrongheaded) this is. But the entire escapade makes some very important points in the debate about net neutrality. That debate was never about some mythically "neutral" network, but was rather about the ever-shifting balance of power between content and eyeballs. Content providers (Google, Yahoo, BBC, and evidently ESPN) believe that users want their content more than their content wants the users. And so, a new battle is begun. Who has more leverage: the pretty pictures or the glassy eyeballs?

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.

Sealand, the odd semi-independent "nation" off to coast of Britain caught fire. The home page of the principality mentions the fire and is asking for donations to rebuild.

Sealand has an extremely odd history. Essentially, it is a platform dating from the WWII era seven nautical miles off the coast of Britain. It claims independence from Britain as a country, although in practice no one really cares enough to push the point and they clearly rely on British services and protection (which is obvious from the response to the fire). The real questions are: is Sealand still needed, and if it is, what happens to its customers now?

More specifically: Do these acquisitions really have anything to do with the Internet at all? What will be the size and scope of these networks when combined? Who will be the winners? We can offer some pretty convincing answers to all of these as well as some wild speculation about the next acquisition to come.