Andrew Orlowski
The
Register
Friday, January 19, 2007
Robert Kahn, the most senior figure in the development of the
internet, has delivered a strong warning against "Net Neutrality"
legislation.
Speaking to an audience at the Computer History Museum in Mountain
View, California at an event held in his honour, Kahn warned against
legislation that inhibited experimentation and innovation where
it was needed.
Kahn rejected the term "Net Neutrality", calling it
"a slogan". He cautioned against dogmatic views of network
architecture, saying the need for experimentation at the edges
shouldn't come at the expense of improvements elsewhere in the
network.
(Kahn gently reminded his audience that the internet was really
about interconnecting networks, a point often lost today).
"If the goal is to encourage people to build new capabilities,
then the party that takes the lead is probably only going to have
it on their net to start with and it's not going to be on anyone
else's net. You want to incentivize people to innovate, and they're
going to innovate on their own nets or a few other nets,"
"I am totally opposed to mandating that nothing interesting
can happen inside the net," he said.
So called "Neutrality" legislation posed more of a
danger than fragmentation, he concluded.
With the exception of Google's man in Washington DC, Vint Cerf
(with whom Kahn developed TCP/IP), most of the senior engineers
responsible for developing the packet switched internetworking
of today oppose "Neutrality" legislation. Dave Farber,
often called the grandfather of the internet, has been the most
prominent critic.
Engineers fear rash legislation would inhibit the ability of
systems engineers to improve latency and jitter issues needed
to move data at speed.
"The internet is still pretty fragile today," said
Kahn.
Life of Kahn
Kahn's history as protocol designer is a minor note, compared
to his role as a politically astute manager and advocate at key
moments in the development of the technologies responsible for
the internet.
When he embarked on a career in networking, peers and seniors
tried to talk him out of what was then considered a crazy choice.
"People thought I was throwing my career away. People thought
time sharing wouldn't take off and if it did it would only be
in a few palce, so wouldn't have commercial values," he said.
"If I had listened to many people in the field I would not
have gone into networking."
Working on colour TV, automatic game control loops, information
theory, and even microwaves were all considered "cooler"
than networking.
Later, he found DARPA was a reluctant sponsor. The US Department
of Defense's research agency didn't have many computers when Kahn
arrived in 1972 and couldn't see much of a use for them.
Technical history is often seen as an inevitable progression,
punctuated by moments of individual genius, but the gentle backroom
cajoling rarely gets mentioned.
It was certainly needed. Ironically, when Kahn arrived at DARPA
it was to take a break from networks, and work on factory automation
research. But the hype du jour, Artificial Intelligence, was sweeping
the land and Congress cut the budget for his project. Kahn began
to reassemble a team of packet switching veterans.
In the early 80s he managed the gradual, and awkward transition
from private defense project to public network, fighting off the
cumbersome, bureaucratically-devised OSI model of internetworking.
"I fought a ten year battle to protect the name 'Internet'",
he says. "It cost a million dollars and eventually the name
prevailed - but we could have lost the internet."
The CRNI (Corporation for National Research Initiatives) was
really essential to winning that one, he said.
Kahn urged today's engineers to "Think Big... we are at
the very early stage of a revolution that's going to take most
of the 21st century". He rejects any labelling as the "father
of the internet", saying credit for its growth can be shared
by the entire industry.
You can find a video of his talk here.
It's a 230MB download in Windows Media format only, and there's
no transcript yet.
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