Robert Kahn on Network Neutrality
Transcript
"An evening with Robert Kahn" was an event held on 9 January
2007 at the Computer History Museum (available here).
Kahn talks about network neutrality briefly in this video, in response
to a question from the audience. This passage has been referred to in
various online sources (see the Wikipedia entry
and references there), but no transcript of the lecture exists. This is
unfortunate and taxing for anybody who is interested in Robert Kahn's
views on network neutrality but does not have the time to sit through a
2-hour lecture.
The following is a transcript of the relevant passage that I made from
the video. The passage starts at ~ 1:43 into the video.
I made some small changes (omitted "ehem"s and "you know"s and changed
"gonna" to "going to" etc.). Words that I was not certain about are set
in angle brackets with a ?; words that I did not understand at all are
marked as "***". I am grateful for any help to fill these gaps. All
errors of course remain my own.
Thanks!
Bettina Berendt
Person from the
audience:
Hi, let me follow up with what Burt was asking and ask you about a
specific economic issue. By the way, my name is Phil [Ghost ?]. A
specific economic issue and that's to do with network neutrality.
There's been quite a lot of stuff going on in the last couple of years,
regulatory things as well as policy issues. Could you give us your
thoughts on network neutrality. Is it a good thing, is it a bad thing,
where is it going to go?
Robert Kahn:
Well let me just tell you that that term as far as I am concerned is a
slogan. So the real question is you've got to penetrate down and ask
what is it you're really asking about.
If the goal is to encourage people to build new capabilities, then the
party that takes the lead in building that new capability is probably
only going to have it on their net [to start with?] and it is not going to
be on anybody
else's net. If you first require them to get everybody else in the
world to buy into it so it's uniform and everywhere, that's probably
too hard. I think you gotta start incrementally and allow things to
grow.
What does net neutrality try to achieve? Well, one model of it says
that the network is just a transport vehicle of some sort and that all
the important stuff takes place on the boundaries. I would take the
following position, and in this I probably disagree with Vint who's
been very strong on one side of the net neutrality issue being now a
Google rep, but I would probably take the position that organizations
ought to be able to provide services, and those services could include
functionality that's provided within the net, provided that other
parties who then wanted to participate in it could have a way to do
this at the boundaries, and if it turns out that it's more efficient to
do things inside the net than outside the net, I'm ok with that.
The time that you run into problems is when, by virtue of doing that,
you tend to fragment the net. And anything that will tend to fragment
the net I'm opposed to, provided it's not an incremental evolution of a
new technology that's happening. If you do it by policy that says you
know that guy can't participate in this, then I would be opposed. You
really want organisations to put new and innovative features out on the
net, and I think the organisations that produce them should be able to
control it, but you'd also like the whole net to be integral, you like
it that the fact that somebody is on another net that they can still
participate as part of this internet experience that we not allow it to
fragment.
And I think it's possible to make that happen it's not necessarily in
the interest of the organizations putting a new capability out to want
to [***] this because they want to differentiate themselves. But I
think this is something that could be done at the policy level, and I
think it's the 5% or the 2% piece of the problem that you end up having
to work on. It's when things are naturally going to evolve in a way
that allows the world population to be part of it.
You really want to incentivize people to innovate. And if they're going
to innovate, they're probably going to innovate on their own net, so
with [?] the few other nets that they can work together with But you'd
like them to do this in a way that if other nets want to participate,
they can. Because the natural conclusion if you don't do this is
fragmentation. And I think fragmentation is sort of the inverse of what
you want to see in the Internet environment. So I am totally opposed to
mandating that nothing interesting can happen inside the net. It's just
that if interesting things happen inside the net, it ought to be
because of consenting nets and not something that will prohibit
somebody else from participating if they chose not to do it that way.
Person from the
audience:
Thanks.
Last updated on 2007-04-11 by Bettina Berendt.
URL of this page:
http://vasarely.wiwi.hu-berlin.de/kahn_net_neutrality_transcript.html