From Internet to Obamanet

Critics of President Obama’s “net neutrality” plan call it ObamaCare for the Internet.

Both ObamaCare and “Obamanet” submit huge industries to complex regulations. Their supporters say the new rules had to be passed before anyone could read them. But at least ObamaCare claimed it would solve long-standing problems. Obamanet promises to fix an Internet that isn’t broken.

The permissionless Internet, which allows anyone to introduce a website, app or device without government review, ends this week. On Thursday the three Democrats among the five commissioners on the Federal Communications Commission will vote to regulate the Internet under rules written for monopoly utilities.

No one, including the bullied FCC chairman, Tom Wheeler, thought the agency would go this far. The big politicization came when President Obama in November demanded that the supposedly independent FCC apply the agency’s most extreme regulation to the Internet. A recent page-one Wall Street Journal story headlined “Net Neutrality: How White House Thwarted FCC Chief” documented “an unusual, secretive effort inside the White House . . . acting as a parallel version of the FCC itself.”

> how many millions of Americans have amateur radio sets?

Relatively few people are amateurs these days. My point was only that getting going with ham radio is easier, quicker, more reliable, and far less expensive than setting up the infrastructure for any sort of useful internetworking when you don't have an ISP, much less a backbone of routers, switches, and DNS and BGP servers to interconnect the ISPs or their equivalents on an alternative network.

Have you ever set up a business network for, say, a company of 10 or more users, with a commercial ISP's pipe from the internet? Okay, now you don't have the ISP -- what do you connect to, how do you "tie in" to anyone else's network? The internet is not just a huge collection of "last-mile" connections to consumers and businesses. With all due respect, I get the feeling you're not familiar with what useful internetworking entails, or else you're proposing something insanely crude, like the BBSes and UUCP mail relays of the 1980's. No one today would use that seriously, even in an emergency.

I'm a hobbyist/experimenter/system-designer who got started about 1970 even before there were microprocessors. Yet the idea of designing and building all that from scratch doesn't appeal to me, and it's not for lack of interest in the concept. It's that I know what it takes to make a useful network, having done it on a small scale a few times (I'm a Network Systems Admin by trade these days), and it just ain't gonna happen on a large enough scale to be useful.

Me? I plan to get a ham license.

> I’m not understanding your comment. There is no reason that another internet couldn’t be made with DNS, the whole shebang.

And there's no reason you can't build your own 3-stage rocket capable of lifting 10,000 pounds of payload either. Go ahead, try it. Do you plan to use materials commonly found around the house, or are you rich enough to finance the internetworking infrastructure with commercial/industrial quality gear? Do you have even an order-of-magnitude approximate idea of what such a system costs, not only in equipment, but in paid employees to maintain it?

Then there's that little annoying item of how you connect to the existing internet. Because you're going to have to do that, or else your alternative net falls apart. You HAVE to acknowledge and work with the existing internet, period. So whatever protocols you devise for your network, they will have to be compatible in some fashion with the established standards, or else you'll be isolated and no one will come to play with you.

> Who says you need “last mile stuff”. Go satellite/wireless.

Ummm, in that case your satellite/wireless link -IS- the "last mile". Sooner or later, you have to get to the end-user's computer, or mobile device, and that's what's called the "last mile", whether literal or figurative.

Look, I'm not saying it's impossible to build a network, hell I'm a Network Systems Admin -- it's my profession to build and maintain networks.

What I'm saying is that it's wildly impractical and expensive to try to build something like the internet, or even a tiny piece of it. I'm saying that any alternative internetwork system would never in fact support communications beyond chatter, which is more easily done with radio and similar non-packet technologies. If you really want to shoot for a packet-switched network, that's also an established technology over radio, and has been done for decades.

But hey, if you think you can build an alternative network, can employ the trained professional personnel necessary to maintain it, and develop the wide usage and high reliability that can attract serious support from the businesses and banks who will make your network functional, you go right ahead, and God Bless you.

Hell, you succeed at that, and I'll come work for you. :)

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