George Ou
Latest from George Ou
Farber and Faulhaber on the “Dead hand of regulation”
Inter-networking pioneer David J. Farber and professor Gerald R. Faulhaber have articulated one of the most important points in the Net Neutrality debate by pointing out the dangers of the “Dead hand of regulation”. Customer needs take second place; regulatory “rent-seeking” becomes the rule of the day, and a previously innovative and vibrant industry becomes a ...
Real Net Neutrality – Regulating CDNs, apps, and devices
We’ve all been told that “Net Neutrality” is about “preserving” the Internet as it is, but those of us who have followed the issue closely know that this was never the intent. Now that the FCC is set to vote on Net Neutrality regulations this week, the “real” Net Neutrality hardliners are all out in ...
OpenBSD developer refutes accusations of backdoors
OpenBSD developer “Jason L. Wright” has refuted rumors propagated by OpenBSD founder Theo de Raadt that he had somehow inserted backdoors into the open source operating system on behalf of the FBI. De Raadt forwarded a private email from Gregory Perry, CEO GoVirtual Education, which accused Wright of planting backdoors into the OpenBSD source code ...
Division of labor between broadband and CDN
n the recent peering dispute between Level 3 Communications’ Content Distribution Network (CDN) business and broadband provider Comcast (see video), Level 3 argues that it should not have to pay Comcast anything for an additional 300,000 Mbps of private peering capacity because Level 3 provides value by delivering video content over its nationwide backbone. Since the ...
Shouldn’t Netflix get free USPS mail delivery?
With less than 10% of the US population subscribing to Netflix DVD rental service, Netflix already pays more than $700 million a year to the US Postal service for the postage for the DVDs they send which is a staggering 28% of Netflix revenue. Unfortunately for Netflix, the US Postal Service might increase rates and ...
Many analysts wrong on Comcast versus Level 3
There were quite a number of stories that inaccurately reported on the Comcast versus Level 3 peering dispute. Those stories inaccurately reported that Comcast was trying to charge an additional toll on the entire Internet (video in particular). The mistakes in the stories were understandable because so many analysts go it wrong but those stories ...
Comcast confirms my observations on peering dispute
In my video on the peering dispute between Level 3 Communications and Comcast, I made a number of key assertions that were deduced from FCC testimony and PR statements from both companies. Public companies cannot afford to make false statements that are publicly documented though they often try to be vague. However, some statements don’t have any ...
Netflix will grow, not kill the Internet
Bloomberg ponders the question of “will Netflix kill the Internet” which cites some interesting data, but I think it has a misguided view of the effect of Netflix on the Internet. I don’t believe Netflix will *kill* the Internet because the evidence shows that Netflix is actually *growing* the Content Delivery Network (CDN) and broadband ...
Level 3 outbid Akamai on Netflix by reselling stolen bandwidth
Level 3 communications raised a lot of eyebrows earlier this month when it outbid rival Content Delivery Network (CDN) provider Akamai to deliver Netflix content to large parts of the United States. The announcement was a huge win for Level 3′s CDN business and it meant leasing around 2.9 terabits of distributed capacity to Netflix. ...
Another Net Neutrality ‘violation’ debunked
In yet another case of a made-up conspiracy like the Craigslist blocking incident to drum up support for Internet regulation, OpenDNS founder David Ulevitch is misleading the public about Verizon Wireless supposedly blocking OpenDNS servers. Ulevitch claims that Verizon Wireless is blocking OpenDNS which is an ad-supported Domain Name Service (DNS). OpenDNS sells advertisers data ...