Cisco Systems, which was the hero of the free Internet in the 1990s, has become its chief enemy.
That’s because throughout this decade it has put most of its investment into systems that monitor or control what people do with the resource.
As Richard Doherty of Envisioneering, explained to me this week at the NCTA show, a lot of network operators still don’t know the power they have in their hands with Cisco monitoring equipment.
One example is what Cisco calls Cisco Service Control Release 3.0. This was acquired through a company called p-Cube. It’s a box that can do deep packet inspection of everything coming through a network core, preventing people from using some services, and scaling others back, without anyone’s knowledge.
I wrote about p-Cube some years ago. Their first sales of this device were to Singapore. Now Cisco is pushing this technology toward U.S. cable and phone ISPs and getting a good reception.
This is really what the network neutrality debate is about. It’s about
phone and cable ISPs wanting to use devices like this to turn today’s
free Internet into a service-based architecture in which every bit has
its own price, based on what it can do for you, and they (the ISPs)
take a cut of every transaction.
The result is to destroy the "social mobility" that allowed companies
like Google (and even Cisco) to appear on the scene. If you can’t use
Vonage, if you have to use the phone company’s VOIP offering, then your
VOIP technology progresses only as fast as the phone company’s vendor
decides to let it progress, not as fast as new capabilities are
rolled-out in the market.
This would not be possible if there were ample choice in the Internet access market. The fact is that today there is not ample choice. Many people can get broadband only from a phone or cable company — not both. These companies are hoarding bits, and now plan on using that chokehold on customers to destroy the Internet.
At Freedom2Connect, the general conclusion was that "no one would violate network neutrality" because of what happened in Madison River, where
a company tried to block VOIP ports and paid a big fine. But that was a
negotiated consent agreement. It was not a precedent. And that was with
a very small company. What if Verizon decided to do this, or AT&T?
That’s exactly what the two companies are threatening.
Thanks to Cisco they can do all this, and more. A lot more. Cisco has become the enemy of the Internet.
