Leviathan Spam
Send the bits with lasers and chips
See the bytes with LED lights
Wireless, optical, bandwidth boom
A flood of info, a global zoom
Now comes Lessig
Now comes Wu
To tell us what we cannot do
The Net, they say,
Is under attack
Stop!
Before we can’t turn back
They know best
These coder kings
So they prohibit a billion things
What is on their list of don’ts?
Most everything we need the most
To make the Web work
We parse and label
We tag the bits to keep the Net stable
The cloud is not magic
It’s routers and switches
It takes a machine to move exadigits
Now Lessig tells us to route is illegal
To manage Net traffic, Wu’s ultimate evil
The FCC in Oh Eight bought into the theory
And Comcast, the Chairman determined to bury
Then on Nine Twenty One
Genachowski declareth
Thou shalt not give primacy
Networks, you must shareth
The Net’s great virtue was decentralization
But Julius from on high decreed concentration
of power and decisions over all peers
Substitute bureaucrats for Net engineers
You may not
Shall not
Cannot cap
It’s discrimination!
Don’t you know that?
You may not give
the bits a weighting
No matter importance, voice or data
You may not
Shall not
Cannot charge
Even though
the bytes are large
In what other sector
is pricing illegal?
All for nothing as business model
is laughably feeble
Silicon, wires, software glue
It takes tens of billions to make bits move
You cannot charge
You cannot price
You cannot cap
It won’t suffice
No, no, they say, to bit analysis
Though it may lead to Net paralysis
We will not tolerate Q. O. S.
Not Weighted Round Robin
Nor flow-based service
Not Q-in-Q
Not PBT
Nor SLAs
at Layer Three
Storewidth and caching to speed the bits through
Akamai, Limelight cut latency to you
Though the result is customer speed
Don’t you get it? You may not give priority
Content, conduit, Googleplex
This neutrality thing may lead to bit wrecks
We thought all was well
3G, 4G, then WiMax!
But the once free Net
suffered bureaucratic attacks
When zetta visual bits
and mobile nets collide
Will the Chairman answer his phone?
. . . Or run and hide?
Out: speed, gadgets, quantum innovation
In: lobbyists, lawyers, mass litigation
Come to Washington
Ask us permission
Don’t they know it’s abundance they’re missin’?
But abundance is over
Scarcity is cool
We thought the Web was different
Now who’s the fool?
Moore’s law transcends
the cramped, dire fears
of misnamed Free Press
They’re no high tech seers
Mr. Chairman, please
might you cut us a break?
Should D.C. micromanage
the guts of cyberspace?
If you ban the codes that make the Net work
DiffServ, IPsec, and Dual Leaky Bucket
Net investors may revolt
and with fury say ————!
Who knows what the Web will bring
Which business models or networks will reign
With Net traffic growing at 60 percent
Shouldn’t techies experiment?
With fiber and cable
to bandwidth enable
Googleplex servers
a giant content stable
We do useful things like
BRED and Draft Martini
But once Neutrality is loosed,
might we never bottle this genie?
What about MPLS
and Inter Frame Gap?
Utopians now rule
Get used to that fact
Traffic, apps, digital value exploding
So tell me, FCC
What the heck is the problem?
The Net keeps on giving
Like water to wine
No artificial limits
Abundance sublime
But D.C. takes this great bounty for granted
Reap others’ rewards, assume innovation planted
Tera, peta, exa, zetta
So long free Net, see ya later
Miracle though the Net may be
The global telecosm is not free
— Bret Swanson
