Ars Technica: A neutral 'Net needs up to twice the bandwidth of a tiered network.

According to David Isenberg, a long-time industry insider and proponent of "dumb" (neutral) networks, the research itself is fine. In his view, it's simply obvious that a dumb network will require more peak capacity than a managed one.

But extending that banal observation to make the claim that running a managed network is cheaper is, to Isenberg, not at all intuitive. For one thing, doubling the peak volume of a network does not mean spending twice as much money as it cost to build the original network. "The failure of the authors to extend the conclusions from capacity to raw costs of capacity is deliberately misleading," Isenberg says, "especially when the researchers invoked 'economic viability' and 'cost of capacity' in their introduction to the work."

He presents other arguments, but the gist of his criticism is that the paper is fine (Isenberg used to work at AT&T and knows of the some people involved in the research) but simply leaves out important considerations. It cannot, then, be used to make the claim that a non-neutral Net is a cheaper Net.

The Far Side of Technology: How Virante Marketing Solutions & Burton Hosting Fooled the Web

A while back there was a web page that was designed to "test hosting services" by getting onto Digg, getting tons of votes, and use IFRAME tags to load a page on each of a number of major web hosts. The winner would be the host that could stand up to the pressure the longest - which turned out to be a heretofore unknown company called Burton Hosting. But the whole thing, TFSoT alleges, was a hoax designed to promote Burton Hosting.

A more thorough investigation confirmed that we were right to be suspicious. We started by running a simple WhoIS search on the 0effect.org domain. That gave us two names: Russ Jones and Ronald Jaffre. Looking at the Reddit submission, we learned that rjonesx submitted the site to Reddit. That matched the gmail address listed in the WhoIs data, so it appeared that Russ had Reddited his own site. There isn't anything wrong with that in general, so we looked to the Digg submission next.

Russvirante was the Digg user who submitted the story, and we assumed that this was Russ Jones as well. Googling for Russ Jones, we found that Virante.com is among the first few search results - specifically, as Virante High Potential Web Marketing. A quick glance at that site showed us that Russel Jones is actually the CTO of Virante. And unsurprisingly, one of their specialties is social media/viral marketing. Now the idea of the "Web 2.0 Effect" site being used as a viral marketing campaign for Burton Hosting begins to gain some substance.

Astroturf. Stinks.