In an op-ed in today’s Washington Post, Karen Kornbluh, U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and Daniel Weitzner, White House Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Internet Policy, made a powerful case for building an international consensus around the benefits of an open, interconnected Internet.

According to Kornbluh and Weitzner, the Internet is such a powerful engine of economic and social advancement because no centralized authority governs it and no nation owns it – which “means that nations that choose to take a heavy-handed approach to regulating the Internet can reduce its value for every other nation and user.”

In particular, Kornbluh and Weitzner argue that “[t]he first threat is posed by some governments and international institutions intent on imposing pre-Internet-era telecommunications regulatory schemes to provide them control over the flow of information (and money) they enjoyed in the old days of the monopoly phone company.”

We couldn’t agree more.  In this country, the FCC opened a docket to examine whether broadband Internet access service should be reclassified as a pre-Internet-era common carrier service under Title II of the Communications Act.  NCTA and others pointed out that imposing a top-down Depression-era regulatory structure on modern broadband facilities would not only be unlawful but would depress broadband investment and job-producing economic growth at the worst possible time.

Fortunately, the FCC declined to reclassify broadband Internet access service in its Open Internet Order.  Unfortunately, the reclassification docket was expressly left open.

If we want other nations to reject the idea of imposing old-style regulatory structures on the Internet, there’s no place to start like home.  It’s time for the FCC to close the Title II reclassification docket.  That would prevent a future Commission from turning back the clock, and send a clear message to the rest of the world.

As part of The Cable Show 2011, we are producing a special venue on the exhibit floor called The Park.

It is not an exhibit itself. Nor is it a set of panels. It is a series of nine one-hour talk shows that will be streamed live over the web and that attendees can witness in person.

The conversation in The Park will center on the dynamic changes that the cable industry is going through, which are transforming the customer experience.

For its first 50 years, the cable industry was primarily about delivering traditional television. Since the commercial launch of cable modems 15 years ago, the focus has gradually been shifting to broadband; we have now reached a point where broadband is an enabling platform for a variety of services and is re-defining the traditional media business.

In previous phases of our industry’s history, cable had a particular infrastructure and utilized certain technologies, which then enabled a set of services it could deliver to customers. The Park will show, through practical demonstrations and thought-provoking discussions, that we are now entering a new phase, in which our business operates in a different way, delivering new types of services to our customers.

This is a new world in which Consumer Electronics, Information Technology and Hollywood have become intertwined. At a time when some critics have accused the cable industry of being an obsolete dinosaur, doomed to distinction, the industry is actually turning into a dynamo, becoming a part of the broader ecosystem and finding innovative ways to carry our hybrid fiber-coaxial infrastructure into the future.

Here is the list of the topics we’ll be addressing in The Park over the three days:

• Socially Acceptable: Community Engagement in a Socially-Driven Interactive World. We’ll examine the enormous impact of social media, especially in the areas of customer service, politics and commerce.
• Unplugged: The Mobile Extension of Cable’s Value Proposition. Cable’s broadband services (both video & Internet) are becoming unchained from the set-top box and the modem, allowing consumers to extend the value of their subscription to mobile devices and even outside the home.
• Ideas in Action: Partnerships That Drive Broadband Adoption in America. With the increasingly critical role that broadband plays as a driver of economic recovery, job creation and global competitiveness, how are cable operators helping to drive broadband adoption? Also, a presentation of Cisco’s annual Visual Networking Index will document the growth and use of IP networks worldwide.
• Consumer Voices: Digital Natives – Habits and Habitats of the Next Generation. A special focus group of real consumers will feature tomorrow’s consumers. We’ll be able to learn firsthand from young consumers their experiences, practices, expectations about use of digital platforms in their daily lives and behaviors – today and tomorrow.
• Cable Bridge: You CAN Get There From Here. Cable’s shift to new platforms is still evolving, so we’ll examine the growing momentum towards multi-platform delivery.
• TV Everywhere: The Latest in Cable’s Anytime, Anywhere App-Focused Attitude. Programmers are undergoing radical shifts in their business as well, while still partnering with cable operators. New apps empower authorized subscribers to access shows & movies in a convenient, personalized and portable manner.
• Consumer Voices: New Advertising Strategies & What Consumers will Find Helpful (or Not). Advertising will be key to generating revenue in this new environment. This focus group will look at how consumers will view new ad strategies implemented on diverse platforms including product placement.
• Network Nirvana: Achieving Harmony in Cable’s Connected Home. As broadband converges everything, distinctions between cable’s voice, video and data services begin to fade. Cable’s connected home  allows content to be streamed to any device in the home, and leverages the network to enable new services like home monitoring, automation and security.
• Problem Solvers: Innovating for the Greater Good. Advanced technology is not only a commercial venture, but also a power force for good, affecting everything from educations to civics. In addition, we’ll also discuss cable’s role in advancing the critical IPv6 transition that will make the Internet continue to function properly.

Tune in Tuesday afternoon (June 14) at live.thecableshow.com beginning at 12:30 p.m. (CT) to see the conversation. The whole schedule is online at The Cable Show website.

As we reported, yesterday was World IPv6 Day, an important time of testing for the transition from our current IPv4 system to IPv6.

According to initial feedback, there appeared to be some intermittent software issues, but overall this 24-hour test was a success for those websites participating in World IPv6 Day (See ISOC’s release). It will take some time for Internet companies (websites, ISPs and others) to collect and examine their data, so it will likely be days or weeks before the results are fully analyzed.

As I indicated earlier this week, the cable industry was fully engaged in World IPv6 Day, as befitting our role as leading broadband providers in America. CableLabs, the industry’s research & development organization, kept an open communications line for 26 hours, in order to allow for quick MSO discussion and response to any issues that might have arisen.

We will continue to be involved in this and other key Internet issues (e.g., our sponsorship of the 85th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force next year).

Kudos to the Internet Society for taking the lead on this initiative, and for their role to help promote the transition to IPv6.

World IPv6 Day is being observed today, having started June 8 at midnight GMT. It is a global-scale test flight of IPv6 sponsored by the Internet Society.

A number of major web companies and other industry players are enabling IPv6 on their main websites for 24 hours. You can read yesterday’s post in order to learn more about the IPv6 transition.

Today’s goal is to motivate the various parts of the Internet ecosystem – websites, consumer electronics manufacturers, ISPs,  other hardware manufacturers, operating system vendors, and web companies –  to prepare their services for IPv6 to ensure a successful transition from the current addressing system of IPv4.

Current estimates are that .02 to .05% of users connecting to IPv6-participating websites may experience some delays or connectivity issues during the day, as routing paths can be longer  or IPv6 software issues may arise.

There are several tips for testing IPv6 today.

• Visit test-ipv6.com.
• Install the ShowIP Firefox plug-in, which will show if you’re connecting through IPv6.
• Hurricane Electric’s free tunnel broker allows users to experiment with IPv6 by tunneling over the existing IPv4 Internet.

We’ll update this post if anything significant happens today with testing.

We live in an age of transitions. Right now we’re in the middle of an important one that most people probably haven’t yet noticed.

Since you’re reading this blog, you’re obviously familiar with the Internet. You may not realize that it works, in part, because Internet Protocol addresses are assigned to each device that connects to the Internet. Your desktop computer at work, your personal laptop, the routers that provide Wi-Fi, all have their own IP address. And, since even more devices connect to the Internet today, so does your gaming system, your mobile phone and other gadgets you own.

As we mentioned here back in February, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), the organization responsible for handing out global IP addresses, has run out of existing addresses, which is somewhat analogous to a telephone company running out of phone numbers.

The current system of addresses is known as IPv4, which stands for Internet Protocol Version 4. It offers 4.3 billion IPv4 addresses, which we’re now exhausting. Plans have been underway for some time to transition to a new IP address system, called IPv6.  IPv6 has significantly more addresses than IPv4 so there should be plenty to accommodate current and future needs.

IPv6 uses 128 bit addresses, compared to IPv4′s 32 address bits, which offers a dramatically larger address space.  As an example, an IPv4 might look like this:  192.168.10.1. In contrast, an IPv6 address might be expressed like this: 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334.

All the Parts of the Internet, Working Together

This transition involves all the parts of the entire Internet “ecosystem,” including content providers and websites, ISPs, consumer electronics retailers, equipment manufacturers, and consumers. And this week brings an important milestone.

Wednesday, June 8, 2011, is World IPv6 Day. It’s a global-scale test of IPv6 sponsored by the Internet Society. On Wednesday, starting at midnight GMT (8:00 p.m. Tuesday night on the East Coast), a number of participants will enable IPv6, in addition to their current IPv4 connectivity, on their main websites for 24 hours.

NCTA, as well as some of our member companies, will be participating. NCTA’s website at www.ncta.com will be accessible through IPv6.  For those of you running IPv6 you can test this at ipv6.ncta.com or at www.ncta.com. In addition, cable operators such as Bright House Networks, Charter, Comcast, Cox, GCI, and Time Warner Cable will be conducting limited tests on that day to assess how subscribers will interact with their websites (and others) that are testing IPv6.

As I mentioned, this transition has already been quietly underway for some time, and cable has been playing a role since 2004. For example, you may recall that over the past three years, this blog has featured information about deployment of wideband service based on the DOCSIS 3.0 standard. From the beginning, the D3 specification included IPv6 support.

Comcast began IPv6 trials over a year ago. CableLabs conducted interoperability testing since 2009, to help vendors improve their IPv6 implementation.

NCTA hosted a content summit in November 2010, where MSOs and programmers worked together on transition plans. The cable industry also hosted a series of webinars in May 2011 for retailers, describing why they should carry and promote IPv6-capable electronics.

Next week, we’re hosting the IPv6 Summit during The 2011 Cable Show to provide an opportunity for cable operator and programmer executives, senior managers, technologists and other experts to learn more about the transition and collaborate on solutions and strategies. The Cable Show will also feature an IPv6 Pavilion on the Show floor featuring a wide range of consumer devices that are IPv6-enabled.

We’ll have more information tomorrow on World IPv6 Day and what’s going to take place.