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Net Neutrality 6-25-2006

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Net Neutrality Links

I’ve added these links to the Net Neutrality Page today.

Amanda does it again

AMANDA COGDON AND ROCKETBOOM ON NET NEUTRALITY. [via Chris J. Davis]

Does the Internet really need the US?

So anyhow, for my theory de jour (nope sorry, not French) I reckon if the deep-corrupt US politicians and marketeers want to take their county’s technology back to the dark ages (as they appear to have done with foreign policy), and the people in that country are fool enough to swallow that line, then I say f**k ’em [my edit]. It’ll be a shame to lose such an innovative population from a unified, global, open net, but if that’s the way it’s going – friends, check your passports are up to date. . . .

Even within the mindset of US capitalism, the idea is broken. Other nations (and corporates) with a clue will thrive in an environment where Americans have lost net neutrality. Yep, sit back and use your PC as a glorified DVD player, your mobile for ordering a burger, while your economy gets left in the slow lane.

The world has a huge amount to be grateful for to American people for the work behind the Internet, behind the Web. But this is the human race we’re talking about, if some nation decides to go tinpot for dollars then it isn’t any one else’s responsibility. The Internet is bigger than the United States. The Internet was designed (in the US) to work around breakage, no matter where it happens.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

Net Neutrality 6-24-2006

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Net Neutrality Links

I’ve added these links to the Net Neutrality Page today.

Wresting Control from the US

On other internet-related news, there continues to be rumblings that ICANN, which currently is the US-controlled body that governs the internet, may have to cede some or even all of its power to a UN body. The UN Working Group on Internet Governance has laid out four options for the future governance of the internet:

Option One – create a UN body known as the Global Internet Council that draws its members from governments and “other stakeholders” and takes over the US oversight role of Icann.

Option Two – no changes apart from strengthening Icann’s Governmental Advisory Committee to become a forum for official debate on net issues.

Option Three – relegate Icann to a narrow technical role and set up an International Internet Council that sits outside the UN. US loses oversight of Icann.

Option Four – create three new bodies. One to take over from Icann and look after the net’s addressing system. One to be a debating chamber for governments, businesses and the public; and one to co-ordinate work on “internet-related public policy issues”.

[supernova] Michael Copps

Michael Copps of the FCC has two messages: All is not well in Washington, and we “need to do a lot more about that.”

Access to the Internet could reasonably be considered a civil right, he says. The Net is crucial, yet the US is falling in terms of per capita access to broadband. And the FCC counts 200kb as broadband. And if there’s a single person with broadband in a zip code, the FCC counts the entire zip code as having access to broadband. He says we’re the only industrialized country that has no national strategy for getting the country connected. He suggests that other countries have better competition policies or incentives.

“Let’s get the facts, do the research, do the analysis, consider our options” and implement.

“Decentralized end user control is increasingly at risk.” “The concentrated providers have the ability to build networks with traffic policies that restrict how you and I use the Internet.” Although they say they’re not going to do that, but history shows that concerns with the ability and the incentive frequently give it a try, he says.

Metro-Scale Wi-Fi as Ultimate Backup

If you’re a business owner—home, small, medium, or large—$20 per month as a backup policy against a broadband outage or a line cut that would take down a wired service is a pretty low price to pay just to have it immediately available as needed.

Remember that many of the RFPs issued by municipalities require net neutrality to be enshrined in proposals. Which, in most cases I’ve read, includes an explicit mention that any device may be attached to the network and used for any legal purpose. Thus sharing a single network connection when a business’s wired line goes down is perfectly legitimate.

The municipal architecture for most cities is either switched or mesh throughout, and it’s only dependent on a supply of power—I don’t know city-by-city requirements for backup power on mesh nodes, and I think there’s essentially no requirement for this. In Tempe, I believe six fiber drops serve the MobilePro network, with at least one dedicated to city purposes. Because they’re switched, even multiple fiber cuts wouldn’t damage the network. Likewise, a network like Philadelphia’s, according to EarthLink’s description, will be almost entirely wireless until you hit some fiber points of presence.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

Net Neutrality 6-23-2006

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Net Neutrality Links

I’ve added these links to the Net Neutrality Page today.

Net Neutrality: This is serious by Timbl

. . . There have been suggestions that we don’t need legislation because we haven’t had it. These are nonsense, because in fact we have had net neutrality in the past — it is only recently that real explicit threats have occurred.

Control of information is hugely powerful. In the US, the threat is that companies control what I can access for commercial reasons. (In China, control is by the government for political reasons.) There is a very strong short-term incentive for a company to grab control of TV distribution over the Internet even though it is against the long-term interests of the industry.

Yes, regulation to keep the Internet open is regulation. And mostly, the Internet thrives on lack of regulation. But some basic values have to be preserved. For example, the market system depends on the rule that you can’t photocopy money. Democracy depends on freedom of speech. Freedom of connection, with any application, to any party, is the fundamental social basis of the Internet, and, now, the society based on it. . . .

Call the Telecoms’ Bluff on Net Neutrality.

The Government should, henceforth, treat the internet more like the Interstate Highway System than the telephone network.

This would mean that the Gvt, or a federal regulatory agency, should take control of and/or subsidize the building and maintaining of the network from now on. Take the financial burden of it away from the telecoms.

Make it a matter of national security, if you have to, to get that network built up, and to provide unfettered access to it by the public.

This, is a proposal that the telecoms should jump on in a heartbeat for two reasons:

1. The immediate financial windfalls it gives them.

2. It actually has the effect of slowing down the development of alternative high speed internet competition form other sources.

If, as I expect, the telecoms get their wish on Net Neutrality, you will see the rapid expansion of satellite, or other broadband internet technologies takeoff. And the sheer competition from those other sources will force the telecoms to scrap their differentiated charges to various tiers of content providers.

But, in the meantime, I think we should start floating my alternative proposal to take the wind out of the telecoms’ sails. This proposal will show us whether the telecoms are really concerned about building the network, or in just finding a way to make more money.

Larry Lessing on: Tim Berners-Lee on Net Neutrality: “This is serious”

One clue to this Net Neutrality debate is to watch what kind of souls are on each side of the debate. The pro-NN contingent is filled with the people who actually built the Net — from Vint Cerf to Google to eBay — and those who profit from the competition enabled by the Net — e.g., Microsoft. The anti-NN contingent is filled with the entities that either never got the Net, or fought like hell to control it — telecom, and cable companies.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

Net Neutrality 6-22-2006

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Net Neutrality Links

I’ve added these links to the Net Neutrality Page today.

Jeff Pulver’s Save the Internet Contest Winners

And the winner is . . .
Congratulations to Chris Burke for claiming the $1000 prize in our “Save the Net” Viral Ad Contest. We intend to use the submission to spread the word in policy circles to ensure that government crafts policy that best advances the open Internet to allow for maximum creativity and innovation.
Chris’ winning entry is available at:
http://files.bungie.org/thisspartanlife/Blog05_S3.mov

Here are a few of the better runners-up:
http://www.anders.com/video/save-the-net.mov

http://67.15.182.229/nn.html

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7050009655852167999&q=save+the+internet

We are now launching Round II of the “Save the Net” Contest.


Tuning Fork

One of the other issues surrounding this bill is that cable companies believe telcos will cherry pick their towns, offering IPTV service only to areas with higher incomes. It’s illegal, but not hard to believe, even though the Telcos deny it’s their intent. To top it off, Congress plans to put that regulatory wonder, the FCC, in charge of making sure the phone companies don’t. Can’t you just imagine Telco Legree rubbing his hands together at the prospect of an agency as inept as the FCC regulating the phone company steamroller? It’s like asking a Little League commissioner to oversee drug testing for Major Leaguers—he’d be out of his league. Oh, wait…

What this boils down to is cable companies and telcos fighting to force their own agenda on consumers while telling us it’s for our own good. Meanwhile, Congress, ever obliging and the one-time guardian of the people, is really only interested in placating industry lobbyists and corporate interests. As to what’s going to happen down the road, suffice it to say that it’s all likely to work out in the end…for them.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

Net Neutrality 6-21-2006

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Net Neutrality Links

I’ve added these links to the Net Neutrality Page today.

Net Neutrality–The Video Parody

I made a parody of Woody Guthrie’s famous song “This Land Is Our Land”, with Net Neutrality as the subject. I remixed video footage from the fantastic Elephants Dream animated movie short, a Blender Foundation project that was released under a Creative Commons license. You MUST see the original movie to understand how amazing the graphics, animation, music, and sound effects are in this animation. Visit their site and buy the DVD, which has a high definition version of the movie. That version is better than Pixar and I love Pixar! Note: The quality of even the “decent” version of my parody is absolutely no match for the breathtaking quality of the original, let alone that of the high definition movie.

Coyote Gulch . . . Robert Cringely:

“But all packets aren’t created equal. TCP packets over longer distance connections, for example, are effectively at a disadvantage, because they are more likely to have data loss and require retransmissions, thus expanding their appetites for bandwidth. By the same token, packets of all types that originate on the ISP side of its primary Internet connection have the advantage of functioning in an environment with far greater bandwidth and far fewer hops. Perhaps the best example of this disparity: packets that pass through private peering arrangements, versus those traveling from one backbone provider to another through one of the many NAPs, with their relatively high packet loss.

“This ‘to NAP or not to NAP’ issue has been with us for a long time. Smaller and poorer ISPs that can’t attract peering deals with their larger brethren are stuck with communicating through the NAPs, which requires more time and bandwidth to transfer the same number of data packets successfully. This has long been a marketing point for bigger and richer ISPs. But beyond marketing, this disparity hasn’t received much public notice. There are many ISPs that have both private peering and inter-NAP connections, yet whether they send a packet through the NAP or not hasn’t been a huge public issue. Perhaps it should be. It has certainly been possible for ISPs to pretty easily put a hurt on packets, and they probably have been doing so, though most pundits assume that we are still living in the good old days.

The funny thing about scale — Kafka’s numbers are wrong [via Ken Camp ]

In a telephony online article in early May, BellSouth’s Chief Architect Henry Kafka was quoted as saying:

The average IPTV user will likely consume about 224 gigabytes per month, he added, at a monthly cost to carriers of $112, a giant leap from the less than $5 attributed to Internet use. If that content were high-definition video, the average user would be consuming more than 1 terabyte per month at a cost to carriers of $560 per month.

“Clearly that’s not what the average user is going to pay per month for their video service,” Kafka said. “That’s why we need help.” . . .

Kafka’s numbers are wrong because the cost of bandwidth is not linear as volume increases. Scale creates economies that result in a lower cost per Mps (or Gigabyte downloaded). I have personally noticed in my own studies that the cost doubles in order to quadruple bandwidth, although this is not confirmed by my colleagues (or any other sources for that matter).

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

Net Neutrality 6-20-2006

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Net Neutrality Links

I’ve added these links to the Net Neutrality Page today.

I don’t usually comment on this page, but then what’s said here is usually thoughts passed on that are either rants or one sided solutions to a complicated situation. Today, however, Scot Karp has changed that pattern for me. His piece,
Eminent Domain: A Modest Solution to Net Neutrality? jarred me out of my “watch the debate,” position into finally seeing Scot’s radical suggestion as one that would hurt, but would work.

So how do we fix this? Are we stuck in telco hell? Silicon Valley can ignite a political arms race and spend more on lobbyists, but why play an old man’s game? Instead, these webbies should get creative, change the rules. Bam-Bam, not Barney Rubble is the future. Take the telcos and cable companies out at the knees.

Here’s an idea: Start screaming like a madman and using four letter words–like K-E-L-O. And fancier words like “eminent domain.” I know, I know. This sounds wrong. These are privately owned wires hanging on poles. But so what? The government-mandated owners have been neglecting them for years–we are left with slums in need of redevelopment. Horse-drawn trolleys ruled cities, too, but had to be destroyed to make way for progress. How do we rip the telco’s trolley tracks out and enable something modern and real competition?

SPEED BUMPS ON THE INFORMATION HIGHWAY [via deal architect]

Check out this graphic:

How the Internet works. Chronicle graphic by John Blanchard

Ethical fog by Stirling Newberry

Chicago Dyke at corrente joins the long list of people commenting on the question of “should blogs take ads from telecos on net neutrality”. Bopnews.com has turned down these ads in the past, but there is no reason to believe that we will turn them down in the future.

Having used blogads at various times, generally with success, I think the paradigm that Skippy has gotten into – that ads are push that people are overly influenced by – simply isn’t backed by my experience. [Blogads] are essentially very gaudy links. Should we turn down Google ads because we can’t control the content? Several sites – like Brad Delong’s – have been very anti-Bush and his executive, and then had google ads that touted Bush gear.

Trying to draw lines that don’t exist – we should not sequester the blogsphere – doesn’t make any sense to me at all. “If you can’t take their money, drink their liquor, smoke their cigars, fuck their women and still vote against them in the morning, you shouldn’t be in this business.” No one has been farther out front against the telecos in the blogspace than Matt Stoller. Prudery when it comes to money is not reasonable, and this is prudery. . .

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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NET NEUTRALITY PAGE