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Net Neutrality 7-2-2006

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Net Neutrality Links

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

What If End-Users Owned Their Access Pipe?

PBS tech columnist Robert Cringely has penned an intriguing (and I think important) piece called “If we build it they will come: It’s time to own our own last mile.” It’s apparently based on conversations he’s had with Bob Frankston, who years ago wrote the VisiCalc program (which Cringely describes as “the first killer app”) and who last year authored an essay entitled “Connectivity is a Utility.” Cringely describes Frankston as “one of the smartest people I speak to.” . . .

If We Build It They Will Come. It’s time to own our own last mile. by Roger X.Cringley

To Bob [Frankston, the programmer who wrote VisiCalc] the issues surrounding Net Neutrality come down to billability and infrastructure. While saying they are doing us favors, ISPs are really offering us services they can bill for. Nothing is aimed at helping us, while everything is aimed at creating a billable event. Take WiFi hotspots, for example. Why should the telephone or cable company care about who connects to my WiFi access point? They are my bits, not the ISP’s. I paid for them. If I can download gigabytes of pornography why can’t I share my hotspot with someone walking down the street wanting to check his e-mail? Frankston’s analogy for this is accusing someone of stealing your porch light by using it to read a street sign.

It isn’t about service, it is about creating billable events, that’s all. And billable events, by definition, are things we have others do because we are unable or unwilling to do for ourselves. So a Verizon or a Comcast does us a favor, they say, by licensing rights to a movie and allowing us to buy or rent it over the Internet. We could buy the rights ourselves, but who would know where to even go? And wouldn’t Verizon, as a big buyer, necessarily get a better price? When you have a preferred or exclusive provider versus a competitive marketplace, prices are always higher, not lower. In this case the ISP isn’t doing us a favor, they are forcing us to buy from them something that we might well be able to buy from someone else for a lot less. . . .

The New Paranoid style in American politics By Andrew Orlowski

The “Net Neutrality” campaign – which created little excitement except on the outer fringes of the web – suggests that the left is now just as capable of being haunted by paranoid fantasies as the right.

What the internet has achieved, with its twisty maze of echo chambers all alike, is a rapid acceleration of this paranoid discourse, which expels nuanced and complex reasoning. Let’s have a look what was being written this week, after the Senate failed to pass those “Neutrality” provisions, as these hundreds of Nation States of One broadcast their distress signals.

“This could mean the death of small internet businesses,” wrote one MySpace blogger, quoted on CNET. A Republican opponent of the “Net Neutrality” legislation was graced, on the same site, with this riposte:

“Thanks, Jim, for being a fascist and promoting fascism in our country.”

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

Net Neutrality 7-1-2006

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Net Neutrality Links

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

Stopping the Big Giveaway – by John Kerry

The Commerce Committee voted on net neutrality and it failed on an 11-11 tie. This vote was a gift to cable and telephone companies, and a slap in the face of every Internet user and consumer.

It will not stand.

I voted against this lousy bill for two reasons: because net neutrality and internet build-out are crucial to building a more modern and fair Information Society, and both were pushed aside by the Republicans.

. . . Why are United States Senators afraid to say that companies should be expected to foster growth by building out their broadband networks to increase access?

. . . This bill was passed in committee over our objections. Now we need to fight to either fix it or kill it in the full Senate. Senator Wyden has already drawn a line in the sand — putting a “hold” on the bill, which prevents it from going forward for now. But there will be a day of reckoning on this legislation soon, make no mistake about it, and we need you to get engaged — pressure your Senators, follow the issue, demand net neutrality and build-out.

It’s not just net neutrality that is at stake

Kos wrote yesterday that the Net Neutrality amendment was defeated yesterday in the Commerce Committee, and there have been several diaries about that since. A bill that was kept however has not been remarked upon here. This is the revival of the broadcast flag, which the FCC had mandated several years ago but was struck down by a court. Now the entertainment industry is trying to bring the broadcast flag back with a new law. . . .

With respect to the broadcast flag however, Republicans take precisely the opposite position. By supporting the broadcast flag, they are saying that it is necessary for the government to control which of those transmissions that we listen to or watch on TV we can record: something that is unprecedented. It has been taken for granted up until now by everyone that if you can hear something on the radio or hear it on TV you should be able to record it, but the broadcast flag would change all that. The government would require all electronic devices that are capable of receiving digital TV or radio signals to implement restrictions blocking recording of those signals if the producer of the signal has embedded in it a flag indicating that it does not want the signal recorded. In other words, the government will mandate that you no longer control what you do with your electronic devices, but the corporations of the entertainment industry do.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

Net Neutrality 6-30-2006

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Net Neutrality Links

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

Net Neutrality Amendment Defeated in Senate Committee

“We are not going to get it solved with one solution or the other,” telecom analyst Jeff Kagan told the E-Commerce Times. “We have to come up with alternatives and compromises. I don’t know what will be acceptable to both sides.”

A U.S. Senate committee on Wednesday rejected an amendment that would prevent Internet service providers from charging Web firms more for faster service to consumers. The amendment failed by an 11-11 vote. . . .

Psst! The Internet just went corporate

Did anybody feel a disturbance in the Force yesterday? Nope, I didn’t either. But Neo was spinning in his cybergrave: The ‘Net went corporate on Wednesday, with the blessing of the U.S. Congress.

Yes, you can still surf anywhere you want on the Internet. But depending on what you’re looking for, it may take forever to load. See, there’s this bill sponsored by the telecommunications industry (uh-oh) intended to remunerate carriers for their support of the Internet. It all comes down to that wonderfully vague and innocuous term “‘Net neutrality”: Right now, everyone’s site is carried with equal speed and service, whether it’s Google.com or Ihaveapetferret.net. But the telco companies want high-dollar outfits (like Google) to pay for better service. That means Ihaveapetferret.net (and any other small site without Google million$ at its fingertips) likely won’t have the cash to pay up — and will get ghettoized by the carriers. Meaning… unless your blog is a blockbuster, no one’s going to read it. It’ll simply take too long to load.

Has Anyone Read the FCC’s USF for VoIP Order yet? To lift from Stephen Colbert, “Is it bad or the worst thing we have ever seen out of Washington?”

All I can do is ask: Was recent DC activity on Capitol Hill a calculated effort of misdirection of David Copperfield proportions (David Copperfield of modern magic and Claudia Schiffer fame, not the David Copperfield of Dickens fame, although many a VoIP provider might, as a result, find itself living in a Dickensian “Bleak House” as a result)?

How come we couldn’t see the humungo elephant right in front of our eyes? While we were amassing all our troops on the hill trying to protect our flank on the eastern front, we were getting wiped out this week on the western front. Why does the FCC say VoIP providers give us all your money?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

Net Neutrality 6-29-2006

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Net Neutrality Links

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

Net Neutrality Matters by Scott Russell

Imagine a world where Internet performance is controlled by the company who owns the cables and where speed is sold to the highest bidder. Imagine a world where some Web sites load faster than others, where some sites aren’t even visible and where search engines pay a tax to make sure their services perform at an acceptable speed. That’s the world US Telecommunications companies (telcos) such as AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner are trying to create. . . .

To the lay person, it may seem like a laughable proposition. As Cory Doctorow (FreePress) put it, “It’s a dumb idea to put the plumbers who laid a pipe in charge of who gets to use it.” And yet the US congress is swaying towards the view of the telcos, so what’s going on?

Blogtopia “Under Grave and Immediate Threat”

Imagine trying to cope with today’s world without blogs.

On second thought, it’s too painful.

Yet, it may happen sooner rather than later:

Blogs have gained a growing cultural and political impact in the United States and worldwide. In the United States, they’ve been credited with playing a key role in the resignation of a U.S. Senate Majority Leader and the public repudiation of a longtime TV news anchor. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of the English language deemed “blog” its word of the year in 2004. The Technorati website boasts that it keeps track of some 28 million blogs worldwide.

Undeniably, blogs and their collective identity known as the “blogosphere” have become an extraordinary phenomenon. And no matter what topics they may discuss or what political leanings they may espouse, they are all under grave and immediate threat.

The Internet’s Oedipal Drama

Fundamental changes have already taken place in the Internet’s traffic load. In the good old days when the Internet was a private club for elite Universities and defense contractors, traffic was light even for the primitive pipes of the day. When congestion collapse appeared it was viable, just barely, to manage it with an end-to-end system that relied on good behavior on the part of the community, because there was a community. The overloaded Internet of the mid 80’s got new life from exponential backoff and slow start in TCP, because the most aggressive consumer of bandwidth was ftp, the files it transferred were short, and users were patient. They didn’t have spam, viruses, worms, or phishing either.

Now that the Internet has to contend with a billion users and multi-gigabyte file transfers with BitTorrent, the honor box model no longer works at all. When BitTorrent is slowed down by backoff, it simply propagates more paths, creating more and more congestion. In another year, the Internet is going to be just as unstable as it was in 1985.

This being the case, the carriers have to implement traffic limits inside the network, building on the mechanisms established as far back as the 1980s with RED and its progeny. This is the only way to control BitTorrent. There is no community and we’re not patient people.

And while they’re doing that, it makes perfect economic and technical sense to implement voice- and video-oriented QoS. Even Berners-Lee acknowledges this, he’s just on the neutrality bandwagon because he’s exercised about third-party billing for web content, a very obscure concern. So whether the phone company manages its links or not, whether they offer third-party billing for QoS or not, and whether the phone company competes with Akamai by offering content caching or not, the Internet will either change or collapse.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

Net Neutrality 6-28-2006

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Net Neutrality Links

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

The pretense of knowledge by Patrick Ross

We are only beginning to understand on how subtle a communication system the functioning of an advanced industrial society is based — a communications system which we call the market and which turns out to be a more efficient mechanism for digesting dispersed information than any that man has deliberately designed.

When F.A. Hayek spoke these words more than thirty years ago in accepting the Nobel Prize for Economics, he was referring to the market as a communications system, a reflection of the increasing role of information as a driver of the economy. But these words also speak to the global communications system we call the Internet or cyberspace. While the individual elements of the Internet are designed by man, its growth and evolution has been almost organic, not unlike the development of the market Hayek described. Hayek devoted his career to championing markets over government planning, and his 1974 speech in Stockholm was no exception. His words ring true today as we hear of plans to impose limitations on this modern communications system, this market if you will, by the government in the form of network neutrality regulations.

Net Neutrality: The Mainstream’s still unconscious

The newspaper of record in our nation’s capital, The Washington Post, correctly observes that the rhetoric around net neutrality “has concealed more than it has illuminated.” However the reporter, Jeffrey Birnbaum, parrots elements of the carrier’s arguments in his column, “No Neutral Ground in This Internet Battle.” He fails to provide both sides of the argument in full, suggesting repeatedly that the carriers’ are the aggreived parties.

Let’s begin with his definition of net neutrality:

Net neutrality, which is shorthand for network neutrality, is one of two possible answers to the following legislative question: Should cable and telephone companies be allowed to charge add-on fees to others for access to their networks.

Under a net-neutral system, the answer would be “no.” If net neutrality were to lose, the answer would be “yes.”

A very different definition of net neutrality than mine: . . .

State governments push for Net neutrality laws

As a U.S. Senate panel prepares for a vote on Net neutrality legislation this week, state attorneys general in New York and California are joining Internet companies in saying that network operators must not be permitted to prioritize certain broadband content and services.

In a letter sent Friday to the leaders of the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, a Democrat, urged the adoption of a proposal called the Internet Freedom Preservation Act. This is the first time that state officials have entered the Net neutrality debate.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

Net Neutrality 6-27-2006

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Net Neutrality Links

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

How can we keep the Bells from committing net-neutricide?

How do you detect when the Bells are committing neutricide? It can’t be as simple as measuring throughput. There’s a host in China that I can’t reach from my ISP in London because of an incorrectly configured router at Sprint. That’s stupid and painful, but it’s not the same thing as anti-neutral. Distinguishing stupidity from malice from outside is going to be very hard.

One thing we don’t want is something like the SEC’s anti-insider-trading rules. Network neutrality rules won’t have much practical use if the only way to get them enforced is to convince a bureaucrat at the FCC to raid AT&T’s sales office, seize its files, and investigate your suspicions of wrongdoing. . .

Hyperbolic neutrality nonsense

Netflix founder Reed Hastings wants to move his company’s video distribution system off the postal system and onto the Internet, where it would become a major consumer of bandwidth. He’s worried about traffic-sensitive pricing, so he invokes the all-singing, all-dancing Wonder Principle, “net neutrality”, on the opinion pages of America’s most credulous newspaper:

Today, forces are at work to stake out future control of Web site traffic and eliminate the Internet’s longstanding openness. . . .

. . . While I can sympathize with Mr. Hastings’ desire to have Fedex service for the price of a first class stamp, I’d rather not be the one to pay the difference.

EXCLUSIVE: AT&T CEO’s political donations to net neutrality opponents

As AT&T continues its battles with net neutrality proponents on Capitol Hill this week, I thought it would be interesting to see where AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre has been spending his own money this campaign and election cycle.

I went to Opensecrets.org, and checked under “Whitacre.” . . . .

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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NET NEUTRALITY PAGE