PeerFlow

Comcast: P2P Stifling Fail! Says FCC Chair

Maybe attacking Kevin Martin's vanity is the way to get net neutrality, or at least that seems to have backfired on Comcast:

Remember how Comcast this week told us that 1) the FCC's "Internet policy statement" (PDF) had no legal force and 2) that the agency might not have the authority to enact such rules even if it wanted to? Those theories will soon be put to the test, as Republican FCC Chairman Kevin Martin now says he wants to rule against Comcast in the dispute over the company's P2P upload throttling. Score one huge, precedent-setting win for net neutrality backers.

Martin stands up for "principles"

Martin broke the news Thursday evening by way of the Associated Press, telling them that "the Commission has adopted a set of principles that protects consumers' access to the Internet. We found that Comcast's actions in this instance violated our principles."

— Comcast loses: FCC head slams company's P2P filtering, By Nate Anderson, ars technica, | Published: July 11, 2008 - 01:30AM CT

Oh, wait:

The decision could be an historic one, but not for its actual effect on Comcast. The cable company has already announced plans to transition away from the current throttling regime to something that looks more at overall bandwidth use rather than particular applications. Trials in Pennsylvania are currently underway on the new system, set to be deployed by year's end. Martin's order would therefore not require the company to do anything new, but it would have to provide more detail about past and future practices.

Lots of sound and fury signifying...?

I'd say it's a bit too early to say Scott Cleland was wrong when he said enforcement of the FCC's net neutrality principles was "preposterous".

-jsq

Patrick Henry Was Unreasonable, Too: Fight FISA "Compromise" on the Fourth of July!

On the Fourth of July, who wants to legalize their government spying on them, their children, their parents, and their neighbors, without even a warrant? Listening to every phone call; reading every text message, IM, email, and facebook poke; watching every video you post or view? This is what we expect from Hugo Chavez, from Fidel Castro, or from the old Soviet Union. Yet that is just what the United States Senate is proposing to do, after the House already passed it.

After fighting and winning a war at long odds against the greatest empire on earth, at the demand of the people, the Founders of U.S. added a Bill of Rights to the Constitution, the fourth of ten of which is:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

—Fourth Amendment, U.S. Constitution, effective 15 Dec 1791

That is what the Congress proposes to give away next week, by saying telcos like AT&T and Verizon can spy on you as long as they have a note from the president saying it's OK.

The Internet provides us tools to bring the Senators to their senses.

To quote a fighter against that same world-spanning empire, Mohandas K. Gandhi:

L.A. Times to cut 250 Jobs: Less Free Press; More Need for a Free Internet

There's good news and there's bad news:

The Los Angeles Times on Wednesday announced plans to cut 250 positions across the company, including 150 positions in editorial, in a new effort to bring expenses into line with declining revenue. In a further cost-cutting step, the newspaper will reduce the number of pages it publishes each week by 15%.

"You all know the paradox we find ourselves in," Times Editor Russ Stanton said in a memo to the staff. "Thanks to the Internet, we have more readers for our great journalism than at any time in our history. But also thanks to the Internet, our advertisers have more choices, and we have less money."

— Los Angeles Times to cut 250 jobs, including 150 from news staff, By Michael A. Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer, July 3, 2008

One reason for these cuts is the housing downturn in California: fewer real estate ads. But there are deeper reasons:

Announcements of hundreds of reductions were issued only last week by dailies in Boston, San Jose, Detroit and elsewhere. Among Tribune newspapers, the Baltimore Sun said it would cut about 100 positions by early August and the Hartford Courant announced plans to cut about 50 newsroom positions. The New York Times and the Washington Post both instituted layoffs or buyouts to reduce their staffs this year.

Besides the changes in the newspaper industry, Tribune carries the burden of about $1 billion in annual payments on its debt, much of which it took on to finance the $8.2-billion buyout.

Sure, it's happening everywhere. But the L.A. Times is one of the best sources of journalism around. Why did somebody find it worthwhile to buy it out just to load it up with debt and force layoffs?

Whether this newspaper was targetted or not, the handwriting is on the wall for fishwraps. They'll either adapt to the Internet or die. I suspect many of them will die. That means we'll lose many of our traditional sources of real reporting. Fortunately, some new sources are arising, such as Talking Points Memo, which bit into the Justice Department scandals and hung on like a bulldog. Yet blogs like that thus far have a tiny fraction of the resources of big newspapers like the L.A. Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. There's going to be a time of unsettlement of the fishwrap plains while the new shops in cyberspace put down roots into the old country.

And we won't have ready access to either the remaining existing newspapers worldwide or to the new online sources of reporting unless we have a free Internet. Yet another reason that net neutrality is important.

Yet another reason not to let the telcos get away with retroactive immunity. Remember, the telcos currently paying off Congress are the same companies that want to squelch net neutrality. If they can get away with handing over every bit to the NSA yesterday, why would they stop at squelching your P2P today?

-jsq

Amnesty Foes 2.0: SenatorObama-PleaseVoteAgainstFISA

I've been waiting for this to hit the bigtime, and it has, it's been slashdotted:

ya really notes a blog posting up at Wired reporting that foes of the Telecom Amnesty Bill have mounted a campaign on Barack Obama's own website. Though the group was created only days ago, on June 25, it has grown to be the fifth largest among 7,000 such groups, just short of Women for Obama. Although it is widely known that Obama changed his stance from opposing telecom immunity to supporting it, many have not given up hope of getting him to switch once again.

Telecom Amnesty Foes On the Move, Posted by kdawson, slashdot, on Tuesday July 01, @08:02AM from the one-week-and-counting dept.

And today the group has more than 9,000 members and is #2 among all MyBO groups.

It's everywhere else, too, Time, WSJ, Wired, Huffington Post, TPM, DailyKos, MyDD, OpenLeft, digg, reddit, and of course facebook. Read all about it on the wiki.

(Yes, I'm a member of the group, since about the second day, and here's what I think about the issue.)

This group is a goldmine of information about which telecoms gave what money to whom.

The most significant part to me is that people are using a candidate's own organizing tools to attempt to organize the candidate. Not stopping there, either, attempting to organize allies for the candidate. Obama claims to be people-powered. Let him say that while other politicians follow money from lobbyists, he listens to the people who give him money, who are the people, and when they said think again he did, and discovered the bogus House FISA "compromise" bill is no such thing, and now he's against it. We'll see.

-jsq

Online Everyone: The Internet for Everyone, a new public/private coalition

Google's Vint Cerf, ZIPcar's Robin Chase, FCC's Adelstein: Internet for Everyone, a public/private coalition for getting everyone online:

It's Google's involvement in the deal that makes the new coalition something to keep an eye on. The company has expanded its Washington DC lobbying group significantly in the past few years.

"When you have a public interest community up against a massive industrial sector like the cable and telco companies, you're going to likely fail because of the corrupted political system where money buys influence," said Silver. "However, if you can align the public interest with major industrial sectors that also have an increasing influence in Washington, then you have something formidable, then you actually can beat the cable and phone cartel, and this is going to how its going to play out."

— Net Neutrality Advocates Call For Fast, Universal Access To The Net, By Sarah Lai Stirland, Wired, June 24, 2008,

Access, choice, openness, innovation: yes, those are the points (plus speed), without being weighed down by the albatross of the clunky "net neutrality" malnym.

-jsq

PS: Free Press: if you're going to put a video up front, pick a fluent public speaker such as Robin Chase or Jonathan Zittrain to show first, eh? "Collective hallucination," yes!

Banana Republic, DC: Telecom Lobbying Revolving Door

Greenwald notes that AT&T spends more in three months for lobbying than EFF's entire budget for a year. Then he spells out how the lobbying revolving door works, and concludes:

The "two sides" referenced there means the House Democratic leadership and the telecoms. Congressional leaders are "negotiating" with the telecoms -- the defendants in pending lawsuits -- regarding the best way for immunizing them from liability for their lawbreaking, no doubt with the help of the former Democratic members and staffers now being paid by the telecoms to speak to their former bosses and colleagues about what they should do. To describe the process is to illustrate its oozing, banana-republic-like corruption, but that's generally how our laws are written.

None of this is particularly new, but it's still remarkable to be able to document it in such grotesque detail and see how transparent it all is. In one sense, it's just extraordinary how seamlessly and relentlessly the wheels of this dirty process churn. But in another sense, it's perhaps even more remarkable -- given the forces lined up behind telecom amnesty -- that those who have been working against it, with far fewer resources and relying largely on a series of disruptive tactics and ongoing efforts to mobilize citizen anger, have been able to stop it so far.

— How telecoms are attempting to buy amnesty from Congress, Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com, Saturday May 24, 2008 06:48 EDT

Remember, AT&T and the other telcos and cablecos are the same companies that want to nuke net neutrality in the name of competition and progress; two other flags they behind, just like the banana republic flag of national security.

-jsq

ATCA Again: Duopoly Against VoIP Long Before Video

Back in 1995, an organization calling itself AMERICA'S CARRIERS TELECOMMUNICATION ASSOCIATION ("ACTA"), petitioned the FCC to regulate Voice over IP (VoIP) services. The gist of the matter was:

Permitting long distance service to be given away is not in the public interest.

In other words, if the telcos couldn't make money off of it, nobody should.

A usually reliable source says:

The ACTA petition was the first time that the FCC confronted VoIP as a policy issue. The FCC, however, never acted on the ACTA petition, and ACTA, the moving party, no longer exists. The question presented by the ACTA petition was whether the FCC had regulatory authority to regulate VoIP Internet software used by individuals to do telephony with each other, with no service provider in the middle.

— VoIP: ACTA Petition, Cybertelecom

It's interesting that the same telcos that now rail against regulation were happy to try to use it back in 1995 when it suit their purposes.

So ATCA failed to control VoIP via FCC regulation. But they can use volume charging to eliminate both VoIP and video they don't provide themselves.

The duopoly's claims of a few people using too much traffic are a smokescreen. The real issue is control: they want to control what passes through "their" networks so they can profit by as much of it as possible. I have no objection to telcos and cablecos making a profit. I do object to them squelching everybody else to do so. On the Internet you can connect any two tin cans, unless the duopoly can cut your string.

-jsq

Byte Charging Rears Its Ugly Head

Here it is again:

Some people use the Internet simply to check e-mail and look up phone numbers. Others are online all day, downloading big video and music files.

For years, both kinds of Web surfers have paid the same price for access. But now three of the country’s largest Internet service providers are threatening to clamp down on their most active subscribers by placing monthly limits on their online activity.

— Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic, By BRIAN STELTER, New York Times, Published: June 15, 2008

The article names Time Warner, Comcast, and AT&T as the three prospective byte chargers.

I can remember when all the European PTTs charged by the byte. That held the Internet in Europe back by at least four years. The article rightly points out byte charging would interfere with all sorts of business plans. It would also inhibit political speech.

Isn't it lovely when the duopoly that controls U.S. Internet access considers participation a leak that needs to be fixed?

-jsq

An Integral Part: the Internet intertwined with everything else

This is what the Internet is best at:

My blog is an integral part of my life, and I'm neither ashamed of it, nor do I think my online friendships are lesser than physical friendships. And they become physical friendships, a lot of times. I travel all over the place, and whenever there's anybody in the area I try to meet up with them. I owe almost everything going on in my life right now to blogging and the Internet, and that's fine with me. The Internet does nothing so well as social networking. The other day, I realized I was living with someone I had met on LiveJournal, spreading jam I had gotten from a friend I met on LiveJournal, and having breakfast at a table I had bought on Craigslist — everything I was doing that day had to do with this glittering network of people I had found through the Internet. The blog doesn't really interfere with my writing because it comes from a completely different side of the brain. I do feel guilty when I get too busy and haven't posted, but I would never stop doing it. It's an integral part of the way I market my books and interact with my audience.

— Catherynne M. Valente: Playing in the Garden, Locus, May 2008

Valente writes fiction, yet many companies can attest to the same kind of intertwining of the Internet with everything else they do.

And there was not a word in there about wanting the Internet turned into cable TV.

-jsq

Vigilantes Against BitTorrent? Revision3 Taken Down by SYN Floods

Revision3 uses BitTorrent to distribute legal Internet television. It turns out using BitTorrent may be enough to subject a company to crippling online attack.

On the internet, computers say hi with a special type of packet, called “SYN”. A conversation between devices typically requires just one short SYN packet exchange, before moving on to larger messages containing real data. And most of the traffic cops on the internet – routers, firewalls and load balancers – are designed to mostly handle those larger messages. So a flood of SYN packets, just like a room full of hyperactive screaming toddlers, can cause all sorts of problems.

...

That’s what happened to us. Another device on the internet flooded one of our servers with an overdose of SYN packets, and it shut down – bringing the rest of Revision3 with it. In webspeak it’s called a Denial of Service attack – aka DoS – and it happens when one machine overwhelms another with too many packets, or messages, too quickly. The receiving machine attempts to deal with all that traffic, but in the end just gives up.

...

A bit of address translation, and we’d discovered our nemesis. But instead of some shadowy underground criminal syndicate, the packets were coming from right in our home state of California. In fact, we traced the vast majority of those packets to a public company called Artistdirect (ARTD.OB). Once we were able to get their internet provider on the line, they verified that yes, indeed, that internet address belonged to a subsidiary of Artist Direct, called MediaDefender.

— Inside the Attack that Crippled Revision3, by Jim Louderback in Polemics, on May 29th, 2008 at 07:49 am

The plot thickens from there. Well worth reading. I bet the legal proceedings will be even more interesting.

-jsq

Porter's Five Forces and Net Neutrality: What If Distribution Channels are Open?

Here's a take on why telcos so adamantly oppose net neutrality:

The eager and almost rabid application of Porter's "Five Forces" (Supplier Power, Customer Power, Threat of New Entrants, Threat of Substitute Products, Industry Rivalry) to technology products and services has bred an entire generation of MBAs in marketing positions dedicated to developing and maintaining closed systems and closed hardware platforms. This is particularly egregious in the case of business models that are effectively based on distribution channels. In conventional analysis there is nothing wrong with making your living on distribution channels. Remember, that in 1979, when Porter developed the Five Forces framework, distribution channels were highly expensive to create and maintain and, owing to these costs, constructing them effectively presented a significant barrier to entry. Your product didn't even have to be particularly good, because the threat of substitutes was reduced via the difficulty and expense of the competition actually getting those substitutes (however good they might be) to your customers. Suppliers, if they wanted access to your customer base as a proxy to sell their raw materials, had to go through you. New entrants had to build an entirely new distribution channel. Customers were stuck. You owned the market. But you had to guard this distribution channel carefully. And you had to make sure you hadn't forgotten something simple and critical. That's not part of a conventional Porter analysis. But why would it be? Conventional distribution channels are quite physical, antique and boring.

— The Five Forces/Circles of Hell, a Private Equity Professional, Going Private, 27 April 2008

The article goes on to detail how Blockbuster used the old Porter model of closed distribution channels and Netflix used an existing open distribution channel: the U.S. Postal Service.

To spell out the telco connection:

Postal Hikes and Time Warner's Role Discovered by New York Review of Magazines

The New York Review of Magazines catches up with Time Warner and the postal rate hikes it lobbied for and got. First, the bottom line:

...the true price of letting corporations shape government policy: free speech.

— Going Postal, Callie Enlow, New York Review of Magazines, 2008

The NYRB gets into some of the underlying political machinations:

Even Time Warner was taken aback. Halstein Stralberg, co-creator of Time’s rate proposal, said, “There was a new chairman at the commission and there was a totally new environment, and they adopted it, to my surprise.”

The NYRM noted the sudden parachuting in of a new chairman just before the decision as unusual:

In the corporate world, The Progressive Populist would most likely be forced out of business. But should the same rules apply when the product is ideas and the conduit is a government-owned monopoly? To the current administration, the answer is yes, said Cullen. The president appoints the five commissioners that compose the Postal Regulatory Commission. Between the 2005 Time Warner complaint, when the PRC rejected the corporation’s proposed rate restructuring, and the 2006 rate hearings, when the PRC adopted the suggestions almost verbatim, two new commissioners joined the PRC. One of them, Dan G. Blair, replaced George Omas as chairman just one month before the end of the rate cases, a move that Bob Cohen described as “pretty unusual.”

However, the NYRM didn't follow up on the other chairman, the chairman of the Postal Board of Governors from January 2005 to January 2008, James C. Miller III, and his 27-year-old theory:

"...none should be favored and none benefited. Each party pays the cost of service it consumes, not less, and does not bear the cost of others’ consumption."

Curious how someone with that philosophy should be chairman just at the time the decision was made.

The NYRM does say what happened, why it was unusual, and who it affected:

Positive Externalities: What Yoo Ignores

It turns out Prof. Chris Yoo has been rebutted by legal scholars before:

Our article directly replies to a series of articles published by Professor Christopher Yoo on this topic. Yoo's scholarship has been very influential in shaping one side of the debate. Yoo has mounted a sophisticated economic attack on network neutrality, drawing from economic theories pertaining to congestion, club goods, public goods, vertical integration, industrial organization, and other economic subdisciplines. Yet he draws selectively.

For example, his discussion of congestion and club goods is partial in that he ignores the set of congestible club goods that are most comparable to the Internet - public infrastructure. Yoo focuses on the negative externalities generated by users (i.e., congestion) but barely considers the positive externalities generated by users (he simply assumes that they are best internalized by network owners). Yoo appeals to vertical integration theory to support his trumpeting of 'network diversity' as the clarion call for the Internet, but he myopically focuses on the teaching of the Chicago School of economics and fails to consider adequately the extensive post-Chicago School literature. And so on.

In our article, we explain the critical flaws in Yoo's arguments and present a series of important arguments that he and most other opponents of network neutrality regulation ignore.

— Network Neutrality and the Economics of an Information Superhighway: A Reply to Professor Yoo, BRETT M. FRISCHMANN, Loyola University of Chicago - Law School; Fordham University - School of Law, BARBARA VAN SCHEWICK, Stanford Law School, Jurimetrics, Vol. 47, 2007, Stanford Public Law Working Paper No. 1014691, Stanford Law and Economics Olin Working Paper No. 351

Hm, "positive externalities generated by users" as in participation and ad hoc content creation.

The authors also address David P. Reed's point that competition is not the holy grail of networking:

By focusing only on the market for last-mile broadband networks, Yoo not only neglects the importance of unfettered application-level innovation for realizing economic growth and the role of a nondiscriminatory access regime in fostering the production of a wide range of public and nonmarket goods. His argument also neglects other ways to solve the problem of broadband deployment that would not impede competition and innovation in complementary markets.

-jsq

Myths and Historical Errors: Cherry Re Yoo

Dr. Barbara Cherry sent me a response to Dr. Chris Yoo's "novel" opinion of her antitrust theory. Dave Farber posted Barb's comments on his Interesting People list, although without her postscript with the pointer to her articles and book. Farber appended a response from Chris, which I'll post separately.

From: "Cherry, Barbara" <cherryb at indiana.edu>
Date: Fri, 9 May 2008 18:28:04 -0400
Subject: Re: Prof. Yoo responds for Prof. Farber

John,

Christopher Yoo's response unfortunately contains several historical analytical errors that I've repeatedly discussed in my writings. It is unlikely that he actually read my TPRC paper to which you provided a link in our blog, as he would have readily discovered some of them.

Perhaps the fundamental problem is that many economists and legal scholars commenting on the network neutrality debate DO NOT understand the history of common carriage. Under the common law, common carriage obligations were TORT obligations imposed on carriers (in their relationship with customers) simply by virtue of their status of engaging in the business. In other words, the obligations are STATUS-BASED and unrelated to the industry's market structure. Attributing the imposition of common carriage obligations to natural monopoly is a MYTH, unfortunately so often erroneously repeated in the secondary literature that it is believed to be true.

The rest after the jump.

Social Welfare: Reed Asks Yoo

David P. Reed asks a question and Christopher S. Yoo responds on Farber's Interesting People list. I'm posting both in full here, with my thoughts at the end; basically, law isn't a science, and anecdotes can turn into legal cases; some have already regarding net neutrality.

From: David P. Reed [dpreed@reed.com]
Sent: Saturday, May 10, 2008 11:50 AM
To: David Farber
Cc: ip
Subject: Re: [IP] re-distribution of op-ed on Net Neutrality -- a reaction and a reply from one of the authors

I read through the long comment by Chris Yoo below, and as a non-lawyer interested in policy, I ask the following simple question:

Is there a well-regarded (one might ask for scientifically reasoned) argument that antitrust law as currently interpreted and practiced has a substantial impact measured in some currency like $ on social welfare?

Otherwise this entire argument is about nothing more than vaporware proceeding from a faith that competition (however loosely defined) creates social welfare best. AFAIK, this is largely an article of faith, just as the "End of History" was a grand article of faith posited by many of the same people as "truth".

It is just not fair to imply that the core of "today's settled antitrust law" carries even the level of weight as Darwin's Theory of Evolution. There have been no replicable studies of its practice.

Law professors and lawyers who don't challenge its truthiness squarely are merely behaving as dogmatic mandarins always do - asserting authority of professional status, rather than rigor of reasoning, experiment, or argument.

I say this not as FOX News or Hillary Clinton would call an elitist, but as a person who genuinely is unconvinced by magical faith in authorities.

That's Reed's question. Yoo's response, and my thoughts, after the jump.

Novel Point of View: Dr. Chris Yoo's Opinion of Dr. Barbara Cherry's Antitrust Opinion

I previously posted a pointer to Barbara Cherry's examination of antitrust history in response to Dave Farber's posting of an op-ed against net neutrality. Dave responds:

( INDEED I AM NOT A LAWYER AND SO I ASKED PROF. YOO, ON THE FACULTY OF PENN LAW AND ONE OF THE AUTHORS OF THE EDITORIAL, TO REPLY TO THIS NOT -- IN PARTICULAR PROF. CHERRY'S COMMENTS. DAVE FARBER)

— re-distribution of op-ed on Net Neutrality -- a reaction and a reply from one of the authors, David Farber, Interesting People, Fri, 9 May 2008 15:23:10 -0400

Here's Prof. Yoo's response:

From: "Christopher S. Yoo" <csyoo@law.upenn.edu>
Date: May 9, 2008 2:51:40 PM EDT
To: "David Farber" <dave@farber.net>
Cc: "Faulhaber, Gerald" <faulhabe@wharton.upenn.edu>

Dave Farber forwarded me a recent e-mail asking for a lawyer's reaction to Barbara Cherry's recent presentation and paper questioning whether antitrust law can protect against the harms envisioned by network neutrality proponents. As the only lawyer among the co-authors of the op-ed that Dave, Michael Katz, Gerry Faulhaber, and I worked up for the Washington Post, I am happy to offer a few thoughts. (Those interested in a different take on the relationship between network neutrality and antitrust law may want to look here: http://ssrn.com/abstract=992837.)

Barbara's work is based on a theory advanced by Neil Averitt and Robert Lande that would place consumer choice at the center of antitrust policy. As Averitt and Lande explicitly recognize, their theory would represent a fairly significant break (they would call it a paradigm shift) away from current antitrust law, which focuses on maximizing economic (and particularly consumer) welfare.

Interestingly, antitrust law once was quite friendly toward the consumer choice perspective that Barbara favors. (I review these developments in vol. 94 of the Georgetown Law Journal at pages 1885-87, http://ssrn.com/abstract=825669.) Early cases like FTC v. Brown Shoe (1966) and Times-Picayune Publishing v. United States (1953) invalidated exclusive dealing and tying contracts (which are among the types of antitrust practices most similar to network nonneutrality) because they infringed on unfettered consumer choice.

The rest of Dr. Yoo's response after the jump, and my response in a following post.

Sitcoms as Gin, or, Looking for the Mouse

Clay Shirky explains why sitcoms serve the same function as gin did in industrial revolution Britain:

Transcript.

This is why traditional media fear the Internet. They have been supplying the gin to keep us all intoxicated instead of doing anything participatory or useful with our leisure time. The Internet (and gaming, and computers in general) provides ways of interacting and participating at every scale from local to global that have never existed before. And people are starting to use them.

Think about that the next time somebody equates "screen time" for television and the Internet.

-jsq

Hamlet in DC: To Legislate or Not to Legislate, That is the Question

The U.S. Senate takes up net neutrality again, to legislate or not to legislate:

At a Senate Commerce Committee hearing entitled "The Future of the Internet" on Tuesday, Democratic politicians argued for passage of a law designed to prohibit broadband operators from creating a "fast lane" for certain Internet content and applications. Their stance drew familiar criticism from the cable industry, their Republican counterparts, and FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, who said there's no demonstrated need for new rules, at this point.

— Net neutrality battle returns to the U.S. Senate, by Anne Broache, C|Net News.com, 22 April 2008

Some of the senators seemed to think the Comcast debacle indicated there was need for legislation:

"To whatever degree people were alleging that this was a solution in search of a problem, it has found its problem," said Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.). "We have an obligation to try and guarantee that the same freedom and the same creativity that was able to bring us to where we are today continues, going forward."

Kerry is one of the backers of a bill called the Internet Freedom Preservation Act, chiefly sponsored by North Dakota Democrat Byron Dorgan and Maine Republican Olympia Snowe, which resurfaced at the beginning of 2007 but has gotten little attention since. A similar measure failed in a divided Commerce Committee and in the House of Representatives nearly two years ago.

Unsurprisingly, Martin says he doesn't need a law to enforce, because he can make it up as he goes along:

ISPs Escalate Ignoring FCC

Fox started the trend of ignoring the FCC when it does something they don't like. Now the duopoly has gotten up to the same trick:

Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, and cable research company CableLabs were all invited to participate several weeks ago, but declined, Martin said. The commission again reached out to Comcast after the announcement this week that it would develop a P2P bill of rights with Pando Networks, but they again sent their regrets, he said.

— ISPs Give FCC Cold Shoulder at Internet Hearing, by Chloe Albanesius, PCMag.com, 04.17.08

You may recall at the previous hearing, at Harvard, FCC chair Kevin Martin couldn't hear the difference between participant and consumer, while Comcast hired shills off the street to take up seats so people with things to say couldn't. Now the duopoly is painting the FCC as unduly critical of themselves, and the press is going along with that, including the hometown Silicon Valley newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News, which should know better:

Novelty Used Against Net Neutrality by Duopoly

A musician warns us about novelty being used to subvert participation, and comes up with a clever analogy:

We hate when things are taken from us (so we rage at censorship), but we also love to get new things. And the providers are chomping at the bit to offer them to us: new high-bandwidth treats like superfast high-definition video and quick movie downloads. They can make it sound great: newer, bigger, faster, better! But the new fast lanes they propose will be theirs to control and exploit and sell access to, without the level playing field that common carriage built into today’s network.

They won’t be blocking anything per se — we’ll never know what we’re not getting — they’ll just be leapfrogging today’s technology with a new, higher-bandwidth network where they get to be the gatekeepers and toll collectors. The superlative new video on offer will be available from (surprise, surprise) them, or companies who’ve paid them for the privilege of access to their customers. If this model sounds familiar, that’s because it is. It’s how cable TV operates.

— Beware the New New Thing, By DAMIAN KULASH Jr., Op-Ed Contributor, New York Times, Published: April 5, 2008

Yep, and the cablecos and telcos have not been shy about saying that's what they want to do.

Here's the new analogy:

Big picture: Net Neutrality vs. Social Control by Big Media

Most net neutrality discussions get bogged down in details. This video draws the big picture from the beginnings of the Internet, backwards to the "consolidation" of earlier forms of media such as the printing press and radio, to what the duopoly is trying to do to the Internet.

Do we want the Internet to go the way of newspapers, radio, and TV, and even the postal service, with 90+% of content provided by half a dozen big corporations and only op-eds and heavily selected and edited letters permitted from the great unwashed? Hey, they've got that in China, and there most of the population believes that Tibetans are barbarian recipients of superior Chinese culture, so Chinese troops are totally justified in squashing any ungrateful opposition. We could return to depending on the traditional media in the U.S.; after all, they only helped lie us into a war of choice in Iraq, costing $2 billion a week that we could be using to deal with education, health care, and preserving the natural world. Or we can fight for Internet freedom.

-jsq

Where the Recipient is Going to Be: Any E-Mail, File Transfer, or Web Search

People are surprised to learn this?

In the end, it turns out it's all about the emails.

— Spying Fight about Emails, Not Phone Calls, DOJ Reveals, By Ryan Singel ThreatLevel, Wired, March 04, 2008 | 4:47:36 PMCategories: NSA

The blogger goes on to point out that almost all of the recent fearmongering, which has been about telephone calls, is just plain wrong. Duh! Half the fearmongers don't understand what they're talking about (e.g.,

Consumer or Participant? FCC Can't Hear the Difference

David S. Isenberg harps on one of my favorite points:

"...consumer, consumer, consumer . . . "

. . . even when Ammori, Benkler, Wu have explained, "Citizen, participant, creator, innovator, investor . . . "

— Kevin Martin at FCC Hearing, David S. Isenberg, isen.blog, 25 Feb 2008

Apparently Martin hears only what he has been instructed to hear. He already demonstrated he doesn't listen to Congress or the public; why should he listen to professional experts?

-jsq

Shills By Comcast at FCC Hearing

This appears to be the week for Comcast to really make a fool of itself.

Comcast acknowledges that it hired people to take up room at an F.C.C. hearing into its practices.

— Grassroots Support? Or Astroturf? by Sam Gustin, Portfolio.com, Feb 26 2008

Some reports said the shills were Comcast employees, but it turns out many of them were hired off the street. They were given yellow highlighters to put in their shirt pockets so they could identify themselves to each other.

Comcast, the company that claims to understand the Internet so well it thinks faking TCP Resets is good network management (which is what that FCC meeting was about), apparently thought in this day of cell phone cameras and blog posts that nobody would notice....

-jsq

Internet Freedom Policy Act

Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Chip Pickering (R-MS) have introduced the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008, which will amend Title I of the Communications Act of 1934 to say Internet freedom, commerce, innovation, participation, and speech are the policy of the United States. It's interesting what this bill does not say. It doesn't specify any regulations, so that those who oppose net neutrality don't have a leg to stand on when they say net neutrality is all about regulation. It doesn't say "net neutrality": it says "freedom", "marketplace", "innovation", and other positive benefits. (I think I'll take a cue from Commissioner Copps and start referring to Internet freedom.) It doesn't say "consumers" except a few times, including once where that word is immediately qualified by

(i) access, use, send, receive, or offer lawful content, applications, or services over broadband networks, including the Internet;

Let's see, if "consumers" can send their own content, applications, and service, they're not really consumers in the traditional sense, now are they?

This is all very nice, in that Markey and Pickering apparently get it about what Internet freedom is about. However, why does this bill have no teeth, unlike Markey's bill of last year or the Snowe-Durgan bill before that?

Comcast Viewed as Great Firewall of China

Prof. Jean Camp points out that:

This is ironically exactly the mechanism used by the Great Firewall of China. When China does it, we call it "censorship".

— Re: [IP] Comcast FCC filing shows gap between hype, bandwidth, Jean Camp, Interesting People, 14 Feb 2008

She points to a paper that details that the Great Firewall of China uses exactly the same forged TCP Reset method that Comcast uses, and how to work around such damage:

Temporary Delays? Comcast vs. Access to Content

Aswin Navin by David Shankbone

In an article about Comcast defending against a complaint brought with the FCC about its throttling of Internet content, there's a larger theme:

Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee's subcommittee on telecommunications and the Internet, plans to introduce a bill today calling for an Internet policy that would prohibit network operators from unreasonably interfering with consumers' right to access and use content over broadband networks. The bill also calls for the FCC to hold eight meetings around the nation to assess whether there is enough competition among network providers and whether consumers' rights are being upheld.

"Our goal is to ensure that the next generation of Internet innovators will have the same opportunity, the same unfettered access to Internet content, services and applications that fostered the developers of Yahoo, Netscape and Google," Markey said in a written statement yesterday.

— Comcast Defends Role As Internet Traffic Cop By Cecilia Kang, Washington Post Staff Writer, Wednesday, February 13, 2008; Page D01

Markey gets it. Too bad the FCC doesn't.

Meanwhile, part of Comcast's defense is:

Canadian Net Neutrality

In Canada, an ISP has even gotten up to blocking striking employees' website:

During the Telus strike in 2005, the corporation blocked access to a website run by striking Telus employees called “Voices for Change” (and at least 766 other websites). Those familiar with network-control issues in Canada also accuse Rogers and Bell of limiting peer-to-peer (P2P) applications, which people use to share audio, video and other digital data with one another. So, here we have ISPs blocking or at least limiting the use of what is likely the most innovative, creative and participatory use of the Internet. In response to customer concerns, Bell recently admitted that they “are now using Internet Traffic Management to restrict accounts that are using a large portion of bandwidth during peak hours. Some of the applications that are included are the following: BitTorrent, Gnutella, LimeWire, Kazaa….”

— The Fight for the Open Internet, Steve Anderson, Canadian Dimension magazine, January/February 2008 issue

The rest sounds very familiar:

Principles: the FCC's Don't Mean Squat --Cleland

Duopoly apologist Scott Cleland spells out what everybody should have already known:

The petitions assume that the FCC's policy of network neutrality principles have the legal and binding effect of formal FCC rules or law and that they trump all existing law and rules. This is preposterous.

— The Common Sense Case Why Network Management Trumps Net Neutrality, Scott Cleland, Precursor Blog, 15 Jan 2008

Indeed, it is preposterous to think that the FCC ever meant to enforce its net neutrality "Policy Statement" of August 2005. Even if it did, the very way the four "principles" in that statement are worded, every one in terms of consumers, excludes the very existence of participatory services such as BitTorrent.

Cleland's blog goes to great lengths to spell out what he considers common sense (which means he knows he doesn't actually have a legal argument). Don't be surprised if his items get parrotted by other anti-Internet-freedom blogs. And don't be surprised if the FCC rules in favor of Comcast, even though any competent network engineer can tell you that there are ways to do network management that don't involve faking reset packets, a technique that would be considered malicious denial of service if it came from any entity other than an ISP, not to mention Comcast's BitTorrent stifling seems closer to the fraudulent promise of unlimited service that got Verizon fined by New York State.

[Clarified:] It's not about network management. It's about a few corporations and their political allies trying to stifle net neutrality and Internet freedom against the best interests of everyone else, including their own customers.

-jsq