PeerFlow

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:

Popular: Bell Canada Throttling Story in Canada's Biggest Newspaper

This article was for a bit the most popular on thestar.com, the online edition of Canada's largest newspaper, and is still number 5 on most emailed as I type:

The Toronto Star has learned that John Sweeney, Bell's senior vice-president of carrier services, sent a letter to the independent ISPs last Friday acknowledging that Bell has implemented bandwidth management from 4:30 p.m. to 2 a.m. for its wholesale customers. Sweeney admitted that peer-to-peer applications will not work as fast during this period, but argued that "a majority of end users will experience an increased level of satisfaction."

While much of the initial commentary has focused on the implications for consumer rights, that discussion misses the more important aspect of this story, namely that Bell's plans undermine the Internet's competitive landscape by raising three concerns.

— Bell throttles its Internet competitors, Michael Geist, The Star, Apr 01, 2008 04:30 AM

It seems Bell Canada has handed net neutrality advocates proof of their concerns , and that the public is watching. This article isn't some emotional scare piece, either.

Verizon Does Something Right: No Hollywood Policing

Verizon talks sense:

We see substantial increases in the volume of traffic. Generally we see that as a good thing. We have more customers paying for more services we provide.

—Tom Tauke, executive vice president for public affairs, Verizon, quoted in Verizon Rejects Hollywood’s Call to Aid Piracy Fight, By Saul Hansell, Bits, New York Times, February 5, 2008, 3:56 pm

He's specifically responding to requests from Hollywood to police copyright. Tauke lists at least three good reasons not to:

1. Slippery slope. What else? Pornography? Gambling?
2. Liability. Especially for a deep-pockets company like Verizon.
3. Privacy:

   Anything we do has to balance the need of copyright protection with the desire of customers for privacy.

A telco concerned with its customers' privacy? I'd call that a good thing!

There is, nonetheless, a downside.

Canada: Throttling Ahead

A law professor in Ottawa sums up the Canadian net neutrality situation in a paragraph:

Net neutrality concerns mount but politicians do not respond.

Net neutrality, which has been simmering as an issue in Canada over the past three years, will reach a boiling point this year as leading ISPs implement traffic throttling technologies that undermine the reliability of some Internet applications and experiment with differing treatment for some content and applications. Despite consumer concerns, politicians and regulators will do their best to avoid the issue.

— Tech law issues to watch in 2008, Michael Geist, thestar.com, Jan 07, 2008 04:30 AM

No smokescreen about we can't regulate the net. straightforward as to who is causing the problem: ISPs busily implementing throttling while complacent politicians look the other way.

-jsq

Cute Non-Technologists

The Economist buys into the telco propaganda about the Internet running out of bandwidth and Marc Andreesen thoroughly fisks the article:

Interesting! The only (correct) data you have is that carriers are rapidly upgrading their backbones. Isn't that an indicator that they're expanding the amount of available bandwidth to prevent your scenario from happening?

— When non-technologists write about technology, They're so CUTE! Marc Andreessen, blog.pmaraca.com, 23 Dec 2007

It's well worth reading the rest of it.

-jsq

Duopoly Helping Net Neutrality: By Obviously Subverting It

With enemies like these...

Until recently, net neutrality was a difficult issue to explain at a dinner party. It was even more of a struggle to get anybody worked up about it. Now, thanks to the major Internet service providers (ISPs) Comcast and Bell-Sympatico, the stakes are crystal clear and the acrid scent of a smoking gun hangs in the room.

— How the Grinches Stole 'Net Neutrality' Internet service providers play favourites with video, large files and political sites. By Wayne MacPhail, the Tyee, Published: December 27, 2007

...it may seem we don't even need friends, but we do.

A pretty good pro-net neutrality writeup follows. This is the gist:

Is it in the carriers' best interest to allow upstart cheap phone companies like Skype or Vonage to suck up bandwidth with its inexpensive and excellent service? Nope, but in a free market and a neutral Internet, upstarts happen. The traditional players just don't like it much and want the nonsense to stop.

You want upstarts? You want net neutrality.

That plus the duopoly wants to control content:

Exabyte Flood As Politics

Control or profits? Which does Wall Street want?

Slashdot finds a post by Ars Technica spelling out how the Nemertes report saying the Internet may get clogged by increasing usage is just part of a political campaign to use increasing Internet traffic as an excuse to nuke net neutrality. A campaign going on since at least January, when the Discovery Institute's Brett Swanson posted "The Coming Exaflood" in the Wall Street Journal. Beware the thousand thousand petabyes!

My favorite piece of the campaign is this one:

We should not fear the exaflood, however. It is key to the innovative new services and applications that appear almost daily. Consider the growing number of universities that are making course lectures available online, often in real time. Or telemedicine programs that are transmitting medical images and linking patients with distant specialists for real-time consultations.

— Bring On The Exaflood! Broadband Needs a Boost By Bruce Mehlman and Larry Irving Washington Post, Thursday, May 24, 2007; Page A31

No reason to fear the deluge! The telcos will protect you. As long as they don't have that nasty net neutrality in the way,

Packet Privacy and Net Neutrality

Everybody's familiar with consumer identity privacy, as in protecting passwords and social security numbers and complying with HIPAA, GLBA, SOX, PIPEDA, et al. But what about packet privacy?

Never mind net neutrality, I want my privacy. As in packet privacy. The telcos say they need to sell non-neutral routing of traffic to recover the cost of building broadband networks. Moving from the Internet, where a packet-is-a-packet, to something that looks suspiciously like the 20th century telephone network requires remarrying the content and connectivity that TCP/IP divorced. It requires deep packet inspection. It requires looking at the content of communication.

AT&tT does not plan to roll out two physical pipes to every end point in order to sell Google enhanced access. The new telco plan calls for content-based routing to separate traffic into media and destination specific VPNs (Virtual Private Networks). Laws exist to address the substantial privacy threats created by the fact telephone companies know Mr. Smith called Mr. Jones, but the privacy risks associated with “content routing” replacing “end point routing” enter an different realm.

— Forget Neutrality — Keep Packets Private, by Daniel Berninger, GigaOm, Sunday, January 14, 2007 at 8:30 PM PT

Despite Berninger's phrasing, packet privacy isn't something separate from net neutrality: it's one of the key features of it. The point is that net neutrality isn't just about pricing policies or technical means of content routing: it's about privacy. And privacy is an issue that everybody understands. Stifling, throttling, or disconnecting without announced limits, censoring, wiretapping, and espionage: these are all violations of packet privacy.

-jsq

Moderate? Comcast Stifling Isn't

Promising unlimited access, not delivering, and refusing to admit it is managing a network for the good of the many above the activities of the few? Pete Abel thinks so:

Earlier this month, Comcast — the nation’s largest cable broadband company — was caught doing what any good Internet Service Provider (ISP) should do, i.e., manage its network to ensure that the online activities of the few don’t interfere with the online activities of the many,

Fair vs. Foul in Net Neutrality Debate, By Pete Abel, The Moderate Voice, 24 November 2007

The problem with Comcast stifling BitTorrent by faking reset packets from a participant is not that Comcast is trying to manage its network: it's that Comcast used a technique that if it came from anyone other than an ISP would be considered malicious denial of service, that Comcast still hasn't admitted doing it, and that Comcast bypassed numerous other methods of legitimate network management, such as those used by PlusNet. Comcast could even use the Australian model and sell access plans that state usage limits and throttle or charge or both for usage above those limits. What Comcast is doing it seems to me is much closer to the false advertising of unlimited access that got Verizon slapped down for wrongful account termination.

The biggest problem with what Comcast (and Cox, and AT&T, and Verizon) are doing is that their typical customer has at most one or two choices, which in practice means that if your local cable company and your local telephone company choose to stifle, throttle, block, or terminate, you have no recourse, because there's nowhere to go. Competition would fix that.

Abel tries to back up his peculiar interpretation of network management with revisionist history:

Duopoly Fear Factor: Metered Access or a Thousand Flowers

EFF mentions "unmetered" once regarding how the duopoly currently says "unlimited" yet stifles BitTorrent or whatever else it thinks is too much.

George Ou flips that one word around: EFF wants to saddle you with metered Internet service. Scary, eh?

You know, I remember real metered pay-per-byte telephone charges, where Ma Bell would charge you a flat rate for the first three minutes and cash in for every minute thereafter, and the European PTTs would also add in exorbitant international fees. That's not what EFF is recommending.

PlusNet: Honest Prioritization

Unlike Comcast and Cox, PlusNet in the U.K. says what it is doing:

The principles of PlusNet's network management policies

• To make sure that time-critical applications like VoIP and gaming are always prioritised
• To protect interactive applications like web-browsing and VPN from non-time sensitive download traffic
• To flex the network under demand to cope with normal peaks and troughs from day to day and month to month
• To flex the network more gracefully than other ISPs in the event of unusual demands in traffic or disaster situations such as a network failure
• To provide a service relative to the amount each customer pays in terms of usage and experience
• Provides a 'quality of service' effect, meaning multiple applications running on the same line interact with each other effectively, and use of high demand protocols like Peer-to-Peer doesn't swamp time-sensitive traffic such as online gaming or a VoIP call.

— Traffic Prioritisation, PlusNet, accessed 26 Nov 2007

Interestingly, this list does not cite video as the most-favored application, instead it lists VoIP and gaming, which are participatory services. However, scan down to their table of types of traffic, and VoIP and gaming are Titanium, while video-on-demand is the highest level, Platinum.

FiOS: Sort of Fast 20Mbps Symmetric

Verizon is starting to sell sort of fast symmetrical access, that is, 20Mbps in both directions. The price is $64.99/month, which is only about twice what you pay in Japan for more than twice the bandwidth. Also only in New Jersey, Connecticut, and New York.

In an apparent reference to the ongoing Comcast stifling or perhaps even to Verizon's own admission of deceptive marketing of "unlimited" wireless telephone access:

Many FTTH providers also cap their symmetrical service, and whether the 20/20 tier would be capped was the first question fired at Verizon on the conference call.

"We don't impose caps upon our subscribers," insisted Susan Retta, Vice President of broadband solutions for Verizon. "We expect customers who order this 20/20 service will want to use it frequently, and we intend to give them the bandwidth that they ordered and they expect."

— Verizon Unveils Symmetrical 20Mbps FiOS, So far only in NY, NJ and CT... by Karl, BroadbandReports.com, 02:34PM Tuesday Oct 23 2007

Well, the bandwidth people expect in Japan is 50 to 100 Mbps, and only 30Mbps and above is considered actually fast, as in ultra-highspeed broadband. Here in the U.S., where the media don't report on other countries much, perhaps expectations are lower.

Interesting admission here:

Comcast v. CxOs: Blocking Lotus Notes, Too

Comcast stifling isn't just for BitTorrent anymore:

The EFF found that not just Gnutella—another file sharing app—was being blocked, but Lotus Notes, an app businesses use to share calendars, emails and files over the net had its traffic interfered with as well. It's fine to piss off a bunch of file sharers, but when Comcast starts making sure that a CTO can't get the files off his work machine, that's a different story altogether. Net Neutrality, we need you!

— Comcast Blocking Gnutella and Lotus Notes Traffic? Gizmodo, 22 October 2007

Nevermind the CTO. Think of the CFO and CEO:

Lotus Notes! As in, corporate enterpriseware that suits use to synchronize their projects.

—Comcast also screwing with Gnutella and Lotus Notes (!?!) by Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing, October 22, 2007 1:43 PM

Meanwhile, over in Japan, everybody from the national and local governments to broadband providers to application writers to Internet participants are concentrating on fast speeds, ubiquitous use, and new applications, not to mention international competitiveness.

Comcast Stifling BitTorrent

This was expected (cablecos, like telcos, want "freedom to degrade"), but is now confirmed:

Comcast Corp. actively interferes with attempts by some of its high-speed Internet subscribers to share files online, a move that runs counter to the tradition of treating all types of Net traffic equally.

The interference, which The Associated Press confirmed through nationwide tests, is the most drastic example yet of data discrimination by a U.S. Internet service provider. It involves company computers masquerading as those of its users.

If widely applied by other ISPs, the technology Comcast is using would be a crippling blow to the BitTorrent, eDonkey and Gnutella file-sharing networks. While these are mainly known as sources of copyright music, software and movies, BitTorrent in particular is emerging as a legitimate tool for quickly disseminating legal content.

— Comcast blocks some Internet traffic, Tests confirm data discrimination by number 2 U.S. service provider, by Jeff Chiu, AP, 19 Oct 2007

Comcast was denying blocking or throttling as recently as August (and as near as I can tell they still do deny it). Numerous users reported it, and the AP has now confirmed it. However, what Comcast is doing isn't precisely throttling.

The Amazon Channel

It's all very well to talk about net neutrality or Internet freedom and how it affects 700Mhz spectrum sales or freedom of the press. But what does all this have to do with the average Internet user?

Suppose the telcos and cablecos get everything they want.

To buy a BBQ grill on eBay, you'll have to pay for the eBay channel. This is above whatever you pay the seller for the grill or eBay for your membership. You'll have to pay your local Internet access company just to let you get to eBay to participate in the auction. Oh, maybe you'll be able to get there anyway, but your access may be so slow that you'll pay for the eBay channel out of frustration.

If you want to buy a book from Amazon, you'll have to pay for the Amazon channel. For search you'll need the Yahoo channel or the ask.com channel or the google channel. Assuming your favorite search engine is even offered as a channel. Many smaller services probably won't be.

Maybe it won't be quite this bad.

Comcast's Secret Bandwidth Limits

Just when you think it's all telcos doing things dire for Internet freedom:

Comcast has warned broadband Internet customers across the country to curb their downloading or wind up on the curb.

The company has a bandwidth limitation that, if broken, can result in a 12-month suspension of service. The problem, according to customer complaints, is that the telecom giant refuses to reveal how much downloading is too much.

The company, which a few years ago advertised the service as “unlimited” has an “acceptable use policy” which enforces the invisible download limit.

The 23-part policy, states that it is a breach of contract to generate “levels of traffic sufficient to impede others' ability to send or retrieve information.” But nowhere does it detail what levels of traffic will impede others.

—Comcast Cuts Off Heavy Internet Users, Customers complain bandwidth limits are secret, By Joseph S. Enoch ConsumerAffairs.Com, August 24, 2007

And you have to wonder how long that AUP said that while Comcast was advertising "unlimited".

This part is especially enlightening:

Douglas said the company shuts off people's Internet if it affects the performance of their neighbors because often many people will share a connection on one data pipe.

So instead of fixing their bad topology, they penalize customers for using it.

Well, it's a free market, right? Comcast users who don't like it can switch to, er, if they're lucky and have any choice at all, probably to whichever of Verizon or AT&T happens to be in their area. There couldn't be any problems with those providers, could there?

Meanwhile, if you want to follow this Comcast controversy, here's the Comcast Broadband dispute blog that one of the cast-offs started, presumably using his new DSL connection.It's kind of like salmon organizing against a dam upstream.

-jsq

Freedom to Degrade

BT made an interesting presentation at an IETF meeting in which it described a spectrum whose endpoints are

• demand side — freedom to degrade others
• ...
• supply side — freedom to degrade competitors

— re-ECN architectural intent by Bob Briscoe, UCL, BT, 68th IETF, Unofficial Birds of a Feather (non-BoF), Prague, 21 Mar 2007

My, freedom is so degrading.

Incumbents Preparing

Cringely gets pessimistic:

In the end the ISPs are going to win this battle, you know. The only thing that will keep them from doing that is competition, something it is difficult to see coming along anytime soon, rather like that lemonade-powered sports car.

— Beyond Net Neutrality: If at first you don't succeed, change the game. I, Cringely, Pulpit, April 6, 2007

Is he just whining?

Ted Who?

The comic is the message.

-jsq