PeerFlow

Economists still calling computer networks "virtual" while interconnectivity is exposing economic externalities

While artists and designers have discovered there's no sharp distinction between "real" and "virtual" (aka the New Aesthetic), economists are still talking about "virtual", even as the networks of computers they're referring to are exposing the economic externalities the greed of the "first economy" is built on.

Bill Davidow wrote for the Atlantic 10 April 2012, How Computers Are Creating a Second Economy Without Workers,

"Twenty years ago, if you went into an airport you would walk up to a counter and present paper tickets to a human being. That person would register you on a computer, notify the flight you'd arrived, and check your luggage in. All this was done by humans."

Well, except for that part about "a computer". And the flight computers in the airplane. And the FAA computers. And....

This is also true:

"Today, you walk into an airport and look for a machine. You put in a frequent-flier card or credit card, and it takes just three or four seconds to get back a boarding pass, receipt, and luggage tag. What interests me is what happens in those three or four seconds. The moment the card goes in, you are starting a huge conversation conducted entirely among machines. Once your name is recognized, computers are checking your flight status with the airlines, your past travel history, your name with the TSA (and possibly also with the National Security Agency). They are checking your seat choice, your frequent-flier status, and your access to lounges."

While Bruce Sterling can (rightly, I think) say that's not AI, nonetheless it all happens without much human intervention. And pixelated images of airplanes don't start to indicate what's going on in there.

The punchline:

"Here's the challenge: In the past, every million-dollar increase in economic output generated on the order of ten jobs. In the future, in the productive Second Economy, it may generate only one or two."

That's not new. I'm a farmer, and 90% of farm jobs in this country

Against SOPA and PIPA, for an open Internet

If you haven't heard of SOPA and PIPA, you will today, as reddit, Wikipedia, Google, Craigslist, Free Software Foundation, and many other websites protest those Internet censorship bills today. The so-called Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is a House bill (H.R.3261) and the so-called PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) is a Senate bill (S.968) (most recently renamed Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011). Both have nothing to do with promoting creativity and everything to do with giving a few large copyright holders priority over the Internet, requiring censorship of links to entire domains. Have you heard of the Great Firewall of China? That's where the Chinese government censors entire domains such as facebook, youtube, and twitter because they contain some content that the Chinese government doesn't want distributed. SOPA and PIPA would do the same thing, except putting Hollywood in charge of what would be censored. In a perfect example of the DC lobbying revolving door, former Senator Chris Dodd, now Chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, called the anti-SOPA blackout an "abuse of power". Funny how it's only an abuse of power when we fight back.

If you don't believe me, listen to Mythbuster Adam Savage.

Here's a technical explanation. And here's a letter of objection many of the engineers who built the Internet.

Here's where the anti-SOPA blackout started:

Stop Internet censorship —Internet Engineers

Parker Higgins and Peter Eckersley wrote for EFF 15 December 2011, An Open Letter From Internet Engineers to the U.S. Congress

Today, a group of 83 prominent Internet inventors and engineers sent an open letter to members of the United States Congress, stating their opposition to the SOPA and PIPA Internet blacklist bills that are under consideration in the House and Senate respectively.

The signatories are people such as Vint Cerf you may have heard of even if you know nothing about the technical details of Internet, and many other people who helped produce the network you are using now. I know many of them, and they are right. If you want a free and open Internet, call or write your Senators and Congress members today, and tell them to vote against PIPA and SOPA.

The full text of the letter is appended below.

-jsq

We, the undersigned, have played various parts in building a network called the Internet. We wrote and debugged the software; we defined the standards and protocols that talk over that network. Many of us invented parts of it. We're just a little proud of the social and economic benefits that our project, the Internet, has brought with it.

Last year, many of us wrote to you and your colleagues to warn about the proposed "COICA" copyright and censorship legislation. Today, we are writing again to reiterate our concerns about the SOPA and PIPA derivatives of last year's bill, that are under consideration in the House and Senate. In many respects, these proposals are worse than the one we were alarmed to read last year.

If enacted, either of these bills will create an environment of tremendous fear and uncertainty for technological innovation, and seriously harm the credibility of the United States in its role as a steward of key Internet infrastructure. Regardless of recent amendments to SOPA, both bills will risk fragmenting the Internet's global domain name system (DNS) and have other capricious technical consequences. In exchange for this, such legislation would engender censorship that will simultaneously be circumvented by deliberate infringers while hampering innocent parties' right and ability to communicate and express themselves online.

All censorship schemes impact speech beyond the category they were intended to restrict, but these bills are particularly egregious in that regard because they cause entire domains to vanish from the Web, not just infringing pages or files. Worse, an incredible range of useful, law-abiding sites can be blacklisted under these proposals. In fact, it seems that this has already begun to happen under the nascent DHS/ICE seizures program.

Censorship of Internet infrastructure will inevitably cause network errors and security problems. This is true in China, Iran and other countries that censor the network today; it will be just as true of American censorship. It is also true regardless of whether censorship is implemented via the DNS, proxies, firewalls, or any other method. Types of network errors and insecurity that we wrestle with today will become more widespread, and will affect sites other than those blacklisted by the American government.

The current bills -- SOPA explicitly and PIPA implicitly -- also threaten engineers who build Internet systems or offer services that are not readily and automatically compliant with censorship actions by the U.S. government. When we designed the Internet the first time, our priorities were reliability, robustness and minimizing central points of failure or control. We are alarmed that Congress is so close to mandating censorship-compliance as a design requirement for new Internet innovations. This can only damage the security of the network, and give authoritarian governments more power over what their citizens can read and publish.

The US government has regularly claimed that it supports a free and open Internet, both domestically and abroad. We cannot have a free and open Internet unless its naming and routing systems sit above the political concerns and objectives of any one government or industry. To date, the leading role the US has played in this infrastructure has been fairly uncontroversial because America is seen as a trustworthy arbiter and a neutral bastion of free expression. If the US begins to use its central position in the network for censorship that advances its political and economic agenda, the consequences will be far-reaching and destructive.

Senators, Congressmen, we believe the Internet is too important and too valuable to be endangered in this way, and implore you to put these bills aside.

Signed,

• Vint Cerf, co-designer of TCP/IP, one of the "fathers of the Internet", signing as private citizen
• Paul Vixie, author of BIND, the most widely-used DNS server software, and President of the Internet Systems Consortium
• Tony Li, co-author of BGP (the protocol used to arrange Internet routing); chair of the IRTF's Routing Research Group; a Cisco Fellow; and architect for many of the systems that have actually been used to build the Internet
• Steven Bellovin, invented the DNS cache contamination attack; co-authored the first book on Internet security; recipient of the 2007 NIST/NSA National Computer Systems Security Award and member of the DHS Science and Technology Advisory Committee
• Jim Gettys, editor of the HTTP/1.1 protocol standards, which we use to do everything on the Web
• Dave Kristol, co-author, RFCs 2109, 2965 (Web cookies); contributor, RFC 2616 (HTTP/1.1)
• Steve Deering, Ph.D., invented the IP multicast feature of the Internet; lead designer of IPv6 (version 6 of the Internet Protocol)
• David Ulevitch, David Ulevitch, CEO of OpenDNS, which offers alternative DNS services for enhanced security.
• Elizabeth Feinler, director of the Network Information Center (NIC) at SRI International, administered the Internet Name Space from 1970 until 1989 and developed the naming conventions for the internet top level domains (TLDs) of .mil, .gov, .com, .org, etc. under contracts to DoD
• Robert W. Taylor, founded and funded the beginning of the ARPAnet; founded and managed the Xerox PARC Computer Science Lab which designed and built the first networked personal computer (Alto), the Ethernet, the first internet protocol and internet, and desktop publishing
• Fred Baker, former IETF chair, has written about 50 RFCs and contributed to about 150 more, regarding widely used Internet technology
• Dan Kaminsky, Chief Scientist, DKH
• Esther Dyson, EDventure; founding chairman, ICANN; former chairman, EFF; active investor in many start-ups that support commerce, news and advertising on the Internet; director, Sunlight Foundation
• Walt Daniels, IBM’s contributor to MIME, the mechanism used to add attachments to emails
• Nathaniel Borenstein, Chief Scientist, Mimecast; one of the two authors of the MIME protocol, and has worked on many other software systems and protocols, mostly related to e-mail and payments
• Simon Higgs, designed the role of the stealth DNS server that protects a.root-servers.net; worked on all versions of Draft Postel for creating new TLDs and addressed trademark issues with a complimentary Internet Draft; ran the shared-TLD mailing list back in 1995 which defined the domain name registry/registrar relationship; was a root server operator for the Open Root Server Consortium; founded coupons.com in 1994
• John Bartas, was the technical lead on the first commercial IP/TCP software for IBM PCs in 1985-1987 at The Wollongong Group. As part of that work, developed the first tunneling RFC, rfc-1088
• Nathan Eisenberg, Atlas Networks Senior System Administrator; manager of 25K sq. ft. of data centers which provide services to Starbucks, Oracle, and local state
• Dave Crocker, author of Internet standards including email, DKIM anti-abuse, electronic data interchange and facsimile, developer of CSNet and MCI national email services, former IETF Area Director for network management, DNS and standards, recipient of IEEE Internet Award for contributions to email, and serial entrepreneur
• Craig Partridge, architect of how email is routed through the Internet; designed the world's fastest router in the mid 1990s
• Doug Moeller, Chief Technology Officer at Autonet Mobile
• John Todd, Lead Designer/Maintainer - Freenum Project (DNS-based, free telephony/chat pointer system), http://freenum.org/
• Alia Atlas, designed software in a core router (Avici) and has various RFCs around resiliency, MPLS, and ICMP
• Kelly Kane, shared web hosting network operator
• Robert Rodgers, distinguished engineer, Juniper Networks
• Anthony Lauck, helped design and standardize routing protocols and local area network protocols and served on the Internet Architecture Board
• Ramaswamy Aditya, built various networks and web/mail content and application hosting providers including AS10368 (DNAI) which is now part of AS6079 (RCN); did network engineering and peering for that provider; did network engineering for AS25 (UC Berkeley); currently does network engineering for AS177-179 and others (UMich)
• Blake Pfankuch, Connecting Point of Greeley, Network Engineer
• Jon Loeliger, has implemented OSPF, one of the main routing protocols used to determine IP packet delivery; at other companies, has helped design and build the actual computers used to implement core routers or storage delivery systems; at another company, installed network services (T-1 lines and ISP service) into Hotels and Airports across the country
• Jim Deleskie, internetMCI Sr. Network Engineer, Teleglobe Principal Network Architect
• David Barrett, Founder and CEO, Expensify
• Mikki Barry, VP Engineering of InterCon Systems Corp., creators of the first commercial applications software for the Macintosh platform and the first commercial Internet Service Provider in Japan
• Peter Rubenstein,helped to design and build the AOL backbone network, ATDN.
• David Farber, distinguished Professor CMU; Principal in development of CSNET, NSFNET, NREN, GIGABIT TESTBED, and the first operational distributed computer system; EFF board member
• Bradford Chatterjee, Network Engineer, helped design and operate the backbone network for a nationwide ISP serving about 450,000 users
• Gary E. Miller Network Engineer specializing in eCommerce
• Jon Callas, worked on a number of Internet security standards including OpenPGP, ZRTP, DKIM, Signed Syslog, SPKI, and others; also participated in other standards for applications and network routing
• John Kemp, Principal Software Architect, Nokia; helped build the distributed authorization protocol OAuth and its predecessors; former member of the W3C Technical Architecture Group
• Christian Huitema, worked on building the Internet in France and Europe in the 80’s, and authored many Internet standards related to IPv6, RTP, and SIP; a former member of the Internet Architecture Board
• Steve Goldstein, Program Officer for International Networking Coordination at the National Science Foundation 1989-2003, initiated several projects that spread Internet and advanced Internet capabilities globally
• David Newman, 20 years' experience in performance testing of Internet
  infrastructure; author of three RFCs on measurement techniques (two on firewall performance, one on test traffic contents)
• Justin Krejci, helped build and run the two biggest and most successful municipal wifi networks located in Minneapolis, MN and Riverside, CA; building and running a new FTTH network in Minneapolis
• Christopher Liljenstolpe, was the chief architect for AS3561 (at the time about 30% of the Internet backbone by traffic), and AS1221 (Australia's main Internet infrastructure)
• Joe Hamelin, co-founder of Seattle Internet Exchange (http://www.seattleix.net) in 1997, and former peering engineer for Amazon in 2001
• John Adams, operations engineer at Twitter, signing as a private citizen
• David M. Miller, CTO / Exec VP for DNS Made Easy (IP Anycast Managed Enterprise DNS provider)
• Seth Breidbart, helped build the Pluribus IMP/TIP for the ARPANET
• Timothy McGinnis, co-chair of the African Network Information Center Policy Development Working Group, and active in various IETF Working Groups
• Richard Kulawiec, 30 years designing/operating academic/commercial/ISP systems and networks
• Larry Stewart, built the Etherphone at Xerox, the first telephone system working over a local area network; designed early e-commerce systems for the Internet at Open Market
• John Pettitt, Internet commerce pioneer, online since 1983, CEO Free Range Content Inc.; founder/CTO CyberSource & Beyond.com; created online fraud protection software that processes over 2 billion transaction a year
• Brandon Ross, Chief Network Architect and CEO of Network Utility Force LLC
• Chris Boyd, runs a green hosting company and supports EFF-Austin as a board member
• Dr. Richard Clayton, designer of Turnpike, widely used Windows-based Internet access suite; prominent Computer Security researcher at Cambridge University
• Robert Bonomi, designed, built, and implemented, the Internet presence for a number of large corporations
• Owen DeLong, member of the ARIN Advisory Council who has spent more than a decade developing better IP addressing policies for the internet in North America and around the world
• Baudouin Schombe, blog design and content trainer
• Lyndon Nerenberg, Creator of IMAP Binary extension (RFC 3516)
• John Gilmore, co-designed BOOTP (RFC 951), which became DHCP, the way you get an IP address when you plug into an Ethernet or get on a WiFi access point; current EFF board member
• John Bond, Systems Engineer at RIPE NCC maintaining AS25152 (k.root-servers.net.) and AS197000 (f.in-addr-servers.arpa. ,f.ip6-servers.arpa.); signing as a private citizen
• Stephen Farrell, co-author on about 15 RFCs
• Samuel Moats, senior systems engineer for the Department of Defense; helps build and defend the networks that deliver data to Defense Department users
• John Vittal, created the first full email client and the email standards still in use today
• Ryan Rawdon, built out and maintains the network infrastructure for a rapidly growing company in our country's bustling advertising industry; was on the technical operations team for one of our country's largest residential ISPs
• Brian Haberman, has been involved in the design of IPv6, IGMP/MLD, and NTP within the IETF for nearly 15 years
• Eric Tykwinski, Network Engineer working for a small ISP based in the Philadelphia region; currently maintains the network as well as the DNS and server infrastructure
• Noel Chiappa, has been working on the lowest level stuff (the IP protocol level) since 1977; name on the 'Birth of the Internet' plaque at Stanford); actively helping to develop new 'plumbing' at that level
• Robert M. Hinden, worked on the gateways in the early Internet, author of many of the core IPv6 specifications, active in the IETF since the first IETF meeting, author of 37 RFCs, and current Internet Society Board of Trustee member
• Alexander McKenzie, former member of the Network Working Group and participated in the design of the first ARPAnet Host protocols; was the manager of the ARPAnet Network Operation Center that kept the network running in the early 1970s; was a charter member of the International Network Working Group that developed the ideas used in TCP and IP
• Keith Moore, was on the Internet Engineering Steering Group from 1996-2000, as one of two Area Directors for applications; wrote or co-wrote technical specification RFCs associated with email, WWW, and IPv6 transition
• Guy Almes, led the connection of universities in Texas to the NSFnet during the late 1980s; served as Chief Engineer of Internet2 in the late 1990s
• David Mercer, formerly of The River Internet, provided service to more of Arizona than any local or national ISP
• Paul Timmins, designed and runs the multi-state network of a medium sized telephone and internet company in the Midwest
• Stephen L. Casner, led the working group that designed the Real-time Transport Protocol that carries the voice signals in VoIP systems
• Tim Rutherford, DNS and network administrator at C4
• Mike Alexander, helped implement (on the Michigan Terminal System at the University of Michigan) one of the first EMail systems to be connected to the Internet (and to its predecessors such as Bitnet, Mailnet, and UUCP); helped with the basic work to connect MTS to the Internet; implemented various IP related drivers on early Macintosh systems: one allowed TCP/IP connections over ISDN lines and another made a TCP connection look like a serial port
• John Klensin, Ph.D., early and ongoing role in the design of Internet applications and coordination and administrative policies
• L. Jean Camp, former Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories, focusing on computer security; eight years at Harvard's Kennedy School; tenured Professor at Indiana Unviersity's School of Informatics with research addressing security in society.
• Louis Pouzin, designed and implemented the first computer network using datagrams (CYCLADES), from which TCP/IP was derived
• Carl Page, helped found eGroups, the biggest social network
  of its day, 14 million users at the point of sale to Yahoo for around $430,000,000, at which point it became Yahoo Groups
• Phil Lapsley, co-author of the Internet Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), RFC 977, and developer of the NNTP reference implementation
• Jack Haverty (MSEE, BSEE MIT 1970), Principal Investigator for several DARPA projects including the first Internet development and operation; Corporate Network Architect for BBN; Founding member of the IAB/ICCB; Internet Architect and Corporate Founding Member of W3C for Oracle Corporation
• Glenn Ricart, Managed the original (FIX) Internet interconnection point

Eyes on their lobbyists' bank accounts

The plutocrats and their bought politicians don't care about Internet free trade, but we should.

Scott Bradner almost gets it about the opposition to net neutrality in Eyes in their ankles: The congressional view of network neutrality:

If you work at a company that uses the Internet to sell to customers or to buy from suppliers you should care about the net neutrality discussion.

You should, but you probably don't have the money to buy some politicians to do something about it, and unfortunately the biggest companies do, and they're busy doing just that:

Woz to FCC: Save the Internet

Wozniak to the FCC on net neutrality:

Imagine that when we started Apple we set things up so that we could charge purchasers of our computers by the number of bits they use. The personal computer revolution would have been delayed a decade or more. If I had to pay for each bit I used on my 6502 microprocessor, I would not have been able to build my own computers anyway.

He also details examples of how difficult it was to start a new service the way the telephone system used to be, how radio used to all be freely receivable, and how cable TV is mis-regulated. He summarizes his case:

I frequently speak to different types of audiences all over the country. When I'm asked my feeling on Net Neutrality I tell the open truth. When I was first asked to "sign on" with some good people interested in Net Neutrality my initial thought was that the economic system works better with tiered pricing for various customers. On the other hand, I'm a founder of the EFF and I care a lot about individuals and their own importance. Finally, the thought hit me that every time and in every way that the telecommunications careers have had power or control, we the people wind up getting screwed. Every audience that I speak this statement and phrase to bursts into applause.

Then he asks for all that not to happen to the Internet:

We have very few government agencies that the populace views as looking out for them, the people. The FCC is one of these agencies that is still wearing a white hat. Not only is current action on Net Neutrality one of the most important times ever for the FCC, it's probably the most momentous and watched action of any government agency in memorable times in terms of setting our perception of whether the government represents the wealthy powers or the average citizen, of whether the government is good or is bad. This decision is important far beyond the domain of the FCC itself.

Ain't that the truth.

-jsq

Duopoly Cons Congress Members

73 Democratic members of Congress signed a letter drafted by telco and cableco lobbyists against net neutrality. Save the Internet has sufficiently fisked it. My favorite point is that when AT&T was required as a condition of acquiring Bellsouth in 2006 to abide by net neutrality, it increased its infrastructure investments. As soon as that two year requirement was up, so were the investments. (And they didn't even honor all the requirements, such as a low-end $10/month service.)

The simple fact is that net neutrality was the condition under which the Internet grew to be what it is today, which is the last bastion of free speech and a free press in much of the world, especially in the United States. The only reason net neutrality is an issue is that the duopoly (telcos and cablecos) succeeded in their regulatory capture of the FCC during Kevin Martin's term as chairman and did away with much it. The U.S. used to have among the fastest Internet speeds in the world. Since the duopoly got their way, the U.S. has fallen far behind dozens of other countries in connection speeds, availability, and update. While the U.S. NTIA claimed at least one user per ZIP code counted as real service.

We can let the telcos and cablecos continue to turn the Internet into cable TV, as they have said they want to do. Under the conditions they want, we never would have had the world wide web, google, YouTube, flickr, facebook, etc.

And left to their plan, the duopoly will continue cherry-picking densely-populated areas and leaving rural areas, such as south Georgia, where I live, to sink or swim. Most of the white area in the Georgia map never had anybody even try a speed test. Most of the rest of south Georgia had really slow access. Which maybe wouldn't be a problem if we had competitive newspapers (we don't) or competing TV stations (we don't). Or if we didn't need to publish public information like health care details online, as Sanford Bishop (D GA-02) says he plans to do. How many people in his district can even get to it? How many won't because their link is too slow? How many could but won't because it costs too much?

John Barrow (D GA-12) has a fancy flashy home page that most people in his district probably can't get to. Yet he signed the letter against net neutrality.

I prefer an open Internet. How about you?

Why did the 73 Democrats sign the letter? Could it have to do with the duopoly making massive campaign contributions to the same Democrats and holding fancy parties for them?

The same lobbyists are after Republican members of Congress next.

Call your member of Congress and insist on giving the FCC power to enforce net neutrality rules.

-jsq

NPRM Diagram 2: scope of rules

Here's the diagram from the NPRM that the FCC folks mentioned frequently at the NANOG panel (The Regulators Meet the Operators, at NANOG 48, Austin, Texas, 22 Feb 2010) regarding scope of net neutrality rule making:

It does seem to clarify some of the points made by the panelists.

More Liveblogging from NANOG Net Neutrality Panel

The Regulators Meet the Operators, at NANOG 48, Austin, Texas, 22 Feb 2010. Notes continued from the previous post. See the pages 37-51 of the NPRM.

Question from a provider: VoIP traffic prioritization from essentially our own service?

Moderator: One thing that won't be allowed is prioritizing your own service over someone else's similar service; that's almost the whole point. FCC person: This is contemplated in the document. Existing services wouldn't have to be reworked rapidly. Seeking input. Reasons to be concerned. Monopoly over last mile has a position to differentially treat such a service. This is one of the core concerns.

Q: Giving the same priority to somebody else's similar VoIP service is essentially creating a trust relationship; how much traffic will the other service provider send?

Liveblogging from NANOG Net Neutrality Panel

The subtitle is The Regulators Meet the Operators, at NANOG 48, Austin, Texas, 22 Feb 2010. The ground rules of the panel are that it's not about politics or policy. It assumes there will be net neutrality, and it's about getting actual network engineers and architects involved in implementing it. Prior reading: pages 41-51 of the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM). I'd actually recommend starting at page 37, which is where the NPRM discusses codifying the existing four Internet principles (see below).

A huge number of comments have been received already, by Jan 15 deadline. More comments are solicited. See also openinternet.gov.

The general idea is to take six proposed principles and turn them into rules that are enforceable and not unreasonable:

Proposed Rules: 6 Principles

• Access to Content
• Access to Applications and Services
• Connect Devices to the Internet
• Access to Competition
• Nondiscrimination
• Transparency

The first four principles have been around for several years. The last two, nondiscrimination and transparency, are the same as the ones Scott Bradner's petition recommended back in June 2009. Back then I mentioned as I always do that the FCC could also stop talking about consumers and talk about participants. Interestingly, their slide at this talk did not use the word "consumer", so maybe they've gotten to that point, too.

The FCC is also making a distinction between broadband and Internet. There are existing rules regarding "managed" vs. "specialized services" for broadband Internet access, but for net neutrality in general, maybe different rules are needed.

Lessig's Herculean Holiday Present: Reboot the FCC

Here's a good test for the new U.S. Executive: to recognize that steady pragmatism means radical change, starting with the FCC:

The solution here is not tinkering. You can't fix DNA. You have to bury it. President Obama should get Congress to shut down the FCC and similar vestigial regulators, which put stability and special interests above the public good. In their place, Congress should create something we could call the Innovation Environment Protection Agency (iEPA), charged with a simple founding mission: "minimal intervention to maximize innovation." The iEPA's core purpose would be to protect innovation from its two historical enemies—excessive government favors, and excessive private monopoly power.

—Reboot the FCC, We'll stifle the Skypes and YouTubes of the future if we don't demolish the regulators that oversee our digital pipelines. By Lawrence Lessig, Newsweek Web Exclusive, 23 Dec 2008

Lessig gets the connection with his old topic of intellectual property and copyright. Those are monopolies granted by the federal government, and they have been abused by the monopoly holders just like the holders of communication monopolies:

Viral Viral: Pretending to Cheat Worked Better Than Cheating for Avril Lavigne Fans

Photo: Arista Records

Avril Lavigne fans push their girl's video to #1 on YouTube by pretending to cheat:

On June 19th, the Avril Lavigne fansite Avril Bandaids launched a “Girlfriend” YouTube Viewer (It’s now been retired) with the intention of making “Girlfriend” the #1 YouTube video of all time. The url that hosted the viewer reloaded the video every 15 seconds. The theory was that Avril fans could load up that url, let it run, and Avril would get the top video spot in no time.

Well, Entertainment Tonight, Perez Hilton, Wired.com, The Globe and Mail, The Sydney Morning Herald, and many others picked up the story and started crying “foul.” How dare this hardcore group choose the number one YouTube video for us!? How dare they! And that’s where this story gets good.

There was no foul. YouTube caps it’s views per specific IP at 200 per day. (That may sound like a lot, but it’s not enough for a small legion of hardcore fans to make a dent in a number approacing 100,000,000.) There was no way they could game YouTube in the way they were purporting; and they knew it all along.

— “Girlfriend” Video Tops YouTube With Viral Viral Marketing (not a typo), by Wade, VoltageCreative.com, 20th August 2008

So they leveraged their leverage by provoking media outrage, causing millions of people to watch the video to see what it's about, and now causing a third wave of blog posts, thus producing still more views.

Now that's clever.

Not the sort of thing you'll ever see come out of telcos or cablecos, either.

-jsq

Boehner's Latest Crying Jag

Boo hoo:

At least one lawmaker is already crying foul over Friday's expected Federal Communications Commission's censure of Comcast for faking internet traffic to limit its customers' peer-to-peer file sharing.

Republican minority leader Rep. John Boehner said the FCC would be "essentially regulating the internet."

— Lawmaker Cries Foul Ahead of FCC Net-Neutrality Decision, By David Kravets, ThreatLevel, July 31, 2008 | 7:02:45 PM

This is rather like crying foul because courts regulate contracts. I wonder how the free market would operate without them? The Internet free market in applications and services wouldn't operate very well without net neutrality.

I don't recall Boehner crying foul when Congress voted to regulate the Internet to require ISPs to hand over every bit (every email, phone call, web page, video, etc.) to the NSA and to legalize them having already done it when it was illegal. No free market talk from him then. Guess he didn't think the Fourth Amendment was worth crying over, unlike Anna Nicole Smith.

And back in 1995, it was the duopoly ISPs demanding regulation from the FCC, because they wanted to squelch VoIP.

Now they want to squelch everybody else's P2P and especially online video, except what they get a cut of. They think they can get away with it if the FCC stays out of the way, so now they are against regulation.

Their principles flip-flop kind of like Boehner's, don't they? Bunch of cry babies.

-jsq

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

Mises Hates Duopoly: Or Only Monopoly and Fictional Wal-E?

I was reading a review of the movie Wal-E, and ran across this quote:

...without the presence of multiple providers of goods in the economy, the single dominant firm is in the same position as a socialist central planner. In the real world, BNL would have no market price signals to help it discern consumer demand for and the relative scarcity of resources. It would not be able to engage in rational economic calculation and would make decisions arbitrarily. Surely, this state would not please many consumers, and the BNL monopoly would be short lived at most.

— WALL-E: Economic Ignorance and the War on Modernity, Daily Article by Gennady Stolyarov II | Posted on 7/4/2008

So is it better if we have a duopoly rather than a monopoly? Is that competitive, then? The current FTC and FCC will say yes. I say no.

Sure, the Austrian school is controversial and all, and I found much of the rest of the review hilariously inapt, but this quote did stick in my mind.

-jsq

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

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

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:

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

Fair Trade: Fixing Antitrust for the Internet

So suppose for the moment that net neutrality is an antitrust issue. Does this bill fix antitrust law enough to deal with it?

Federal lawmakers have introduced yet another network neutrality bill, but this time with a focus on fair trade issues.

This week, U.S. Rep. John Conyers, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, has introduced legislation that addresses the issue by labeling it an antitrust matter. Conyers' H.R. 5994 would ban discriminatory network management practices by amending the Clayton Act.

The bill, labeled the Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act, would require carriers to promote competition and allow people to use any device they want to on the carriers' networks. The bill makes exceptions for emergencies, criminal investigations, parental controls, marketing, and improvements to quality of service.

Under the Detroit Democrat's proposed legislation, ISPs could give preference to certain types of data, but they must give the preference regardless of the data source. It would ban ISPs from discriminating based on content, applications, or services.

— Lawmakers Eye Net Neutrality As Anti-Trust Issue, The Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act would require carriers to promot e competition and allow people to use any device they want to on the carriers' networks. By K.C. Jones, InformationWeek, May 9, 2008 05:42 PM

And does this fix the problems Google and Ebay complain about?

Meanwhile, a cosponsor sums it up:

U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., has co-sponsored the legislation.

"Recent events have shown that net neutrality is more than a hypothetical concern. We need a meaningful remedy to prevent those who control the infrastructure of the Internet from controlling the content on the Internet," Lofgren said. "This legislation will help guarantee that the innovative spirit of the Internet is not trampled."

-jsq

Critics, it's Time to Stop the Quibbling: Broadband in Other Countries

Ars technica sums it up:

One of the ironies of the current broadband situation in the US is that staunch free marketeers defend the status quo even though the result of their views has been duopoly and high prices. Meanwhile, other countries (including those with a reputation in some quarters for "socialism") have taken aggressive steps to create a robust, competitive, consumer-friendly marketplace with the help of regulation and national investment.

Critics, it's time to stop the quibbling: the data collection practices that show the US dropping year-over-year in all sorts of broadband metrics from uptake to price per megabit might not prove solid enough to trust with your life, but we're out of good reasons to doubt their general meaning.

— Broadband: other countries do it better, but how? By Nate Anderson, ars technica, Published: May 11, 2008 - 07:37PM CT

That post includes a table of papers and reports on per-country broadband rankings with corresponding U.S. rankings, from 11 to 24.

Then it gets to lack of political leadership:

Despite the repeated claims of the current administration that our "broadb and policy" is working, the US act ually has no broadband policy and no aggressive and inspiring goals (t hink "moon shot"). The EDUCAUSE model suggests investing $100 billion (a third comes from the feds, a third from the states, and a third from compan ies) to roll out fiber to every home in the country. Whether the particular pro posal has merit or not, it at least has the great virtue of being an ambitious policy that recognizes the broad economic and social benefits from fast broadba nd. 

Here's hoping that the next president, whoever he (or, possibly, she) is, g ives us something more effective—and inspiring—than this. It's telling that the current administration's official page on the President's tech p olicy hasn't had a new speech or press release added since... 2004.

$100 billion may sound like a lot, but the federal government alone spends that much a year on the unnecessary Iraq war. The U.S. needs better priorities.

-jsq

Sensing History: Yoo Re Cherry

Dave Farber posted a response by Chris Yoo to Barb Cherry's post about myths and historical errors. Here's Chris's reponse in full. To me, it seems that he is conceding that she's right about the history, that antitrust says nothing about ISP competition, and that a few ISPs control most of the Internet in the U.S. But read it for yourself:

From: Christopher S. Yoo [mailto:csyoo@law.upenn.edu]

I don't pretend to be an expert on the history of common carriage regulation. Barbara has spent far more time thinking about this than I have, so I always appreciate hearing her reactions and learn from reading her work. That said, here are a few thoughts.

It is true that common carriage long predates both the Granger Movement and the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. That said, one of the central problems is that the historic justifications for common carriage have not aged very well. Often times the common carriage obligations were regarded as a quid pro quo for a government grant of some economic privilege. Other times they were justified because the industry was "affected with a public interest," a concept that is usually traced to the landmark Supreme Court case Munn v. Illinois (1876). The Supreme Court struggled to imbue that standard with content (along with a number of early treatises trying to make sense of the concept) and would ultimately abandon it as analytically empty in Nebbia v. New York (1934). Legal scholars, such as Thomas Nachbar and James Speta in addition to Barbara, have attempted to recover lessons from this era. I have never spoken to Barbara about this in particular, but both Tom and Jim have noted the difficulty in extracting any useful lessons from the history.

The rest after the jump.

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.

Freedom v. Market Mythology

Here's a question that answers itself:

...what is it about individual freedom that "conservatives" like the Spectator and Armey don't like?

To be fair, the debate is larger than the Spectator and Armey. Most congressional Republicans oppose the idea of giving consumers freedom on the Internet. They take shelter in their anti-government, anti-regulation rhetoric, preferring to allow Internet freedom to apply to the corporations which own the networks connecting the Internet to consumers, rather than to consumers themselves. There could, of course, be a larger discussion about the meaning of "conservative" and Republican, and whether the two are synonymous.

(To be fairer still, it's not only Republicans. Many a Democrat also speaks out against Internet freedom. They don't have the fig-leaf of misbegotten ideology to hide behind, as they largely back worthwhile government action in many other areas. They are simply servants of corporate and/or union interests. The question applies equally: What about freedom don't they like?)

— Why The 'Right' Gets Net Neutrality Wrong, Art Brodsky, HuffingtonPost, Posted May 5, 2008 | 10:21 AM (EST)

The clue is "servants of corporate ... interests". (Unions occasionally get into this act; corporations much more frequently.) And it's not simple greed for corporate lobbyist money or kickbacks or the revolving door: many politicians and people really believe the "free market" will solve all problems. That's the origin of the doctrine of "market failure" that has pervaded all U.S. federal departments and agencies. Nevermind that when it's a major airline or automobile manufacturer or, even worse, a financial institution such as Citibank, these same people support all sorts of governmental market manipulations and bailouts. We're talking mythology here, kind of like the "rational actor" myth of economics.

Brodsky digs into the misconceptions behind this myth:

[Peter] Suderman's analysis: "In fact, not only were all of these companies [eBay and Google] born in an era with no mandated net neutrality, it's utterly unclear that a lack of neutrality would've impeded them in any way whatsoever."

That is not how it happened. This is how it happened:

Game on: ECA for net neutrality

Good news:

Gamers are, by nature, a more web-savvy lot than the average Internet consumer. As a result, complicated-sounding concepts like "Net Neutrality" tend to be a pretty easy sell to those individuals whose primary means of entertainment is heavily dependent on fast and unfettered Internet access.

Yesterday the Entertainment Consumers' Association unveiled another new venture into the realm of gamer activism. Following on the success of political action programs such as the Video Game Voters Network, the ECA is hoping to apply a similar formula to the complicated issue of Net Neutrality. The new initiative is called Gamers for Net Neutrality, and its purpose is to provide gamers with the tools necessary to fight the encroaching threat of a micro-monetized and heavily controlled online space.

— ECA Launches Gamers for Net Neutrality, New initiative empowers gamers to help keep online traffic regulation-free. By Mark Whiting, 1up.com, 04/02/2008

This is what it will take to win. We need the FCC to enforce net neutrality. And that will only happen when there's an administration that will make it do so. And that will only happen if the people vote it in. We need more ISP competitors. And that will only happen as customers demand it. This is the path to net neutrality and Internet freedom.

-jsq

PS:

"The Revolution was effected before the war commenced.
The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people...
This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments,
and affections of the people was the real American Revolution."

— John Adams, 1818

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.

Google Wins by Losing 700Mhz Wireless Spectrum Auction

This interpretation seems good:

The real winner here is Google precisely because it lost. Google committed to bidding the minimum $4.6 billion that would trigger open device and open application rules that it had lobbied for, but nobody seriously thought it actually wanted to win the auction. Building out and operating a wireless network is a much lower-margin business than search advertising, and even leasing out the spectrum would have been a distraction. But by putting its $4.6 billion on the table early, it was able to dictate the new rules of the game. Rules that Verizon is now stuck with. All Google really wants are broadband wireless networks that cannot discriminate against Google mobile apps or Android phones no matter who operates them.

— Breaking: FCC Confirms that Big Winner in Spectrum Auction is Verizon. So Why I s Google Smiling? Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch, 20 March 2008

The new rules aren't as good as one might have hoped, and now somebody has to make the FCC enforce them, but at least they're better than the old rules.

-jsq

Nacchio Gets New Trial and Judge

All guilty counts thrown out, and not just a new trial, but a new judge:

The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals has overturned the guilty verdict in the criminal insider trading case of former Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio and ordered a new trial before a different judge.

The 2-1 decision cited U.S. District Judge Edward Nottingham's exclusion of expert testimony by Northwestern University law professor and private consultant Daniel Fischel.

Fischel was allowed to testify on Nacchio's behalf about the facts behind his stock sales, but was excluded from providing economic analysis.

— Nacchio conviction overturned, By Andy Vuong, The Denver Post , Article Last Updated: 03/17/2008 10:33:03 PM MDT

What else will a new trial reveal about the government's dealings with Qwest about warrantless wiretapping?

-jsq

Jettisoned: 8 Centuries of Common Carriage Law

Someone at CAIDA (presumably kc Claffy by the writing style), went to

an invitation-only intensely interactive workshop on the topic of Internet infrastructure economics. participants included economists, network engineers, infrastructure providers, network service providers, regulatory experts, investment analysts, application designers, academic researchers/professors, entrepreneurs/inventors, biologists, oceanographers. almost everyone in more than one category.

— internet infrastructure economics: top ten things i have learned so far, by webmaster, according to the best available data, October 7th, 2007

and wrote up a report including this summary of the political situation:

...and it turns out that in the last 5 years the United States — home of the creativity, inspiration and enlightened government forces (across several different agencies) that gave rise to the Internet in the first place — has thoroughly jettisoned 8 centuries of common carriage law that we critically relied on to guide public policy in equitably provisioning this kind of good in society, including jurisprudence and experience in determining ‘unreasonable discrimination’.

and our justification for this abandonment of eight centuries of common law is that our “government” — and it turns out most of our underinformed population (see (1) above) — believes that market forces will create an open network on their own. which is a particularly suspicious prediction given how the Internet got to where it is today:in the 1960s the US government funded people like vint cerf and steve crocker to build an open network architected around the ‘end to end principle’, the primary intended use of which was CPU and file sharing among government funded researchers. [yes, the U.S. government fully intended to design, build, and maintain a peer-to-peer file-sharing network!]

That's right folks: "resource sharing" was the buzzword back then, and every node was supposed to be potentially a peer to every other.

Back to the Future: 10Mbps by 2012, or, What Japan Had Years Ago

Creeping ahead:

A study from Texas-based research firm Parks Associates predicts that 33 million US households will have broadband connections of 10Mbps or faster by 2012. As of the end of 2007, that figure stood at 5.7 million, which means that a lot of change will have to occur in the US market for that 33 million figure to become a reality.

— Report: 10Mbps broadband in 33 million homes by 2012, By Eric Bangeman, ars technica, Published: March 04, 2008 - 10:20PM CT

Meanwhile, Japan is already doing 100Mbps. But in Japan there is real ISP competition. Unlike in the U.S., where, as shown in the pie chart by Park Associates (via DSL Reports), each of Comcast and AT&T have a fifth of the broadband market, followed by Verizon and Time Warner each with 13%, plus Cox with 7%, and that's 3/4 of the total market served by only five companies, of whom most people have a choice of only two in any given locality. That's not competition.

-jsq

WSJ Fears Innovation: Net Neutrality As Internet Wrecking Ball

Apparently this WSJ opinion writer couldn't actually argue with Ed Markey's net neutrality bill, so he made up a straw man:

Imagine a town that has all sorts of gasoline pipelines running by it but only one gas pump. Rationing is inevitable. So are price controls.

Everyone gets equal amounts, except of course first responders like police and ambulances, which should get all the gas they want. And, well, so should the mayor. And if you can make a good business case that you work 60 miles away, you can file paperwork and perhaps pull some strings for more gas. How about those kids hot-rodding around town who can't drive 55? They get last dibs, and maybe we can sneak in some gas thinner to slow down their engines and not waste gas.

— Internet Wrecking Ball, By Andy Kessler, Wall Street Journal, February 25, 2008; Page A15

What's especially amusing about this strawman is that it's what the duopoly is planning as they do away with net neutrality, except it's not first responders or governments that will get favored bandwidth: it's Hollywood. Meanwhile, Markey's bill doesn't say any of that. It doesn't include any regulation at all.

Kessler invokes Orwell:

This is the essence of the Ed Markey's (D., Mass.) Orwellian-named Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008, which would foist network neutrality on the wild and woolly Internet.

Kessler maybe wasn't around in the earlier days of the Internet, or he would know that net neutrality is what we used to have, until it got chipped away starting in about the year 2000, as the FCC failed to enforce the Unbundled Network Elements (UNE) of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and reclassified cable modem access as an information service in August 2002, wireline broadband in August 2005, and wireless broadband in March 2007. The FCC stripped common carriage status from Internet provision, something never done before in the U.S. So what Markey's bill is actually trying to do is to preserve the freedom the Internet used to have before the present administration and the duopoly systematically tried to do away with it. That's the opposite of Orwellian: that's the plain truth.

If Kessler did know Internet history, or had been around when we were making it, he would know not to write things like this:

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:

Pathetic NTIA Broadband Report: Inflated ZIP Codes and BPL

U.S. Commerce Secretary hails "dramatic growth of broadband" in the U.S., citing a report from National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). That report not only uses the U.S. tinyband definition of 256Kbps as "broadband", it still uses ancient metrics such as this:

By December 2006, 91.5 percent of ZIP codes had three or more competing service providers and more than 50 percent of the nation's ZIP codes had six or more competitors.

— Gutierrez Hails Dramatic U.S. Broadband Growth, Government Technology, Feb 1, 2008, News Report

So any provider that has service available to at least one user in a ZIP code is counted as a "competitor".

Meanwhile, the ARRL says the NTIA report inflates broadband over powerline (BPL) figures:

Shades of NSFNet: EDUCAUSE Proposes 100Mbps Nationwide Broadband

Shades of NSF:

EDUCAUSE, the association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology, today proposed bringing the federal government, state governments, and the private sector together as part of a new approach to making high-speed Internet services available across the country.

The group, whose membership includes information technology officials from more than 2,200 colleges, universities, and other educational organizations, said that a new "universal broadband fund" would be necessary so that "Big Broadband" — services of 100 mbps — could be made widely available.

— EDUCAUSE Proposes New Approach to Broadband Development, Wendy Wigen, Peter B. Deblois, EDUCAUSE, 29 Jan 2008

Back in the 1980s, in the time of standalone dialup Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes), the National Science Foundation (NSF) deployed a nationwide backbone network called NSFNet that eventually ran at the blazing fast for the times speed of 1.55Mbps. NSF also promoted development of NSFNet regional networks, many of which eventually figured in the commercialization of Internet that took off in 1991 when former dialup network UUNET started selling Internet connectivity and former personnel of an NSFNet regional formed PSINet and also started selling Internet connectivity.

Nowadays, when the fastest most people can get as so-called broadband is 1-3Mbps DSL from telcos or maybe 3-5Mbps from cablecos, maybe it's time to do it again. Is this a plan that would work?

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:

Settling for Slow: Duopoly or Competition

This is what the duopoly doesn't want:

In France, for example, the regulator forced France Télécom to rent out its lines. One small start-up firm benefited from this opportunity and then installed technology that was much faster than any of its rivals'. It won so many customers that other operators had to follow suit. In Canada, too, the regulator mandated line-sharing, and provinces subsidised trunk lines from which smaller operators could lease capacity to provide service.

— Open up those highways, The Economist print edition, Jan 17th 2008

The duopoly will settle for the U.S. being slow and expensive as long as they get to collect the rents.

Here's how other countries do it:

AT&T Filtering: Has Tim Wu Not Been Paying Attention?

Katharine Graham by Diana Walker

Tim Wu asks in Slate: Has AT&T Lost Its Mind? It seems he's discovered that:

Chances are that as you read this article, it is passing over part of AT&T's network. That matters, because last week AT&T announced that it is seriously considering plans to examine all the traffic it carries for potential violations of U.S. intellectual property laws. The prospect of AT&T, already accused of spying on our telephone calls, now scanning every e-mail and download for outlawed content is way too totalitarian for my tastes. But the bizarre twist is that the proposal is such a bad idea that it would be not just a disservice to the public but probably a disaster for AT&T itself. If I were a shareholder, I'd want to know one thing: Has AT&T, after 122 years in business, simply lost its mind?

No one knows exactly what AT&T is proposing to build. But if the company means what it says, we're looking at the beginnings of a private police state. That may sound like hyperbole, but what else do you call a system designed to monitor millions of people's Internet consumption? That's not just Orwellian; that's Orwell.

— Has AT&T Lost Its Mind?A baffling proposal to filter the Internet. By Tim Wu, Slate, Posted Wednesday, Jan. 16, 2008, at 10:15 AM ET

Come now; what did you think they were up to?

Time Warner Volume Charging

Transparency via memo leak?

Metered Internet access is a fact of life for many broadband users around the world, but has been largely a nonfactor when it comes to wired broadband in the US. That may change, according to a memo leaked to the Broadband Reports forums. If the memo is to be believed, Time Warner Cable will be rolling out what it calls "Consumption Based Billing" on a trial basis in the Beaumont, Texas area.

Under the proposed scheme, new customers will be able to choose from a couple of different plans with varying bandwidth caps. They'll be given online tools to monitor usage and will be able to upgrade to the next higher tier of service to avoid charges for exceeding their monthly bandwidth limit. If the trial works well, Time Warner would then roll out bandwidth caps to current customers: "We will use the results of the trial to evaluate results for possible future nationwide rollouts," reads the memo.

Bandwidth caps have been a sore subject for some users who have found themselves bumping into mysterious, undefined limits. This past fall, a number of Comcast subscribers complained that their service was cut off after having reached Comcast's bandwidth limit.

— Leaked memo: Time Warner Cable to trial hard bandwidth caps, By Eric Bangeman, ars technica, January 16, 2008 - 04:12PM CT

If the memo is legitimate, it's good that Time Warner is going for more transparency. Although if they want transparency, why don't they just come out and announce what they're doing?

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

Forensic FCC Oversight

Preventive Congressional oversight had no effect on the FCC. We'll see if forensic oversight does any better:

Bipartisan leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee launched an investigation of the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday, three weeks after the agency's controversial vote to ease media ownership restrictions.

In a letter sent to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, the committee asked that all electronic records and personal e-mails related to FCC work be saved.

The committee has "initiated a formal investigation into FCC regulatory procedures to determine if they are being conducted in a fair, open, efficient, and transparent manner," said the letter written by Chairman John Dingell, a Michigan Democrat, and ranking Republican Joe Barton of Texas.

"This investigation will also address a growing number of allegations received by the committee relating to management practices that may adversely affect the agency's operation," the letter said.

— House panel launches probe of FCC practices, Reuters, Tue Jan 8, 2008 4:15pm EST

Maybe Congress will slap the FCC with another stern letter. I'm sure Kevin Martin is quaking in his boots.

-jsq

Users Revolt: Net Neutrality Wins

This is the path to net neutrality:

"See-bare-espace... it is everting."

—Odile Richards, Spook Country by William Gibson, 2007

Long version:

Top Ten Predictions for 2008

1. The Users Revolt. As advertisers focus in on social networking sites, users revolt against this trend, and power shifts in the worlds of Social Networking from owner to user, on issues ranging from Second Life rules and Facebook privacy to Cellphone Billing. Users will gain new leverage.

— My Top Ten Predictions for 2008, Mark Anderson, Strategic News Service Blog, 22 December 2007

He picks up on some of many signs of users' discontent, such as Facebook's Beacon fiasco:

Consolidation Flood: What Will Really Stifle Internet Innovation

Advocates of the "exabyte flood" political campaign against net neutrality claim they are for innovation and that the coming flood of Internet usage will stifle innovation unless they get their way.

What will really stifle innovation on the Internet is this:

The Federal Communications Commission, at the urging of Chair Kevin Martin, voted 3-2 on Tuesday to relax longstanding rules that block corporations from owning a broadcast TV station and a newspaper in the same city.

— Uproar Over FCC Vote on Media-Ownership Rules, By Frederick Lane, Top Tech News, December 19, 2007 10:14AM

No, not specifically newspaper and television consolidation. Further consolidation of media and information distribution in the hands of a tiny number of companies. This December the FCC lets newspapers and TV stations consolidate. Last December it let SBC buy Bellsouth. Internet access is already in the hands of a tiny number of companies (typically at most two in any given area) that are increasingly moving to control the information they carry on behalf of a small number of companies including themselves and movie and music content producers.

The exaflood politics isn't really about how much infrastructure the duopoly has to build out. It's about maintaining the duopoly and extending its control of information, to the duopoly's short-term profit and the long-term detriment of of us all, including the duopoly.

-jsq

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,

Copowi: an ISP Based on Net Neutrality

Here's an ISP that centers around net neutrality:

Within and subject to the constraints of the law and our Terms of Service, we guarantee:

• We will not block, degrade or modify data users send or receive over the Internet.
• We will not discriminate between network traffic on the basis of who it came from or where it is going to for some commercial advantage.
• Where possible we will only deal with wholesale service providers who support keeping the Internet open and fair, in the same way.

—www.copowi.com, accessed 11 Dec 2007

That third point is a bit difficult to implement, given that Copowi provides its DSL as a reseller for AT&T, Quest, and Verizon, but at least their heart's in the right place: they're for equal access, innovation, participation, and lower cost.

Now if they can also deliver reliable and inexpensive service with good marketing....

-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.

AT&T vs. Apple: iPhone and Maybe 700Mhz

AT&T's CEO Randall Stephenson announced next year's 3G iPhone a few weeks before this year's iPhone's likely biggest sales over the holidays:

So what's up? Was it a simple slip? Or is the guy so out of touch with reality that he doesn't realize that with a few words he has probably deferred -- maybe forever -- at least a million new customers worth to Wall Street at least $1 billion in market cap for his company?

I don't think Stephenson's statement was by accident and I don't think he is out of touch with reality. I think, instead, he was sending a $1 billion message to Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

— When Networks Collide: AT&T suddenly doesn't like Apple so much. By Robert X. Cringely, Pulpit, PBS, 29 November 2007

Well, it could be either. This is the same AT&T that couldn't produce its own iPhone and had to make a deal with Apple; AT&T could be so out of touch that it doesn't know what it's doing in this announcement. And maybe Stephenson resents that so much that he does want to hurt Apple even if it hurts AT&T. If he thinks he can get away with it, it amounts to the same as being out of touch, because Apple could produce an unlocked iPhone and sell it on all AT&T's networks, especially if Stephenson gives Jobs enough excuse to break Apple's contract with AT&T. Or, as Cringely points out, Apple could join Google in bidding for 700Mhz spectrum, or enable its Apple computers for VoIP, or come up with something else that isn't covered by the existing contract. Jobs and Apple know how to innovate. Telcos don't. No wonder AT&T is scared.

-jsq