PeerFlow

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.

R.E.A. for Fast Internet Everywhere

In the 1930s Franklin Roosevelt discovered stayed at Warm Springs in south Georgia to treat his polio. He discovered that most of rural America did not have electricity, and thus little light at night, few refrigerators, no eletric irons, and where you could get electricity, it cost much more than he was used to.

It was Roosevelt himself who linked the country's rural electrification program to his adopted hometown of Warm Springs, Ga. In an August 11, 1938, speech at Gordon Military College in Barnesville, Roosevelt spoke at the dedication of Lamar Electric Membership Corporation (now Southern Rivers Energy). His comments there immortalized the impact the president's connection with rural Georgia had in illuminating the nation's farms and country back roads. "Fourteen years ago, a Democratic Yankee came to a neighboring county in your state in search of a pool of warm water wherein he might swim his way back to health," Roosevelt said before a crowd of 20,000 that summer day. "The place, Warm Springs, was a rather dilapidated, small summer resort. His new neighbors extended to him the hand of genuine hospitality, welcomed him to their firesides and made him feel so much at home that he built himself a house, bought himself a farm, and has been coming back ever since."

Truly, Roosevelt endeared himself to Georgians. He continued his speech with the following words, which have been quoted countless times in promoting Warm Springs, the Little White House and Georgia's EMCs: "There was only one discordant note in that first stay of mine at Warm Springs: when the first-of-the-month bill came in for electric light for my little cottage, I found that the charge was 18 cents a kilowatt-hour about four times as much as I paid in Hyde Park, New York. That started my long study of proper public utility charges for electric current and the whole subject of getting electricity into farm homes. So, it can be said that a little cottage at Warm Springs, Georgia, was the birthplace of the Rural Electrification Administration."

The R.E.A. produced more than electricity. "Truly, Roosevelt endeared himself to Georgians", and to the rest of rural America, making the rest of FDR's New Deal much easier to sell. Read the rest of FDR's speech: that's exactly what he's doing; using the R.E.A. t o sell the New Deal.

We have a similar situation today with high speed Internet and rural America. Republicans controled Congress and the White House for 8 years and the U.S. fell behind. Democrats want to pass the equivalent of another New Deal. High speed Internet access everywhere would have the effect the R.E.A. had in the 1930s.

Plus more: the Internet is the printing press, the telephone, the telegraph, the radio, and the TV of the 21st century. Without it, people can't even download the PDF of the CWA report that shows how far behind they are, much less YouTube, facebook, blogs, and access to diverse news sources throughout the world, not to mention the text of every bill in Congress and the voting records of every Congress member, as well as who their campaign contributors are. Those of us with Internet access take those things for granted.

Those without still mostly depend on one local newspaper and TV news for their information. Well, that plus chain emails for those who have dialup. With newspapers failing and TV news controled by a handful of companies, without the Internet there is no free press. Without a free press there is no democracy.

As FDR said in 1938:

Yes, electricity is a modern necessity of life (and) not a luxury. That necessity ought to be found in every village, in every home and on every farm in every part of the wide United States.

The same is true of high speed Internet access in 2009.

We need high speed Internet access everywhere for economic progress, national competitiveness, and for democracy. And yes, since the Internet is a huge source of recipes, for mom and apple pie! In south Georgia, even for okra fritters! All the Internet you can eat: how's that for a slogan?

U.S.A.: Dead Last in Internet Speeds, and Not Trying Very Hard to Catch Up

Leslie Cauley writes in USA Today:

The average Internet download speed in the USA is 5.1 megabits per second

A programmer on a project I'm working on just moved back to Finland. He's got 30 megabits per second, and he could get 100 Mbps if he wanted to pay a little more. Meanwhile, back in the U.S.A., we're lucky to get 3Mbps through DSL or 8Mbps through cable. Anywhere in Japan you can buy 100Mbps for about the same price per month as we pay in the U.S. for 3Mbps. I don't think you can even buy anything as slow as 8Mbps in Japan anymore.

USA Today got its data from a report by Communication Workers of America, which says:

New research indicates that between 2007 and 2009, the average download Internet speed in the United States has increased by only 1.6 megabits per second (mbps), from 3.5 mbps in 2007 to 5.1 mbps in 2009. At this rate, it will take the United States 15 years to catch up with current Internet speeds in South Korea, the country with the fastest average Internet connections.

U.S.A.! We're dead last and not trying very hard to catch up!

It's not just the U.S. as a whole that's a backwater, some parts are worse. Let look at Georgia. Don't stop with the interactive display, which appears to show the fastest tested, click on through to the PDF report that shows a more realistic picture of speeds people actually get; it has the map shown above.

Atlanta is as usual well served, at least by U.S. standards, which is 1/10 the speeds you can get in a couple dozen other countries.

But look at the other half of Georgia. See all the grey in the southeast of the state, between Valdosta and Savannah, and between Macon and Valdosta (GA-01)? Less than 768 kilobits per second. That's dialup. Which means nobody there will be picking up this PDF, or posting pictures on facebook, or watching clips of the Daily Show on YouTube, or following what their representative is up to.

And that's just the people who actually use the Internet. Most people don't. See all the white areas? There are few speed tests there because there are so few people there using the Internet to test.

Last week Rep. Sanford Bishop (D GA-02) said all information about the new health care reform would be online. That's a good 21st century step. But much of his own district (southwest Georgia) won't be able to get it that way; they're still mired in the 20th century.

In the 1930s there was a similar situation with electric power, as FDR discovered when he stayed at Warm Springs in south Georgia to treat his polio. Result: the Rural Electrification Authority (R.E.A.), which brought electricity to rural America and made the rest of FDR's New Deal welcome to rural Americans. More on that in the next post.

-jsq

Japan Still Far Ahead of US in Internet Connection Speeds

While the U.S. still hopes to get up to 10Mbps Internet connection speeds by 2012, Japan already has such speeds for cable Internet service almost everywhere. And yes, I mean Internet connections, not just broadband.

But in Japan cable Internet service is of declining popularity, because 30 or 40 Mbps for $50 or $60 per month is not really fast there.

DSL in Japan goes up to 50 Mbps for also around $50-$60/month.

But for actual fast, cheap, Internet connections, people in Japan buy Fiber to the Home (FTTH), which actually costs less and delivers from 100Mbps to 1Gbps.

Meanwhile, back in the U.S.A., EDUCAUSE has proposed 100Mbps national broadband using a funding method that already failed in Texas.

Japan didn't get to 100Mbps by a single government-funded network. It did it by actually enforcing competition among broadband providers. Why did it do this? Because a private entrepreneur, Masayoshi Son, and his company Softbank, pestered the Japanese government until it did so.

Thus it's refreshing that these graphs laying out how far ahead of the U.S. Japan is come from the New America Foundation. Chair? Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.

Internet, Not Broadband, for National Policy

A national broadband policy is what you get when you put bellheads in charge. Fortunately, Scott Bradner has been on the Internet since the beginning, and explains the difference.

Broadband is not the Internet. Broadband is shorthand for a diverse class of wired and wireless digital transmission technologies. The Internet, in contrast, is a set of public protocols for inter-networking systems that specifies how data packets are structured and processed. Broadband technologies, at their essence, are high-capacity and always-on. The essence of the Internet is (a) that it carries all packets that follow its protocols regardless of what kinds of data the packets carry, (b) that it can interconnect all networks that follow those protocols, and (c) its protocols are defined via well-established public processes.

There’s risk in confusing broadband and Internet. If the National Broadband Plan starts from the premise that the U.S. needs the innovation, increased productivity, new ideas and freedoms of expression that the Internet affords, then the Plan will be shaped around the Internet. If, instead, the Plan is premised on a need for broadband, it fails to address the ARRA’s mandated objectives directly. More importantly, the premise that broadband is the primary goal entertains the remaking of the Internet in ways that could put its benefits at risk. The primary goal of the Plan should be broadband connections to the Internet.

It's a petition. Please sign it.

-jsq

PS:

Therefore, we urge that the FCC’s National Broadband Plan emphasize that broadband connection to the Internet is the primary goal. In addition, we strongly suggest that the Plan incorporate the FCC Internet Policy Statement of 2005 and extend it to (a) include consumer information that meaningfully specifies connection performance and identifies any throttling, filtering, packet inspection, data collection, et cetera, that the provider imposes upon the connection, (b) prohibit discriminatory or preferential treatment of packets based on sender, recipient or packet contents. Finally, we suggest that the Internet is such a critical infrastructure that enforcement of mandated behavior should be accompanied by penalties severe enough to deter those behaviors.

While you're at it, urge the FCC to stop talking about "consumers" and start talking about participants.

Iran and U.S. Media Irrevelance

Blogger Interrupted spells out the pretty much complete failure of the U.S. news media, especially cable news, to cover what's going on in Iran, which is at least of a scale with the Tienanmen Square protests that made CNN's name 20 years ago.

No obstacle was enough to stop the coverage. Even when China cut off CNN from Beijing, CNN reported repeatedly that they were cut off. BECAUSE IT IS NEWS WHEN A NEWS ORGANIZATION IS SHUT DOWN. When tanks hit the streets in Moscow in 1991, cameras were there, regardless of safety concerns, in one of the most closed societies on earth at the time, as the outcome was in grave doubt. Reporters risked their lives.

At least one news organization has been shut down, El Arabiya. Plus cell phone service is out and facebook, youtube, Voice of America, and BBC World Service are being blocked or jammed in Iran.

There are news organizations covering all this, most notably the BBC. But if you really want to know what's going on you have to turn to twitter or bloggers like Andrew Sullivan.

The biggest problem with the decline of the traditional news media is the accompanying decline in real reporting. Yet how hard could it be to report that the official election statistics are preposterous, the Iranian state's own election monitors say the election had problems, and the opposition (which apparently actually won) is very organized and is planning demonstrations today and a general strike Tuesday?

If the traditional media can't cover something as obvious as this, what good is it?

-jsq

Where the Money Leaving Music Sales is Really Going

Charles Arthur did a little research:

But the reality is that nowadays, one can choose between a game costing £40 that will last weeks, or a £10 CD with two great tracks and eight dud ones. I think a lot of people are choosing the game - and downloading the two tracks. That's real discretion in spending. It's hurting the music industry, sure. But let's not cloud the argument with false claims about downloads.

Or keep making such claims and keep electing Pirate Party members the the EU Parliament. Either way such claims have a limited life span.

USPS Bubble Pop

Big corporations' distortion of US Postal Service rates gets noticed by The American Interest:

Just as General Motors has in effect subsidized Big Oil by continuing to build gas-guzzlers in recent years, so has the USPS continued to subsidize Big Mail by shaping its operations to encourage what it now calls, revealingly, “standard mail”—that is, advertising junk mail. Most American citizens are blissfully unaware of the degree to which USPS subsidizes U.S. businesses by means of the fees it collects from ordinary postal customers. For example, if you wish to mail someone a large envelope weighing three ounces, you’ll pay $1.17 in postage. A business can bulk-mail a three-ounce catalog of the same size for as little as $0.14.

USPS management claims that “standard” mail makes lots of money, that the USPS makes a better margin delivering a “standard” mail package for $0.14 than it does a first-class one for $1.17. Why? Supposedly because of efficiencies produced by bulk-mail, machinable, zip-plus-four and zip-plus-nine standardization schemes. If you look at the revenue stream from advertising mail, it does look impressive, and it has been growing (for perverse reasons we’ll come to in a minute). But when you juxtapose next to that revenue stream the enormous transactional costs of maintaining a riotously complex rate structure to service it, you quickly reach a different conclusion: Standard mail, the costs of which are also generally tax-deductible for businesses, does not make money. It amounts to a corporate subsidy, which helps to explain why Congress, insofar as its members understand this, typically doesn’t object to the status quo. After all, these corporations have been known to contribute to electoral campaigns.

Actually, it’s worse than that. Not only are pennies shaved off the postage affixed to grandma’s letters routed directly into the pockets of direct-mail marketers, some 20 percent of direct-mail advertising volume is comprised of credit card, mortgage and other financial offers. So yes, the USPS has contributed in a subtle yet very real way to our burst economic bubble.

And the USPS's own "standard mail" is about to pop. It's worse than you probably think. An article well worth reading.

Chess End-Game for the Duopoly?

This is rich:

"Now is not the time, nor is this the appropriate proceeding, to engage in a debate about the need for net neutrality obligations," two TWC lawyers warned the FCC on Monday. The discussion should stay strictly focused on broadband deployment, the company insists. "Debates in this proceeding about new net neutrality regulations would only divert attention from these important goals, delaying the distribution of funds while generating considerable contention when the Commission should instead be fostering a spirit of collaboration."

Matthew Lasar, writing in ars technica, makes a familiar point:

And one of them, Comcast, definitely thinks that the agency was way out of line to invoke this statement when sanctioning the company for P2P throttling last year, and has filed legal papers against the FCC in federal court. Expect arguments that the Commission never really properly established the declaration as a set of rules when the trial starts.

Well, yeah, I'd expect to hear arguments like that, because the duopoly's paid shills have been making them ever since the FCC made that toothless declaration of principles.

Yet it seems the Obama administration has taken the initiative to do what the FCC never did:

But the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 has hard-wired the FCC's pronouncement into law, at least when it comes to stimulus grantees. The legislation requires of grant recipients "at a minimum, adherence to the principles contained in the Commission’s broadband policy statement." Plus the government must publish, in consultation with the Commission, "the non-discrimination and network interconnection obligations that shall be contractual conditions of grants awarded."

Still, why is Time Warner picking now to be so intransigent? And why is NCTA claiming FCC can't interpret those principles, because

"Imposing new and untested nondiscrimination or interconnection requirements as a condition of stimulus funding risks injecting contentiousness, uncertainty, and delay into a process that should focus on creating new jobs and new broadband connections as quickly as possible,"

While NCTA and TW are of course themselves injecting contentiousness, uncertainty, and delay into the process.

Hm, so if the current duopoly won't accept these principles, the stimulus money may have to go to other companies. Which could mean the end of the duopoly.

The duopoly is playing chess with death.

Sterling: Samizdat Quality Quality Oligarch Press

Bruce Sterling,, who has studied and practiced paper and online media his en tire career, and who also traveled to the USSR and then to Russia, says Prof. Clemons hasn't imagined the worst:

(((Well, no -- the "worst" would be that the publishers keep grinding out product, only it's evil propaganda entirely subsidized by ultrawealthy moguls who have made themselves the only public source of news and culture. In other words, the commercial press collapses and it's replaced by a classically fascist press. (Likely run on bailout money.) THAT's the worst -- with the possible exception of a furious proletarian upheaval that forces everyone to read grimy, poorly-printed copies of PRAVDA.)))

It would be easy to see a path from where we are now (half of U.S. media is owned by only five companies that actively suppress stories they don't want to hear and promote stupid ones they do want) to Bruce's scenario.

Clemons: Advertising Doomed Online, Too

U. Penn. professor Eric K. Clemons, who researches strategic and competitive information technology, writes:

The expected drop in internet advertising revenues this year was neither unpredictable nor unpredicted, nor was it caused solely by the general recession and the decline in retail sales. Internet advertising will rapidly lose its value and its impact, for reasons that can easily be understood. Traditional advertising simply cannot be carried over to the internet, replacing full-page ads on the back of The New York Times or 30-second spots on the Super Bowl broadcast with pop-ups, banners, click-throughs on side bars. This might be a subject where considerable disagreement is possible, if indeed, pushed ads were still working in traditional media. Mostly they have failed. One newspaper after another is going out of business across the United States, and the ad revenues of traditional print media, even of highly respected magazines, is declining. The ultimate failure of broadcast media advertising is likewise becoming clear.

So a newspaper that wants to survive needs to find a way to do it without depending on traditional broadcast advertising.

Version Tracking for Congress

Stuff that's been old hat for decades in the computing world is fresh and shiny in government. Govtrack.us tracks not only bills, but also voting records and videos of Congress members. And it adds RSS feeds, old hat to most people on the Internet, but radical innovation for legislation! You can now subscribe to every bill, vote, and YouTube video that your Congress critter posts, including many of their floor speeches. Those are especially enlightening, seeing them speak in front of a mostly empty chamber, especially compared with their previous voting and speech records. Govtrack should be useful not only for the public, but for Congress members and their staffers, for example by making it easier for them to read the bill before voting on it.

Maybe using the Internet to shine a little light on Congress can lead to a more open Internet and maybe even a more open society.

Google closing Austin, Trondheim, and Lulea offices

I guess this makes it officially a recession:

NEW YORK (AP) — Google is closing three engineering offices and cutting 100 recruiters from its work force as the recession dampens hiring at the Internet search company.

"Given the state of the economy, we recognized that we needed fewer people focused on hiring," Laszlo Bock, a Google vice president, wrote in a blog posting late Wednesday announcing the layoffs.

The moves follows news last week of a government filing from Google showing a significant cutback in temporary employees aimed at trimming costs. The company acknowledged in November that it would be looking to reduce contract workers while retaining full-time employees.

—Google to cut 100 jobs, close engineering offices, AP, USA Today, 15 Jan 2009

Hm, looks like that Austin office lasted all of one year.

-jsq

Keen on Coughlin on the Internet

I was going to say you have to admire Andrew Keen for finding a contrarian perspective and mining it for all it's worth. But this latest missive from him seems all too desperate.

Can Obama's plan for universal broadband turn the recession into a political nightmare resembling the 1930s? Yes, it can, writes the author of the controversial book, The Cult of the Amateur.

...

Imagine if today’s radically unregulated Internet, with its absence of fact checkers and editorial gatekeepers, had existed back then. Imagine that universal broadband had been available to enable the unemployed to read the latest conspiracy theories about the Great Crash on the blogosphere. Imagine the FDR-baiting, Hitler-loving Father Charles Coughlin, equipped with his “personalized” YouTube channel, able, at a click of a button, to distribute his racist message to the suffering masses. Or imagine a marketing genius like the Nazi chief propagandist Josef Goebbels managing a viral social network of anti-Semites which could coordinate local meet-ups to assault Jews and Communists.

— The Internet Is Bad For You, by Andrew Keen, 19 Dec 2008

Like we don't already have xenophobic propaganda on talk radio, Fox News, Lou Dobbs on CNN, etc. Rush Limbaugh already has his personalized TV show channel, as does Bill O'Reilly. If that's what gatekeepers bring us, bring on the Internet.

With net neutrality, please. As in what Larry Lessig says Obama plans to require:

the terms offered one website or company are no better or worse than those offered anyone else.

That way we can keep free speech on the Internet, even if it doesn't exist on TV or radio. What Keen hates most about the Internet is exactly what is its greatest strength: it is not a broadcast medium. It is a participatory medium, in which everyone can publish and everyone can select what to read or view. For example, I realize that I'm giving Keen's doleful visage a tiny amount of publicity by posting this, but hey, it's better to have weirdly wrongheaded stuff like this out there where everybody can see it and rebut it than having it festering in the darkness.

"I know no safe depositary of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power."

—Thomas Jefferson to William C. Jarvis, 1820

On this I'll go with Jefferson rather than Keen.

-jsq

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:

Users Revolted: Net Neutrality to Win

The world has turned upside down:

This column is dedicated to the top managers of American business whose policies and practices helped ensure Barack Obama's victory. The mandate for change that sounded across this country is not limited to our new President and Congress. That bell also tolls for you. Obama's triumph was ignited in part by your failure to understand and respect your own consumers, customers, employees, and end users. The despair that fueled America's yearning for change and hope grew to maturity in your garden.

Millions of Americans heard President-elect Obama painfully recall his sense of frustration, powerlessness, and outrage when his mother's health insurer refused to cover her cancer treatments. Worse still, every one of them knew exactly how he felt. That long-simmering indignation is by now the defining experience of every consumer of health care, mortgages, insurance, travel, and financial services—the list goes on.

Obama's Victory: A Consumer-Citizen Revolt, The election confirms it's time for sober reappraisal and reinvention within the business community. If you don't do it, someone else will, By Shoshana Zuboff

She identifies Apple as one of the few companies that has actually gotten it about how to do business, with its iPod and iTunes. As we've previously seen, this is because Apple gets it that Porter's Five Forces model of competition breaks when open distribution channels are introduced.

It appears that Mark Anderson, Odile Richards, and William Gibson were right: "See-bare-espace... it is everting." Cyberspace just elected a president of the United States. And he knows it.

Obama has been publicly in favor of net neutrality for at least a year. And he has not backed off. He's put Susan Crawford and Kevin Werbach in charge of reviewing the FCC. Now that's cyberspace inverted indeed!

America's Punditocracy Expressed Its Shock

29 September 2008, the day the Internet was validated as more influential than the traditional press:

People discovered that to "Change Congress," you simply need a ballot box - or the threat of one.

All this was reflected on political sites, forums and blogs - but not a hint of this sentiment was expressed by the professional media. So when Congress rejected the Bill on that Monday, America's punditocracy expressed its shock. It also reported that the markets were "astonished" - the markets being presumed to have a better grasp of what American citizens want than American citizens themselves.

All week, the media had refrained from comment that might embarrass the political class. In fact, the first professional column I read which was reflected the true feelings of many US citizens around me was written from 3,500 miles away and published in London's Sunday Times.

Sudden outbreak of democracy baffles US pundits, By Andrew Orlowski, The Register, Posted in Government, 3rd October 2008 18:47 GMT

Dinosaurs were probably shocked by mammals, too.

-jsq

House Prevents Crash

Acting swiftly, the House prevented the crash yesterday:

“The House of Representatives is currently experiencing an extraordinarily high amount of e-mail traffic. The Write Your Representative function is therefore intermittently available. While we realize communicating to your Members of Congress is critical, we suggest attempting to do so at a later time, when demand is not so high. System engineers are working to resolve this issue and we appreciate your patience.”

— House limits constituent e-mails to prevent crash, By Jordy Yager, The Hill, Posted: 09/30/08 01:16 PM [ET]

Oh, that other crash? They haven't even figured out whether it's real or not.

-jsq

Treasury discloses "secret" documents to spyee defense lawyer

That's the problem with secrets. You tell somebody, even somebody who works for you, and eventually they tell someone else:

As I recounted in Salon in July, lawyers for the Bush administration have gone to extreme and even bizarre lengths in their attempts to prevent the federal courts from determining the legality of the president's warrantless electronic surveillance program. A key problem for them is a top-secret document that the Treasury Department accidentally disclosed to Al-Haramain's lawyers in 2004. The document confirmed the surveillance of our clients, and thus, we contend, their legal standing to sue as victims of the program.

—More evidence of Bush's spying, Why the White House can no longer hide the truth about its warrantless surveillance of Americans. By Jon B. Eisenberg Salon.com, 12 September 2008

Given thousands (or millions?) of people spied upon, eventually somebody is going to gain a foothold of legal standing to sue.

Oh, my, it gets better:

But since the July 2 ruling, we have discovered additional evidence of surveillance of our clients. In fall 2007, FBI deputy director John Pistole gave a speech at a conference of bankers and lawyers in which Pistole thanked the bankers for their cooperation in giving the FBI financial records for terrorist financing investigations, and then went on to describe the FBI's 2004 investigation of Al-Haramain. In the text of the speech -- which is posted on the FBI's Web site -- Pistole explicitly admitted that the FBI had used "surveillance" among other "investigative tools" in the Al-Haramain investigation, noting that "it was the financial evidence that provided justification for the initial [terrorist] designation" in February 2004.

I've got to wonder whether the FBI director didn't know that he was providing standing, or whether he did it deliberately because he's tired of this legal charade and wants warrantless wiretapping to stop before the eventual lawsuits tar his agency even more than it already is.

If Al-Haramain wins, perhaps the next step would be to sue the government officials who authorized those illegal wiretaps.

-jsq

Selling Out Has Its Party: AT&T Fetes Blue Dogs

Glenn Greenwald has video of attendees refusing to say who they were or why they were there or what the party was for:

Amazingly, not a single one of the 25-30 people we tried to interview would speak to us about who they were, how they got invited, what the party's purpose was, why they were attending, etc. One attendee said he was with an "energy company," and the other confessed she was affiliated with a "trade association," but that was the full extent of their willingness to describe themselves or this event. It was as though they knew they're part of a filthy and deeply corrupt process and were ashamed of -- or at least eager to conceal -- their involvement in it. After just a few minutes, the private security teams demanded that we leave, and when we refused and continued to stand in front trying to interview the reticent attendees, the Denver Police forced us to move further and further away until finally we were unable to approach any more of the arriving guests.

— AT&T thanks the Blue Dog Democrats with a lavish party, Glenn Greenwald, Salon, Monday Aug. 25, 2008 11:15 EDT (updated below (with video added) - Update II) Thursday, Aug 28, 2008

The video includes Denver police repeatedly asking accredited press to move away from a public sidewalk.

At another party, an ABC News reporter was arrested while "attempting to take pictures on a public sidewalk of Democratic senators and VIP donors leaving a private meeting at the Brown Palace Hotel."

Parties like this are part of the lobbying revolving door that makes the U.S. look like a banana republic. I'm picking on Democrats, here, but at least 75% of Senate Democrats (including Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, but not Barack Obama) voted against the recent bad FISA bill. A much higher percentage of Republicans voted for it.

If he were alive today, Robert Burns would say:

'We are bought and sold for telecom gold'
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!

-jsq

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

Movie King of the Internet: Bad Idea

Andrew Odlyzko asks what if the duopoly gets its way and completely does away with net neutrality:

But what if they do get their wish, net neutrality is consigned to the dustbin, and they do build their new services, but nobody uses them? If the networks that are built are the ones that are publicly discussed, that is a likely prospect. What service providers publicly promise to do, if they are given complete control of their networks, is to build special facilities for streaming movies. But there are two fatal defects to that promise. One is that movies are unlikely to offer all that much revenue. The other is that delivering movies in real-time streaming mode is the wrong solution, expensive and unnecessary. If service providers are to derive significant revenues and profits by exploiting freedom from net neutrality limitations, they will need to engage in much more intrusive control of traffic than just provision of special channels for streaming movies.

— The delusions of net neutrality, Andrew Odlyzko, School of Mathematics, University of Minnesota Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA odlyzko@umn.edu http://www.dtc.umn.edu/odlyzko Revised version, August 17, 2008

Why is that?

But video, and more generally content (defined as material prepared by professionals for wide distribution, such as movies, music, newscasts, and so on), is not king, and has never been king. While content has frequently dominated in terms of volume of traffic, connectivity has almost universally been valued much more highly and brought much higher revenues. Movies cannot be counted on to bring in anywhere near as much in revenues as voice services do today.

The Internet isn't about Sarnoff's Law (broadcast content like TV, radio, and newspapers) or even about Metcalfe's Law (1-n connectivity, like telephone or VoIP): it's about Reed's law, 2n-n connectivity, such as blogs, P2P, and facebook). That's my interpretation; Odlyzko probably wouldn't agree.

Anyway, that video content such as movies is king is one of the primary delusions Odlyzko addresses in this paper. The other is that movies need to be streamed in realtime. It is mysterious why people continue to believe that in the face of the massive evidence BitTorrent and other P2P services that deliver big content in chunks faster than realtime. I can only attribute this second delusion to a bellhead mindset that still thinks in terms of telephone, which was realtime because nobody knew any other way to do it back in the analog-copper-wire-connection day.

As Odlyzko sums it up:

The general conclusion is that the story presented by service providers, that they need to block net neutrality in order to be able to afford to construct special features in their networks for streaming movies, is simply not credible. If lack of net neutrality requirements is to be exploited, it will have to be done through other, much more intrusive means.

So why let the duopoly force a policy on everyone else that won't even work to the advantage of the duopoly?

One way to get net neutrality would be to let the duopoly have its way, and wait for it to implode. However, given that for streaming video to have any chance of succeeding, the duopoly would have to clamp down on everything else to eliminate any competition, I shudder to think what this would mean. The Internet as a source of real news and opinion would go away. Given that the vestigial traditional news media in the U.S. (TV, radio, newspapers) provide so little news, there's a very good chance that most people in the U.S. wouldn't even know how bad they had it as the country sped its slide into parochialism and irrelevance. How many people even know now that the U.S. has slid from #1 to #23 or whatever the latest number is in broadband uptake? If the duopoly is given its head, even fewer would know.

If we let King Kong Telco and T Rex Cableco battle it out to be Movie King of the Internet, where does that leave poor Fay Wray Public?

FCC, FTC, Congress, executive, and courts, not to mention the public, should all read Odlyzko's paper, and should all refuse the duopoly's demand for special privileges that won't even produce profits for the duopoly. Then all of above should legislate, enforce, and maintain net neutrality so we will all profit and benefit. Yes, even the duopoly can win with this.

-jsq

Kevin Martin's Bottle: Weak Ruling Against Comcast Guarantees Court Challenges

The FCC recently ruled that Comcast has to stop throttling P2P. On the surface, that's a good thing. That Kevin Martin wanted it makes me wonder.

For once I agree with a net neutrality opponent:

By instituting this weird, weak, and barely legal regulation, Kevin Martin will get ‘net neutrality regulation bottled up in the courts for - what - the next five years?

— Game, Set, and Match: Martin! by Jim Harper, Technology Liberation Front, 6 Aug 2008

Harper goes on to predict that meanwhile real competition could develop. And pigs could fly, but that's not the point.

This is the point:

The paragraph prior to the provocative line suggesting regulation of universities contains this sentence: “Allowing some Internet service providers to manage P2P traffic - much less to engage in complete blocking of P2P traffic - while prohibiting others from doing so would be arbitrary and capricious.” This is an administrative-law term of art - “arbitrary and capricious.” The use of it tells us that NCTA or Comcast will challenge the FCC’s decision to regulate only one provider of Internet access without regulating all similarly situated.

But Comcast is under a different regulatory regime!, says Harold and the others. Not in an enforcement of this “broad policy statement” thing-y. The FCC is claming free rein to regulate - not authority based firmly in statute - and if it can throw that rein over cable ISPs, it can throw that rein over universities, over Starbucks, and over the open wi-fi node in Harold’s house.

Now, given the free rein that the FCC is asserting, there is a darn good argument that it’s arbitrary (and “capricious”) to regulate only cable ISPs or commercial ISPs in this way. The FCC has to regulate the whole damn Internet this way if it’s going to regulate Comcast.

This is not just theoretical. Fox News recently refused to pay an FCC-imposed fine, saying it was "arbitrary and capricious". Fox cited a previous case in which a federal court slapped down the FCC for fining a show for swearing, saying it was "arbitrary and capricious".

All that plus if a court rules the FCC's recent decision is "arbitrary and capricious", that will be used as a precedent to require universities to regulate content on their networks in favor of big copyright holders, as elements in Congress have been trying to do for about a year now.

I think net neutrality advocates underestimate Kevin Martin at their (and our) peril.

-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

Rogers Hijacks Google Subdomains for Yahoo Ads

This is pretty blatant:

Rogers, a huge cable internet provider in Canada, has decided to hijack all unregistered domains, and replace them with Yahoo! advertisements. This means Rogers users who type in a domain that doesn't exist, are now getting Yahoo ads instead of the normal "not found" error.

Interestingly, Rogers also decided to do this with subdomains. So for example, example.google.com now takes you to the following advertising:

— Rogers Hijacks Domain Name System, Puts Yahoo! Ads on Google's Subdomains, John, Blamcast, 20 July 2008

The author points out that this essentially the same thing Verisign did in 2003 until they stopped due to massive backlash.

-jsq

Congress at 9% Job Approval: Why Is Lessig Putting Lipstick on the FISA Pig?

Larry Lessig points out that for the first time in history Congress' job performance is rated (by Rasmussen) in single digits: 9%. Some of his commenters think that has something to do with the recent FISA bill, and others think that's just a minority concern.

Three quarters of the American people and even a majority of Republicans oppose Bush's warrantless wiretaps. Two thirds oppose warrantless wiretaps even for communications between U.S. citizens and overseas persons, and almost 2/3 oppose immunity for telcos. Aome people call that a minority. I don't think that word means what they think it means.

Instead of standing up to Bush as the Constitution requires, Congress capitulated and gave the worst president in history still more powers to spy on the people. And the people do know about it:

"Congress rolled over on FISA" --LA Times
"Democrats voted for FISA out of fear" --Chicago Tribune
"Obama gives telecoms a pass" --Hartford Courant
"Senate approves bill to broaden wiretap powers" --NY Times
"Senate vote backs Bush on wiretaps" --Salt Lake Tribune
"Senate vote gives Bush what he wants on surveillance bill" --Seattle Times

News.google.com finds about 960 other stories much like those.

Is the FISA bill the only reason Congress's numbers tanked? Nope, but I don't think it's coincidence that they dropped immediately after the Senate passed that bill.

Why isn't Larry Lessig working to convince Obama he was wrong and getting him to fix it, instead of trying to put lipstick on that pig of a bill?

-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

Senate: Get Out of Jail Free, Telcos and Administration!

Yes, I know, the FISA bill just passed by the Senate doesn't preclude criminal liability. But Bush can, by pardoning for any and all crimes committed, just like Ford did for Nixon; the man who commuted Scooter Libby's sentence won't balk at that. And the bill does do away with civil liability, so the telcos never have to pay for illegal warrantless blanket wiretapping, and the criminal evidence against the politicians that hired it is hidden.

But, to be Chicago kind of candid, whatcha gonna do about it?

Today, the freshman senator from Illinois voted in favor of the FISA bill that provides retroactive legal protection to cooperating telecom companies that helped the feds eavesdrop on overseas calls. Up until a few weeks ago -- let's see, that would be shortly after the last primaries settled the Democratic nomination and terminated what's-her-name's once frontrunning campaign -- Obama adamantly opposed the bill. "Unequivocally" was the word his people used.

— Nomination in hand, Obama stiffs the Dem left on FISA vote, Andrew Malcolm, L.A. Times, 9 July 2008

When did the U.S. lurch so far to the right that jetissoning the Fourth Amendment is considered running to the center?

The "compromise" the bill was supposed to represent is nonexistent;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-jsq

Amnesty Foes 2.0: SenatorObama-PleaseVoteAgainstFISA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-jsq

George Carlin's final list

of seven things you can't say on TV.

-jsq

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

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

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

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

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

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

-jsq

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

Banana Republic, DC: Telecom Lobbying Revolving Door

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

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

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

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

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

-jsq

ATCA Again: Duopoly Against VoIP Long Before Video

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

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

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

A usually reliable source says:

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

— VoIP: ACTA Petition, Cybertelecom

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

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

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

-jsq

Byte Charging Rears Its Ugly Head

Here it is again:

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

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

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

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

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

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

-jsq

Speeches: McCain and Obama, TV and the Internet

Al Gore's home office. (Time Magazine)

John McCain's speech in Kenner 3 June 2008 got truncated by the news media when they switched to Obama's speech that same night. The versions on YouTube reflect that problem, since they were made from TV. They also suffer from TV network labeling and chyrons chatting about the opposition.

Barack Obama's speech that same night has network logos and chyrons, but at least it is complete. However, when Al Gore endorsed Obama on 17 June, the networks all cut away immediately after Gore finished talking, because only the endorsement was news, and they weren't interested in what the candidate himself might have to say. But Gore sent out email to supporters earlier that day, and numerous blogs posted it (Huffington Post, DailyKos, Washington Post, etc.). And Obama's campaign streamed the whole event live, so nobody had to watch network logos, chyrons, commercials, or talking heads, and they could see all of both speeches. Although, oddly, neither the Gore nor the Obama speech seems to be on YouTube yet.

Political campaigns can use the Internet to bypass the traditional media.

-jsq

An Integral Part: the Internet intertwined with everything else

This is what the Internet is best at:

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

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

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

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

-jsq

Vigilantes Against BitTorrent? Revision3 Taken Down by SYN Floods

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

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

...

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

...

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

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

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

-jsq

T-Mobile Lobbying: $700K in Q1 2008

T-Mobile hasn't made the news like AT&T, Comcast, and Cox for violating net neutrality, but has nonetheless been busy lobbying behind the scenes:

WASHINGTON - Telecommunications carrier T-Mobile USA Inc. spent nearly $700,000 in the first quarter to lobby on spectrum matters and other issues, according to a disclosure report.

T-Mobile, which is owned by German telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom AG (nyse: DT - news - people ), also lobbied the federal government on legislation involving wireless taxes, privacy and various consumer protection issues.

The company, the nation's fourth largest cellular carrier, also lobbied lawmakers on the issue of "Net neutrality," or the principle that all Web traffic be treated equally. Some Internet providers want to charge content providers extra to get their Web sites to load faster. Lawmakers have proposed legislation to make Net neutrality the law of the land.

— T-Mobile spent $700,000 lobbying in first quarter, Associated Press, 05.30.08, 5:26 PM ET

The T-Mobile lobbyist pictured is Michelle Persaud, former Democratic staff council for the House Judiciary Committee.

-jsq

Not for Sale: Canadian Internet

Net neutrality has become a political issue in Canada, where a small and very polite rally occurred in Ottawa the other day.

p2pnet news | Freedom:- Today is the day Canadians are gathering in Ottawa to tell the federal government what they think about Net Neutrality and bandwidth throttling.

Bell Canada was suffering under the delusion it could choke down accounts paid for by some of its customers, wrongly claiming they’re responsible for bandwidth congestion.

— Canadians rally for Net Neutrality, P2Pnet news, 27 May 2008

-jsq

Payola for the Duopoly

ISP meddling with net neutrality could unite indy musicians and record labels against the duopoly:

For the music business, the failure of net neutrality presents several big problems. Musicians are at the vanguard of digital distribution of music files, video files, and other space-gobbling content. Traffic throttling will almost certainly result in placing severe limitations on the amount and kind of content musicians can put out there — and it’s pretty likely that musicians will then be forced into partnering with businesses that have fewer limits and greater access, no doubt for a fee, to get their gear online. Another issue is that, as covered recently in this column, we are seeing a whole new universe of music-related business models, and we need to see some predictability in terms of licensing methods and how artists and copyright owners get paid. One of the most compelling proposals is that P2P music sharing should be rendered commercially viable and copyright-legal by the imposition of a blanket license that would be paid at the gate (i,e., through the ISPs). Institutionalized throttling would take this plan out at the knees.

Another problem is that record labels, distributors and retail chains who are already in desperate jeopardy can’t compete with ISPs and cellular providers who, having launched their own music stores, have all the incentive in the world to steer music consumers to their own services rather than open the pipe for folks to shop elsewhere.

— Net Neutrality, By Allison Outhit, Need to Know, June 2008

This observation comes from Canada, where current attempts by some to pass legislation similar to the U.S. Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) has suddenly gotten noticed as a path to something music lovers have seen before:

McKie is referring to proposed changes modelled on the American Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which call for a much heavier-handed approach to interpreting what kind of content uses are protected by copyright. At the same time a Canadian DMCA would accord “safe harbour” status to service providers to shelter them from a potential onslaught of copyright litigation provided they act quickly to block infringing and illegal actions on their networks. A Canadian DMCA could impact net neutrality by putting police power in the hands of the networks, while providing ISPs with strong incentives to prefer privately-negotiated content distribution deals over the chaos of user-generated traffic. The bottom line is that musicians have come to rely on the net as their number one go-to distribution and marketing tool. The net got that way by being neutral to all comers. Whether you were a platinum seller on Universal, or a couple of unknown basement-dwellers, your video had an equal chance of going viral. Without net neutrality, all the good pipe will get eaten up by whoever has the power to make the deal. Which sounds a lot like the payola days all over again.

Yep, that's what we'll get if we don't have net neutrality: payola for the duopoly.

-jsq

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

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

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

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

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

To spell out the telco connection:

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

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

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

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

The NYRB gets into some of the underlying political machinations:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive Externalities: What Yoo Ignores

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-jsq

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