PeerFlow

Why SOPA and PIPA are bad

SOPA and PIPA are not dead, as Mikki Barry reminds us. She points at an excellent writeup on why we should care.

Tom Evslin wrote on Fractals of Change at some unknown data, SOPA and PIPA are Bipartisan Bad Policy, Really Bad Policy

In China you can't get to some Internet sites: no Facebook, no YouTube, no Twitter. Search engines can't find the "Falun Gong" or "Tiananmen Square massacre". We would never do that kind of blocking here in the US, you say. Well, not so fast. If either House bill SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) or Senate bill PIPA (Protect IP Act) or something in between passes both houses of Congress and is signed by the President, Internet censorship, unreachable websites, and forbidden searches will be the law of this land.

The Arab Spring has been enabled by the inability of some governments to block Internet communication. SOPA and SIPA both require that Internet blocking tools be developed and deployed here. Maybe we trust our own government not to misuse these (I don't!); but do we really want to be responsible for the proliferation of censorship and blocked communication?

Why, you ask, would our Congresspeople want to impose censorship anywhere? Why would they want to slow down the most vigorous parts of the US economy?

The answer, at least, is simple. These are bills that Hollywood wants to protect its movies from online piracy, and Hollywood makes mega-campaign contributions and even gives Congresspeople bit parts in its movies. There is nothing partisan about campaign contributions.

Why? The DC lobbying revolving door banana republic, of course, made even worse by the SCOTUS Citizens United decision.

As for the Arab Spring, the powers that be here don't want that here. Remember who propped up Mubarak all those decades.

When even Patrick Leahy pushes PIPA, something is seriously wrong with the U.S. government. SOPA or PIPA or something watered down that their pushers can claim isn't as bad will pass unless the people stand up and stop it.

-jsq

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:

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 [email protected] 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ISPs Escalate Ignoring FCC

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

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

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

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

Subpoena for Comcast from NY State

As I've been predicting since October:

“We have requested information from the company via subpoena,” Jeffrey Lerner, a spokesman for Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, said Tuesday.

Comcast said it was co-operating with the AG's office.

— New York subpoenas Comcast on traffic shaping, Associated Press, February 26, 2008 at 4:08 PM EST

So far it's just a subpoena. We'll see if it turns into a full-fledged lawsuit. And maybe Comcast could start cooperating with its own customers....

-jsq

PS: Why did the New York Times pick up this story only a day after the Canadian Globe and Mail?

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:

Verizon Does Something Right: No Hollywood Policing

Verizon talks sense:

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is, nonetheless, a downside.

Canadian Net Neutrality

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

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

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

The rest sounds very familiar:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-jsq

FCC: Shocked to Hear There's Gambling Going On!

The dateline is ironic:

LAS VEGAS (AP) — The Federal Communications Commission will investigate complaints that Comcast Corp. actively interferes with Internet traffic as its subscribers try to share files online, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said Tuesday.

A coalition of consumer groups and legal scholars asked the agency in November to stop Comcast from discriminating against certain types of data. Two groups also asked the FCC to fine the nation's No. 2 Internet provider $195,000 for every affected subscriber.

"Sure, we're going to investigate and make sure that no consumer is going to be blocked," Martin told an audience at the International Consumer Electronics Show.

—FCC to Probe Comcast Data Discrimination, By PETER SVENSSON, AP, 8 Jan 2008

In other news, Las Vegas Board of Realtors announces investigation of gambling! Sorry; I made that up.

Note that Martin is not only chair of the FCC that continues to enable telecom and media consolidation, he also continues to refer to ISP customers and participants as "consumers", as in the old broadcast model where the broadcasters produce and you the customer are expected to consume whatever they give you.

The organization doing the most investigating of stifling, blocking, etc. by Comcast, Cox, et al., has been the Associated Press, which also originated this story. Interestingly, the AP is not owned by any of the usual five companies that own most of the media in the U.S. The AP is a non-profit cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers. So one of the few national news organizations in the U.S. that has not been consolidated is the one that has been investigating stifling by ISPs.

-jsq

PS:

"I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!"

—Captain Renault, Casablanca, 1942

Duopoly Helping Net Neutrality: By Obviously Subverting It

With enemies like these...

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

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

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

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

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

You want upstarts? You want net neutrality.

That plus the duopoly wants to control content:

Exabyte Flood As Politics

Control or profits? Which does Wall Street want?

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

My favorite piece of the campaign is this one:

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

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

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

Packet Privacy and Net Neutrality

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

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

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

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

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

-jsq

Moderate? Comcast Stifling Isn't

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

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

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

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

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

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

Duopoly Fear Factor: Metered Access or a Thousand Flowers

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

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

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

Cox Interrupts eDonkey: Same Technique as Comcast with BitTorrent

The same person to bust Comcast's blocking of BitTorrent traffic was called upon to test Cox's system, and sure enough, he concluded with "conclusive proof" that eDonkey was getting the same treatment.

First Comcast, Now Cox Busted 'Managing' Traffic by Jason Lee Miller, Webpronews.com, Mon, 11/19/2007 - 10:51.

We asked regular user Robb Topolski, who was the first to discover Comcast's traffic shaping practices, to take a look at Cox connectivity a little more closely.

According to Topolski, Cox is in fact using traffic shaping to degrade p2p traffic. In analyzing a user log, he has concluded that Cox is using traffic shaping hardware to send forged TCP/IP packets with the RST (reset) flag set -- with the goal of disrupting eDonkey traffic. He's been unable to tell precisely what hardware Cox is using, but he notes that the technique being used is very similar to Comcast's treatment of BitTorrent.

— Cox Also Disrupting P2P Traffic, Using the same forged packet method as Comcast, by Karl, BroadbandReports.com, 03:35PM Thursday Nov 15 2007

The main difference between Comcast and Cox is that Cox says it's doing it, for the good of the user, of course. Still, which users exactly asked for their ISP to fake TCP packets? And how long before Cox trips up some business users, Like Comcast stifling Lotus Notes?

-jsq

FCC To End Cable Exclusive Deals for Apartments

Regulation by PR?

Why wait for a boring FCC meeting that no one will watch to announce a major policy, when you can talk to a New York Times reporter instead? Days before the official FCC meeting at which the issue will be discussed, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has just told the newspaper that his agency is ready to strike down the exclusive contracts that cable operators have signed with apartment managers and homeowners' associations across the country.

— FCC to strike down exclusive apartment complex cable deals, By Nate Anderson, ars technica, October 29, 2007 - 01:45PM CT

Ars technica indicates that Martin sounds like he's serious on this one. Of course, Martin sounded serious about open access rules for 700Mhz spectrum, too, yet watered them down until they don't mean much. However, ars technica points out the biggest backers of this apartment rule change are telcos, so maybe he really means it this time. Hm, and I wonder who will sue this time?

Senate Hearings on Communications Stifling?

Somebody gets it that all the recent stifling cases are related:

Two Senators on Friday called for a congressional hearing to investigate reports that phone and cable companies are unfairly stifling communications over the Internet and on cell phones.

Sens. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, said the incidents involving several companies, including Comcast Corp., Verizon Wireless and AT&T Inc., have raised serious concerns over the companies'"power to discriminate against content."

They want the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee to investigate whether such incidents were based on legitimate business policies or unfair and anticompetitive practices and if more federal regulation is needed.

— Senators Want Probe on Content Blocking, AP, finance.MyWay.com, Saturday October 27, 5:59 AM EDT

While the Senate doesn't have much of a track record of actually doing anything about problems, at least this bipartisan pair of Senators sees there's a problem.

-jsq

Comcast v. CxOs: Blocking Lotus Notes, Too

Comcast stifling isn't just for BitTorrent anymore:

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

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

Nevermind the CTO. Think of the CFO and CEO:

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

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

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