Category: Net Neutrality

Does the Internet need saving?

Doc Searls is writing a follow-up on last year’s Saving the Net piece and he wants your suggestions:

So I just decided I’ll run a first aniversary follow-up on the piece, over at Linux Journal. But first I’d like to hear from the rest of ya’ll. Tag your posts savingthenet and I’ll find them.

Mine is simple: what makes us think the Internet needs saving? All the empirical measures say it’s thriving: there are more users than ever before, more web sites, more blogs, more broadband, lower prices, and more ways to get broadband thanks to EVDO, public WiFi, and WiMax (coming soon to an ISP near you).

The biggest and only threat to the Internet is the misguided attempt to regulate ISPs in order to prevent the imaginary threat to the imaginary principle of net neutrality, but it’s unlikely to go anywhere, even if the Dems take back the Senate.

I’d be looking at things like terrorist and criminal uses of the Internet, including spam and phishing, because we’re more likely to see a real encroachment on personal freedom of expression over the Internet in response to the real abuses of bad actors than for any other reason.

But the bottom line is that the Internet is fundamentally healthy, and anybody who tells you otherwise probably has a personal agenda because the only way to sustain the “Internet at Risk” argument is to give more weight to the future than to the present. And as we’ve been hearing “Internet at Risk” arguments for ten years (if not longer) and nothing of that nature has come to pass, it’s simply crying wolf at this point, so get back to me when you have evidence of harm and not just imagination.

Dirty Money

The Guardian reports that Google has set up a PAC and a high-dollar lobbying arm to protect its network subsidies:

While Google would not be hit directly by a two-tier net, its recently acquired online video site YouTube would, and Google fears that splitting the internet could hamper the creation of other innovative businesses.

“Net neutrality is the most obvious issue for us,” says Reyes, who worked at the US state department before joining Google. “But … Congress and the government are going to take on a whole range of issues that affect us on technological fronts, on legal fronts. This is our effort to play in that game.”

Google has an impressive list of players on its team. As well as counting Al Gore among its senior advisers, Google’s Washington office was set up about a year and a half ago by Alan Davidson. A well-known Democrat sympathiser, he served for eight years as associate director of the Centre for Democracy and Technology, a thinktank that opposes government and industry control of the web. Alongside him is Robert Boorstin, a former Clinton foreign policy aide from the Centre for American Progress, as Google’s communications chief in the capital.

Google’s PAC will be run by a five-person board of directors who will be guided by the recommendations of an advisory committee made up of Google employees. It will raise its funds through voluntary donations from staff.

But judging from the fact that in the past Google employees have been involved with leftwing groups such as MoveOn.org, it will be very interesting to see where that cash is headed.

Towards the end, they tick off some of the search monopolist’s more dubious practices. Is this “don’t be evil?”

Dirty corporate money is a cancer on our political process, no matter who it comes from, folks. Google’s influence-buying operation is bad for freedom.

Building a better Internet

The Boy Scouts are on the outs with all right-thinking and decent people for their intolerance of gay scoutmasters, although all the shrieking over Mark Foley would almost make you think they were just unfashionably ahead of the curve. In case anybody’s wobbling, there is something to set you straight. The Boy Scouts are oppressing pirates with a new “activity badge” discouraging illegal file sharing:

A Boy Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, etc., etc. If he’s in the Los Angeles area, he also respects copyrights.

Tens of thousands of Boy Scouts here will be able to earn an activity patch for learning about the evils of downloading pirated movies and music. The patch shows a film reel, a music CD and the international copyright symbol, a “C” enclosed in a circle.

The movie industry developed the curriculum as a way of emphasizing the ills of piracy to a generation that has grown up finding free music and video clips on the Internet.

That’s got to be very upsetting to such leaders of the Pirates’ Rights lobby as Larry Lessig, the Stanford law professor who argues that illegal file sharing is central to enlightened democracy. As if poor Lessig doesn’t have enough on his plate, what with being made into a non-entity by former FCC chief William Kennard in the New York Times last Saturday.

Kennard had to the gall to frame the idiotic network neutrality debate as a battle between Super-Wealthy companies such as Google and Amazon and Merely-Rich cable and telephone companies:

Unfortunately, the current debate in Washington is over “net neutrality” — that is, should network providers be able to charge some companies special fees for faster bandwidth. This is essentially a battle between the extremely wealthy (Google, Amazon and other high-tech giants, which oppose such a move) and the merely rich (the telephone and cable industries). In the past year, collectively they have spent $50 million on lobbying and advertising, effectively preventing Congress and the public from dealing with more pressing issues.

As chairman of the F.C.C., I put into place many policies to bridge the narrowband digital divide. The broadband revolution poses similar challenges for policymakers. America should be a world leader in broadband technology and deployment, and we must ensure that no group or region in America is denied access to high-speed connections.

We are falling short in both areas. Since 2000, the United States has slipped from second to 19th in the world in broadband penetration, with Slovenia threatening to push us into 20th. Studies by the federal government conclude that our rural and low-income areas trail urban and high-income areas in the rate of broadband use. Indeed, this year the Government Accountability Office found that 42 percent of households have either no computer or a computer with no Internet connection.

One thing’s for certain about the net neutrality regulations offered by Congressional Democrats and rogue Republicans: they’re not exactly going to stimulate faster build-out of fiber to the home, whatever their other virtues may be.

So where does that leave the heroic few like Lessig who’ve jumped aboard Google’s bandwagon in demanding new regulations on the business models of broadband carriers? Annoyed, mainly:

It’s funny, I hadn’t realized I was a Google tool. I had thought we were pushing to reverse a failed policy because we wanted to enable the next Google (that was my point about YouTube). I thought we were angry because the “merely rich” had yet to provide broadband as broadly as in other comparable nations. And I thought we were fighting the efforts of the “merely rich” to further reduce competition, either by buying up spectrum that would enable real wireless competition, or by getting state laws passed to make muni-competition illegal. I had thought these were important issues for the new economy — keeping the platform as competitive as possible, to keep prices and quality moving in the direction they move in the rest of the developed world.

Once again, Lessig presses his case on virtue grounds. He, and the others on his side who want our regulators to go where no regulator has gone before, are insistent that you see them as the Good People, who appeal to your sense of virtue and fair play, simply because they oppose the Telcos, the Bad People. And you’re to know that the Telcos are the Bad People because, well, that’s the way it’s always been. And you’re to believe that net neutrality regulations are good because, well, that’s the way the Internet has always been. This is not exactly a highly sophisticated argument.

In fact, it’s wrong in just about every way an argument can be wrong: logically, factually, intellectually, and emotionally. The Internet has not historically had regulations on how to treat router queues, and even if it had we would be under no obligation to honor them in all future telecom regulations. The Internet is a part of our society that was devised by engineers to meet a set of objectives, not a perfect essence that descended directly from the Almighty into Bob Kahn’s head in 1981. In the beginning, we wanted it to be a plaything for academics, and now we want it to be much, much more. So we’re thinking about how to regulate it and how to stimulate it to make it grow into the kind of network we all want it to be. The argument from historical essence is garbage.

Kennard is right when he says we should be debating what it’s going to take to get real broadband penetration into American homes, schools, libraries, and businesses. The better the network, the more useful it is, whether we have content taxes or not. Look at this video conferencing system from Cisco with HDTV and “telepresence:”

One industry analyst described Cisco’s system — which the company calls “telepresence” — as far superior to other video conferencing products, typically accessed or run over the Internet.

Chambers has touted the new technology as so lifelike that it could replace corporate travel, saying that Cisco will cut $100 million in expenses by reducing travel 20 percent in the next 12 months.

The system uses software the company created and runs on a network powered by the company’s own routers and switches. The pictures are displayed on a 60-inch plasma screen with 1,080-pixel screen resolution, which is four times better than the standard television and two times better than a high-definition television.

They’re saying this product has the potential to re-shape Cisco, but it would be illegal to operate under the regulations proposed by Lessig’s warriors (the system almost certainly prioritizes packets and may require extra-spiffy service from ISP or NSP to perform properly, and that’s forbidden under Snowe-Dorgan and Markey.)

One might say, somewhat simplistically, that this net neutrality thing boils down to whether you want to protect downloads from a content tax or have a system of fees and regulations that permits us to cut corporate travel and wire both rich and poor homes with superior broadband.

That’s not a difficult choice. Of course, the issue is more complicated, but not much more, so there you are, choose.

And you can also see Matt Sherman for a reasoned critique of Professor Lessig’s latest.

UPDATE: Super-excitable intellectual property attorney Harold Feld is very upset with the Boy Scouts, but he blames the MPAA, all better to imagine dark conspiracies. Feld is one of my heroes.

Progress and Freedom Foundation honcho Patrick Ross liked this humble piece, but Google scholar Richard Brandt didn’t. You can’t please everybody, and I don’t even try. Check Brandt’s photo, it’s a scream.

Bill Moyers and the Mythology of the Internet

Bill Moyers is the ordained Baptist minister who was LBJ’s Chief Propagandist during America’s descent into the Viet Nam quagmire. He made a name for himself by pushing Joseph Campbell’s loopy theories about the alleged universality of mythology on PBS and giving a megaphone to voices on the lunatic fringe of American politics such as Noam Chomsky. He’s jumped into the Net Neutrality fray with both horns, airing a 90 minute ad for Bob McChesney’s Save the Internet campaign that trails off into odd conspiracy theories toward the end. PBS has set up a web page to promote it, where you’ll find this gem:

The future of the Internet is up for grabs. Last year, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) effectively eliminated net neutrality rules, which ensured that every content creator on the Internet-from big-time media concerns to backroom bloggers-had equal opportunity to make their voice heard. Now, large and powerful corporations are lobbying Washington to turn the World Wide Web into what critics call a “toll road,” threatening the equitability that has come to define global democracy’s newest forum. Yet the public knows little about what’s happening behind closed doors on Capitol Hill.

Some activists describe the ongoing debate this way: A small number of mega-media giants owns much of the content and controls the delivery of content on radio and television and in the press; if we let them take control of the Internet as well, immune from government regulation, who will pay the price? Their opponents say that the best way to encourage Internet innovation and technological advances is to let the market-not the federal government-determine the shape of the system.

Kindly note that this goes beyond the usual refrain of “Big Telco is stealing the Internet and our Democracy will soon be lost” to assert a conspiracy of Big Telco and Big Media. In fact, the last 30 minutes of the show isn’t about the Internet at all, it’s about media consolidation, McChesney’s favorite hobby horse.

Is net neutrality a legitimate part of the media ownership debate, or simply a fear and smear campaign devised to enhance the influence of self-promoters like McChesney and his ilk?

You can probably guess what I think about that.

Net Neutrality: Back to the Drawing Board

Public Knowledge has been one of the knuckle-draggers puffing the net neutrality issue out of all sane proportion, so it was surprising to read a rational article on the subject on their blog. Written by guest blogger Phil Weiser, it valiantly attempts to separate fact from fiction. See Net Neutrality: Back to the Drawing Board:

The real concern of net neutrality advocates should not be insisting on a single tiered Internet that—at least for those who have heard of Akamai already know—is a fantasy. (For those who are unfamiliar with Akamai, its caching services provide enhanced performance to the big companies who can afford to pay for them.) The real concern is that with only two broadband providers offering service, there remains a risk of anticompetitive conduct that understandably makes policymakers nervous. The question is thus, in an environment where there are real benefits from improving network performance and possible efficiencies from alternative pricing strategies, what should policymakers do. For Rob Atkinson and I, the answer is embrace a third way—i.e., a course different from the “do little” approach of the Stevens bill and the “no tiering” approach of the Wyden bill. In particular, we advocate transparency requirements (to enable consumers to be their own protectors); a competition policy based regime that would provide after-the-fact oversight of non-discriminatory conduct (evaluating whether a legitimate business reason existed for it); and a requirement that the best efforts Internet continue to evolve (in bandwidth) so those unable to pay for prioritization are still able to develop and deploy new services. For the details on our proposal, see here.

Comments are predictably bone-headed, of course, except for mine.

No Neuts in CA

This is heartwarming and inspirational:

Television viewers will ultimately wind up with one-stop shopping for video, phone and Internet services, under legislation approved by the state Senate that would open the video-services market to telephone companies.

No matter what happens with Stevens and Barton this year, those of is in California are cool.

I heard a debate of this bill on the radio with my old nemesis Lenny Goldberg arguing against it, pretty pathetically in fact. Lenny was reduced to arguing that cell phones aren’t real phones and similar rot. The man is shameless, but hardworking. No matter what your cause, he’ll shill for you: public employee unions, higher taxes, alimony, child support extraction, re-regulation of utilities, whatever, he’s there as long as you can pay the freight.

Gigabit networking for the consumer

Here it comes, a broadband technology that can move bits at a gigabit per second. And it’s all done without any wires:

On a bus fitted out specially for the occasion in Jeju this week, Samsung demonstrated a new version of 4G technology transferring data at speeds of 100Mbit/s.

The bus was moving at 60kmph – which you rarely see in real life – but it was proof enough, the Korean giant boasted, as the demonstration included handover between cells. 1Gbit/s is 50 times faster than the current Mobile WiMAX specification, 802.16e. At walking pace, the demonstration moved bits at 1GB/s.

What was that about a cable/telco duopoly? Sorry, but technology marches on and today’s reality is tomorrow’s history.

How commmon is International blockage?

Technological Musings says:

British Telecom makes sure that no other VoIP service can work on their network by blocking commonly used ports.

Is this true? I know that Korea Telecom does this, but I’d never heard this before. The blog contains a number of errors, such as this one: “There are a lot of ISPs in the US, who make sure that Vonage doesnt work on their network,” so I don’t want to take this unsourced claim at face value.

Welcome to the neutral net

We pointed out the other day that net neutrality fiends want public ownership of the Internet access network. Here’s a report from Broadband News on what that looks like:

Culver City, California was the first Los Angeles municipality to offer the public a free all-access Wi-Fi network. They’re also the first to ban all porn and p2p from that network, according to an announcement made yesterday. The city says they’ve added Audible Magic’s CopySense Network Appliance to filter illegal and “problematic content” from their network.

Be careful what you ask for, kids, you just might get it.

H/T Techdirt.

Net Neutrality is Intelligent Design for the Left

Traditional values are under attack. The old ways are in decline, people insist on more freedom of choice than their grandparents had. The received wisdom about the very structure and organization of our world has been taken apart by science, and the only way to put it back together is to use the language of science to prop it up. So obscure terms and concepts enter public discourse with new meanings, and a alternative history is created. Fear runs rampant, men of science are assaulted for their moral bankruptcy, and an alternative science is injected into the schools.

While this paragraph clearly fits the “intelligent design” attack on the biological sciences in general and evolution by natural selection in particular, it also applies to “network neutrality”, the idea that only the government can be trusted to dictate policies embedded in Internet access networks. One of the most stark presentations of this viewpoint was written by Jeff Chester for the left’s holiest organ, The Nation magazine:

Absent net neutrality and other safeguards…[b]roadband connections would be governed by ever-vigilant network software engaged in “traffic policing” to insure each user couldn’t exceed the “granted resources” supervised by “admission control” technologies. Mechanisms are being put in place so our monopoly providers can “differentiate charging in real time for a wide range of applications and events.” Among the services that can form the basis of new revenues, notes Alcatel, is online content related to “community, forums, Internet access, information, news, find your way (navigation), marketing push, and health monitoring.”

Missing from the current legislative debate on communications is how the plans of cable and phone companies threaten civic participation, the free flow of information and meaningful competition. (ed: emphasis added)

Note the use of the terms in scare quotes, traffic policing, granted resources, and admission control. These are technical terms that come from the world of network engineering, and we can sure Chester doesn’t use them because he wishes to illuminate their importance in the engineering context. He doesn’t bother to define or explain, but takes it as given that any such words can only be destructive to “civic participation.”

The juxtaposition of network engineering language with social policy language is deceptive and inane. It’s like arguing that an electrical grid that provides alternating current to the home is responsible for politicians who flip-flop between positions depending on what audience they’re addressing. There’s a superficial similarity, indeed, but that’s where the connection ends.

We use admission control and policing on WiFi networks with something called WiFi multi-media (WMM) so that telephone calls and live video streams can happily coexist with web surfing on the same wireless network. Wireless networks don’t have unlimited bandwidth, so we have to use some finesse to provide a satisfactory experience to as many people as possible over a common network channel. Network engineering doesn’t do this in order to stifle democracy and curb “the free flow of information;” on the contrary, enabling as many people as possible to use the network as they wish to use it has the effect of enhancing free information flow. When we use “admission control” and its related priority system on a WiFi network, we can handle four times as many phone conversations as could without them. Doesn’t a phone call to a politician count as “civic participation” any more?

Have we now come to a state where the aesthetics of engineering language guide public policy more than the effects of engineering practice? I hope not, but we’re getting closer.

Chester admits that he wants to government to own Internet access networks, or failing that, that it should control them:

That means we would become owners of the “last mile” of fiber wire, the key link to the emerging broadband world. For about $17 a month, over ten years, the high-speed connections coming to our homes would be ours–not in perpetual hock to phone or cable monopolists.

Chester says, in essence, that the government is more likely to control the Internet in such a way that the public can engage in criticism of government actions and policies than anyone else. I see no empirical evidence that would encourage me to accept this article of faith, and plenty that argue for its rejection.

In our recent experience, we got to see head-to-head competition between a highly-regulated DSL service and a minimally-regulated Internet access system using cable TV systems, and the less-regulated option emerged as the clear technical winner.

Chester uses the language of science to urge us to ignore experimental data, and that’s as fundamentally unscientific and irrational as it gets.

For extra bonus points, his Center for Democracy and Technology minion Mike Godwin urges network neutrality regulation on the premise that the New York city taxi system is a transportation utopia. That’s just silly, and Matt Sherman explains why.