Category: Net Neutrality

Neutralism is the new S-word

Scott Cleland has done some interesting quote-diving from the works of the neutralists, offering up his findings in a new study. Without using the term “socialism” Scott provides the evidence that this is largely an anti-capitalist movement. The fact that a few highly-profitable capitalist enterprises have found a way to manipulate a rather traditional form of digital utopian socialism for their own ends is the real news, however.

Anyhow, enjoy Scott’s paper and think about the notion of a “digital kibbutz” while you’re doing it. Now that we live in a time where government owns the banking system, “socialism” isn’t a bad word in all contexts automatically, but we do have to understand that we need to apply different expectations to government-managed systems than we do to privately-managed ones. It’s not as obvious to me as it is to the neutralists that government is more likely to give us universal high-speed connectivity than is business.

UPDATE: See comments for a critique of Scott’s analysis by Brett Glass.

Nice Outings

My talk at the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group went very well. It was a huge room, seating probably 500 or so, and over half-full. I talked about how some of the crazier ideas about net neutrality are potentially becoming mainstream thanks to the politics in the nation’s capitol and some of the personnel choices made by the Obama Administration. The selection of Susan Crawford for the FCC Transition Team is a cause for alarm. Susan is as nice a person as you’ll ever want to meet, and quite bright and well-intentioned, but her position that ISPs and carriers have no business actively managing packets is poison. I got a healthy round of applause, and several people thanked me for my remarks afterwards. Very few people know how dependent e-mail is on the DNS Blacklists that members of this organization maintain, and that’s a real shame.

Last night I took the short trip up to Mountain View to see Jeff Jarvis’s talk about his book What Would Google Do? The audience, about 25 people more or less, was a lot less impressed with Google than Jeff is, and it occurred to me that Google really is vulnerable on the search front. I can imagine a much more effective search methodology than the one Google employs, but getting the venture capital to build a rival infrastructure isn’t going to happen.

I told Jeff (an old friend of the blog who’s driven a lot of traffic this way over the years) that what he likes about Google isn’t Google as much as it’s inherent qualities of the Internet. He more or less knows that, but the packaging of open networks, distributed computing, and free expression is easier when you concretize it, and that’s what his book does. I read it as a sequel to Cluetrain.

Speaking at MAAWG in Frisco tomorrow

I’m on a panel tomorrow at the General Meeting of the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, the organization that keeps the Internet from being overrun by spam and malware:

The Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group is a global organization focusing on preserving electronic messaging from online exploits and abuse with the goal of enhancing user trust and confidence, while ensuring the deliverability of legitimate messages. With a broad base of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and network operators representing almost one billion mailboxes, key technology providers and senders, MAAWG works to address messaging abuse by focusing on technology, industry collaboration and public policy initiatives

My panel is on Mail Filtering Transparency: The Impact of Network
Neutrality on Combating Abuse:

Network Neutrality (NN) means different things to different people. In 2008, much of the debate was focused on protecting P2P applications from various network management practices. In 2009, the debate is likely to expand to explore the impact of NN concepts on other applications, particularly email. We have already seen the strong reaction by some parties at the IETF to attempts to standardize DNS xBLs, which some claimed were discriminatory and lacking in transparency. We have also heard of claims that when ISPs block certain domains and servers that this may be discriminatory and could run afoul of NN concepts. This panel will explore the question of what NN means to email anti‐abuse, the increasing scrutiny that anti‐abuse policies will be under, the motivations behind the drive for greater transparency regarding such policies, and how all of those things should be balanced against the need to enforce strong anti‐abuse techniques.

Dave Crocker is on the panel, and I’m looking forward to meeting him, and I have it on good authority that Paul Vixie will be in attendance as well. The best thing about being an opinionated jerk like I am is the people you get to meet.

This organization is at the crossroads of “run any application you want” and “reasonable network management.” Spam prevention has always been a lightning rod because the very existence of spam highlights so many of the problems the current Internet architecture has. Its central assumption is that people will behave nicely all (or at least most) of the time, and the existence of botnets clearly calls that into question. It probably comes as no surprise that the filtering that spam reduction systems have to do makes net neuts nervous. Stupid networks may be nice in theory, but we live in a world of practice.

Doubts about Broadband Stimulus

The New York Times has a front page story today on the broadband stimulus bill which features an extensive quote from Brett:

Critics like Mr. Glass say the legislation being developed in Congress is flawed in various ways that could mean much of the money is wasted, or potentially not spent at all — arguably just as bad an outcome given that the most immediate goal of the stimulus measure is to pump new spending into the economy.

An “open access” requirement in the bill might discourage some companies from applying for grants because any investments in broadband infrastructure could benefit competitors who would gain access to the network down the line.

Meeting minimum speed requirements set forth in the House version could force overly costly investments by essentially providing Cadillac service where an economy car would be just as useful. And some worry that government may pay for technology that will be obsolete even before the work is completed.

“Really the devil is in the details,” Mr. Glass said. “Yes, there is $9 billion worth of good that we can do, but the bill doesn’t target the funds toward those needs.”

The bill is still very rough. Some critics cite the bill’s preference for grants to large incumbents, others highlight the amorphous “open access” provisions and the arbitrary speed provisions as weaknesses. The only interest groups that appear altogether happy with it are Google’s boosters, such as Ben Scott of Free Press. This is a flip-flop for Free Press, who only last week was urging members to call Congress and ask that bill be killed.

A particularly odd reaction comes from friend of the blog Jeff Jarvis, who took time out from pitching his love letter to Google What Would Google Do? to tear into the article’s sourcing:

I found myself irritated by today’s story in the New York Times that asks whether putting money from the bailout toward broadband would be a waste. The question was its own answer. So was the placement of the story atop page one. The reporter creates generic groups of experts to say what the he wants to say (I know the trick; I used to be a reporter): “But experts warn…. Other critics say…. Other supporters said…”

I wish that every time he did that, the words “experts,” “critics,” and “supporters” were hyperlinked to a page that listed three of each.

It’s an obvious case of a story with an agenda: ‘I’m going to set out to poke a hole in this.’

The odd bit is that five people are named and quoted, and the terms “expert” and “critic” clearly refer to these named sources. It’s boring to repeat names over and over, so the writer simply uses these terms to avoid the tedium. It’s clear that Brett and Craig Settles are the critics and experts. Jeff seems not to have read the article carefully and simply goes off on his defensive tirade without any basis.

It’s a given in Google’s world that massive government subsidies for broadband are a good thing because they will inevitably lead to more searches, more ad sales, and more revenue for the Big G. But while that’s clearly the case, it doesn’t automatically follow that what’s good for Google is good for America, so it behooves our policy makers to ensure that the money is spent wisely, without too many gimmicks in favor of one technology over another or too many strings attached that don’t benefit the average citizen.

Raising questions about pending legislation and trying to improve it is as American as baseball, and the article in the Times is a step in the right direction. It may not be what Google would do, but it’s good journalism.

I want to make sure that the broadband money is spent efficiently, so I would bag the open access requirement (nobody knows what it means anyway) and give credit all improvements in infrastructure that increase speed and reduce latency.

The bill needs to support all technologies that have utility in the Internet access space, wireless, coax, and fiber, but should encourage the laying of new fiber where it’s appropriate, and high-speed wireless in less-populated areas. Eventually, homes and businesses are pretty much all going to have fiber at the doorstep, but that doesn’t need to happen overnight.

Professional Complainers Blast Cox

Cox Cable announced plans to test a new traffic management system intended to improve the Internet experience of most of their customers yesterday, and the reaction from the network neutrality lobby came fast and furious. The system will separate latency-sensitive traffic from bulk data transfers and adjust priorities appropriately, which is the sort of thing that Internet fans should cheer. In its essence, the Internet is a resource contention system that should, in most cases, resolve competing demands for bandwidth in favor of customer perception and experience. When I testified at the FCC’s first hearing on network management practices last February, I spent half my time on this point and all other witnesses agreed with me: applications have diverse needs, and the network should do its best to meet all of them. That’s what we expect from a “multi-purpose network”, after all.

So now that Cox wants to raise the priority of VoIP and gaming traffic over background file transfers, everybody should be happy. The neutralists have always said in public fora that they support boosting VoIP’s priority over P2P, and Kevin Martin’s press release about the Comcast order said he was OK with special treatment for VoIP. And in fact the failure of the new Comcast system to provide such special treatment is at the root of the FCC’s recent investigation of Comcast, which was praised by the neuts.

So how is it that the very people who complain about Comcast’s failure to boost VoIP priority are now complaining about Cox? Free Press’s general-purpose gadfly Ben Scott is practically jumping up and down pounding the table over it:

Consumer advocates certainly aren’t impressed. “The information provided by Cox gives little indication about how its new practices will impact Internet users, or if they comply with the FCC’s Internet Policy Statement,” says consumer advocacy firm Free Press in a statement. “As a general rule, we’re concerned about any cable or phone company picking winners and losers online.”

“Picking winners and losers” is bad, and failing to pick winners and losers is also bad. The only thread of consistency in the complaints against cable, DSL, and FTTH providers is a lack of consistency.

Make up your mind, Ben Scott, do you want an Internet in which Vuze can step all over Skype or don’t you?

UPDATE: For a little back-and-forth, see Cade Metz’ article on this The Register, the world’s finest tech site. Cade quotes EFF’s Peter Eckersley to the effect that Cox is “presuming to know what users want.” They are, but it’s not that hard to figure out that VoIP users want good-quality phone calls: a three-year-old knows that much.

Technorati Tags:

Damned if you do, screwed if you don’t

The FCC has finally noticed that reducing the Quality of Service of an Internet access service affects all the applications that use it, including VoIP. They’ve sent a harsh letter to Comcast seeking ammunition with which to pillory the cable giant, in one of Kevin Martin’s parting shots:

Does Comcast give its own Internet phone service special treatment compared to VoIP competitors who use the ISP’s network? That’s basically the question that the Federal Communications Commission posed in a letter sent to the cable giant on Sunday. The agency has asked Comcast to provide “a detailed justification for Comcast’s disparate treatment of its own VoIP service as compared to that offered by other VoIP providers on its network.” The latest knock on the door comes from FCC Wireline Bureau Chief Dana Shaffer and agency General Counsel Matthew Berry.

Readers of this blog will remember that I raised this issue with the “protocol-agnostic” management scheme Comcast adopted in order to comply with the FCC’s over-reaction to the former application-aware scheme, which prevented P2P from over-consuming bandwidth needed by more latency-sensitive applications. My argument is that network management needs to operate in two stages, one that allocates bandwidth fairly among users, and a second that allocates it sensibly among the applications in use by each user. The old Comcast scheme did one part of this, and the new scheme does the other part. I’d like to see both at the same time, but it’s not at all clear that the FCC will allow that. So we’re left with various forms of compromise.

The fundamental error that the FCC is making in this instance is incorrectly identifying the “service” that it seeks to regulate according to a new attempt to regulate services (skip to 13:30) rather than technologies.

Comcast sells Internet service, telephone service, and TV service. It doesn’t sell “VoIP service” so there’s no basis to this complaint. The Commission has made it very difficult for Comcast to even identify applications running over the Internet service, and the Net Neuts have typically insisted it refrain from even trying to do so; recall David Reed’s fanatical envelope-waving exercise at the Harvard hearing last year.

The telephone service that Comcast and the telephone companies sell uses dedicated bandwidth, while the over-the-top VoIP service that Vonage and Skype offer uses shared bandwidth. I certainly hope that native phone service outperforms ad hoc VoIP; I pay good money to ensure that it does.

This action says a lot about what’s wrong with the FCC. Regardless of the regulatory model it brings to broadband, it lacks the technical expertise to apply it correctly. The result is “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” enforcement actions.

This is just plain silly. The only party the FCC has any right to take to task in this matter is itself.

The pirates who congregate at DSL Reports are in a big tizzy over this, naturally.

Keeping the Issue Alive

Friends of Broadband should be pleased with President-elect Obama’s proposed broadband stimulus program, which proposes $6 billion in grants for wireless and other forms of broadband infrastructure. Granted, the package isn’t as large as many had wished; Educause had asked for $32 billion, ITIF wanted $10 billion, and Free Press wanted $40 billion, but this is a good start. Harold Feld puts the size of the grant package in perspective and praises it on his Tales of the Sausage Factory blog.

But there’s no pleasing some people. Free Press has mounted an Action Alert, asking its friends to oppose the stimulus package as it currently stands. The Freeps, who run the “Save the Internet” campaign, want strings attached to the money, insisting it only be given to projects that meet their requirements:

1. Universal: focused on connecting the nearly half of the country stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide.
2. Open: committed to free speech and without corporate gatekeepers, filters or discrimination.
3. Affordable: providing faster speeds at lower prices.
4. Innovative: dedicated to new projects only and available to new competitors, including municipalities and nonprofits.
5. Accountable: open to public scrutiny so we can ensure that our money isn’t being spent to prop up stock prices and support market monopolies.

These goals are not even consistent with each other. Half of America uses broadband today, and half doesn’t. Most of the unconnected half have chosen not to subscribe to services that reach their homes already, opting to remain outside the broadband revolution for their own reasons. So we can’t very well pursue numbers 1 and 4 at the same time. Most of this money will be spent in rural areas that are currently served by Wireless ISPs like Lariat. Rural population isn’t as large as urban population, so going into unserved or underserved areas isn’t going to do much for the digital divide-by-choice that plagues America’s inner cities.

I suspect there’s some self-interest involved here, such that Free Press wants to keep the issue of America’s place in the global ranking of broadband penetration about where it is (between 7th and 15th, depending on whose numbers you like) in order to raise money, have a soapbox, and keep on complaining.

I don’t see any other way to explain this.

UPDATE: Freep has sent letters to the committee chairs with much less incendiary language, but arguing the same line: the Internet is a telecom network and has to be regulated the way that telecom networks have always been regulated. This angle is clearly good if you’re a career telecom regulator, but it’s blind to the technical realities of IP network management. Making an IP network fair and functional requires “discrimination”, and the Freep doesn’t get that. Not even a little bit.

This organization has established an amazing ability to confuse its self-interest with the public interest in the short time that it’s been around. Freep’s first issue, after all, was a series of regulations designed to prevent the rapacious newspaper industry from taking over the television industry. They still push for limits on TV and newspaper cross-ownership, and only got into the Internet-as-telephone fight to advance their initial cause. The number of people who think free societies need to be protected from “powerful newspapers” is vanishingly small, or course, around the same size as the flat-earther demographic.

UPDATE 2: It gets even stranger. Open access provisions are already in the bill, as Matthew Lasar points out on the Ars Technica blog:

As for the net neutrality and open access ideas; well, they’re already in the bill (PDF; see p. 53). NTIA, the executive branch agency tasked with disbursing the broadband money, is required to ensure that all grant recipients operate both wired and wireless services on an “open access basis,” though it’s left up to NTIA to define what this means and how it works.

In addition, anyone taking grant money must “adhere to the principles contained in the Federal Communications Commission’s broadband policy statement,” which lays out four basic neutrality provisions for Internet companies. In other words, although “network neutrality” isn’t mentioned, it’s already in the bill in a basic way. (Note that the FCC policy statement only protects “legal content,” however; it’s not a pure “end-to-end” packet delivery guarantee.)

Here’s a suggestion for the Freep: before issuing your next mouth-breathing Action Alert about a pending bill, read the damn thing. You won’t look like such a bunch of knee-jerk alarmists if you do.

Technorati Tags:

Briscoe explains Re-ECN in plain English

See the current issue of IEEE Spectrum for a nice description of Bob Briscoe’s Re-ECN, A Fairer, Faster Internet Protocol:

Refeedback introduces a second type of packet marking—think of these as credits and the original [ECN] congestion markings as debits. The sender must add sufficient credits to packets entering the network to cover the debit marks that are introduced as packets squeeze through congested Internet pipes. If any subsequent network node detects insufficient credits relative to debits, it can discard packets from the offending stream.

To keep out of such trouble, every time the receiver gets a congestion (debit) mark, it returns feedback to the sender. Then the sender marks the next packet with a credit. This reinserted feedback, or refeedback, can then be used at the entrance to the Internet to limit congestion—you do have to reveal everything that may be used as evidence against you.

Refeedback sticks to the Internet principle that the computers on the edge of the network detect and manage congestion. But it enables the middle of the network to punish them for providing misinformation.

The limits and checks on congestion at the borders of the Internet are trivial for a network operator to add. Otherwise, the refeedback scheme does not require that any new code be added to the network’s equipment; all it needs is that standard congestion notification be turned on. But packets need somewhere to carry the second mark in the “IP” part of the TCP/IP formula. Fortuitously, this mark can be made, because there is one last unused bit in the header of every IP packet.

This is a plan that will allow interactive uses of the Internet to co-exist happily with bulk data transfer. It’s quite brilliant and I recommend it as an alternative to a lot of nonsense that’s been floated around this space.

Technorati Tags: ,

High Noon in North Texas

Now here’s a great story:

Verizon is setting up a Wild West-style telecom showdown by expanding its FiOS network further into territory traditionally held by rival AT&T, says a new report from Information Gatekeepers.

According to IGI, a telecom consulting firm, Verizon’s recent FiOS expansion into areas of northern Texas could mark the first time that one carrier has directly competed with another in its own franchised territory for residential wireline Internet services. Traditionally, Verizon and AT&T have competed with each other primarily for wireless voice and data services, as the companies’ landline businesses have been dependent on architecture that each company has purchased over the years from the original “Baby Bell” companies formed in the wake of AT&T’s breakup in 1984.
Windows Vista: Necessity and Opportunity: Download now

But with Verizon now offering video, voice and data services over its fiber-optic network in AT&T’s home state, IGI says that the telecom industry could be “drastically” changed. In particular, IGI says that Verizon’s decision to “overbuild” its facilities into AT&T’s franchise areas could spark AT&T to begin overbuilding as well, thus turning competition for building out services into a potential “nationwide phenomenon.”

More to come as I dig into the details, but this has the potential to be the story of the decade.

One of the great insults

Brzezinski says to Scarborough: “You have a such stunningly superficial knowledge of what went on it’s almost embarrassing to listen to you.”

I know just how he feels. Larry Lessig’s opinion in Newsweek about a government ministry to make sure “innovation” happens is along the same lines. “Innovation”, which is neither good nor bad, happens when it has to, and the best way for a government to stimulate it is probably to burden businesses with more redtape and mindless regulations, but that’s not good for more reasons than I can count.

Re-naming the FCC isn’t likely to accomplish a great deal, and that’s about all that Lessig actually recommends.