Category: Networks

Neutrality ain’t exactly what you may think it is, you see:

The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed legislation allowing Internet Service Providers to do traffic shaping, giving some priority to certain types of content, which would presumably be either the ISPs’ own content or that of ISP customers paying a premium for such access. The U.S. Senate is considering similar legislation, as well as other legislation designed to do exactly the opposite — guarantee that all data packets receive equal service. The prevailing assumption, by the way, is that right now all packets ARE created equal, which of course they are not.

Some pretty good detail on how the Internet actually works follows, but he gets all conspiracy-freakish at the end.

IPTV and VoIP are two examples of applications that need priority service, and there’s also that whole issue of payment. Read a lot, you’ll get a little here and a little there that sheds light on the issue, and you’ll pay for your illumination with propaganda.

In a Wall St. Journal (subscription required) Op-Ed, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden makes several outlandish and false claims:

Mr. Forbes claims there is no evidence of discrimination by Internet providers. This is simply not true. Cox Communications, a broadband provider that also has a large classified advertising business, is currently blocking access to craigslist.org, a large, free classified Web site that competes with Cox. In another instance, Madison River, a broadband provider and phone company, blocked access of its Internet customers to Vonage, a competitor in providing phone services. Luckily, because net neutrality rules were in place when Madison River blocked Vonage, the FCC was able to act in ending Madison River’s discriminatory practices. Unfortunately, today those same net neutrality provisions are no longer in effect, and the FCC would no longer be able to protect Vonage from discrimination.

We’ve examined the Cox Cable myth, and found it totally lacking in substance so we won’t repeat that rebuttal here; scroll down.

The rules that enabled the FCC to act in the Madison River case were actually strengthened in the COPE Act, which gave agency the power to fine offenders up to $500,000.

Wyden then goes on to tout the success of the highly-regulated DSL system, but fails to mention that it lags far behind the less-regulated Cable broadband system in the USA:

To the contrary, policies that spurred competition, including forcing incumbents to provide network access to competitors, are exactly what drove the rapid broadband deployment in South Korea and Japan. Over the past 10 years, while South Korea and Japan were opening up their incumbent’s networks to spur competition, here at home the Baby Bells spent millions of dollars and filed numerous actions at the FCC to prevent competition.

Korea and Japan don’t tell us a thing about investment in US broadband, we’ve done the experiment and can see the results.

Wyden closes with the following colossal load of crap:

Mr. Forbes also makes a poor analogy that many opponents of net neutrality have used comparing the Internet to the Postal Service and mail delivery. This analogy is wrong. Net neutrality protections are not analogous to the post office charging consumers different rates for regular mail and overnight delivery. Rather, net neutrality would protect the person who pays for overnight delivery from having it take five days for his package to be delivered because the person receiving it did not pay for receiving overnight delivery as well. Internet providers want to prevent consumers who pay for priority delivery of data from receiving the data unless Web sites also pay for priority delivery. Net neutrality protections would prevent them from doing so.

Wyden’s regulation prevents broadband carriers from charging anyone for expedited delivery. There is no language in it about “double-charging”. The issue on the table is whether service providers have the option of paying for expedited delivery to customers who did not pay for it themselves.

Any movement that relies on misrepresentation, deception, and falsehood to make its case probably doesn’t have a good set of facts on its side.

H/T Matt Sherman.

This seems like a reasonable trade:

Stevens has added a new section to his proposed bill aimed at preserving consumers’ ability to surf anywhere on the public Internet and use any Web-based application, according to the latest draft obtained by Reuters this weekend.

However, the draft by the Alaska Republican does not include a ban on pricing content companies have demanded.

Earlier versions of the bill only called for the Federal Communications Commission to report on Internet access, prompting Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye, the top Democrat on the committee, and some others to call for more protections.

Screaming neuts aren’t going to like it, however; anything but Internet-as-telegraph offends them.

Perhaps you’ve heard that Cox Cable is blocking Craig’s List; the Net Neutrality militias tout this as an example of the kind of discriminatory behavior they’re going to protect us from. Their leader, the self-described know-nothing Matt Stoller says:

There’s a pervasive myth that there has been no discrimination on the internet against content companies. That is simply untrue. For one, Craigslist has been blocked for three months from Cox customers because of security software malfunctions.

Back on February 23rd Authentium acknowledged that their software is blocking Craigslist but it still hasn’t fixed the problem, more than three months later. That’s a heck of long time to delete some text from their blacklist. And this company also supplies security software to other large ISPs.

Without net neutrality protections, cable and telecom companies will have no incentive to fix these kinds of problems. Already, it’s quite difficult to even know that this is happening because they are quite easy to disguise.

The telcos are of course lying about this, claiming that no web sites have been blocked. And gullible reporters are falling for the lies.

But the real story is that Craig Newmark’s administrators don’t know how to set up their system. Here’s a comment I found on Save the Internet that will probably be deleted pretty soon:

Has anyone here actually read the response from Authentium? Far from “opaque,” it pretty clearly (if technically) explains the problem and why this has nothing to do with blacklists:

“The network packets coming from the Craigslist.org web site were unusual in that they contained a zero-length TCP window that usually indicates a server is too busy to handle more data. The Authentium firewall driver responded by sending data only one byte at a time. This slowed down the web request and made the Craigslist.org web page load very slowly or not at all.”

From RFC 793 (which defines TCP/IP):

” Flow Control:

TCP provides a means for the receiver to govern the amount of data sent by the sender. This is achieved by returning a “window” with every ACK indicating a range of acceptable sequence numbers beyond the last segment successfully received. The window indicates an allowed number of octets that the sender may transmit before receiving further permission.”

Returning a 0 means “please talk to me very slowly.” Literally it means “don’t talk to me at all” but because that’s nonsense, sites generally interpret it as “I’m overloaded; slow down.”

I’ve verified this response myself by connecting to craigslist:

15:52:00.751836 IP www.craigslist.org.http > lemming.ranjan.org.47734: S 1639327951:1639327951(0) ack 3799817961 win 0

Note the final “win 0? that confirms exactly the problem that Authentium claims.

Summary: craigslist told Cox to please speak to it very slowly. Cox did, but for longer than craigslist explicitly requested. Fixing this for craigslist could break other sites, so some caution in shipping a fix is justified.

The fact that SaveTheInternet posted this as an “opaque” response without further comment raises a question of how much STI actually knows about how the Internet works.

Somebody’s lying here, and it’s not Cox Cable or Authentium.

PS: I did my own inspection of Craig’s List’s TCP packets and found the same thing: their initial ACK advertises a Window Size of 0. By comparison, my blog advertises one of 5792, and so does Technorati.

Craig Newmark’s site is screwed up and he’s blaming Cox for it – and seeking a new law. That’s taking Internet retardation to a whole new level.

UPDATE: See Jim Lippard’s blog for a fuller explanation.

UPDATE 2: George Ou at ZDNet is on the case. This story originated with Tom Foremski at ZDNet, and getting him to issue a correction is very important.

UPDATE 3: It’s worth noting that Matt Stoller blogs on myDD.com, half of the Kosola pay-to-blog scandal. Read more about that here or here. Some people will say anything for money. Net neutrality advocate Glenn Reynolds says blogs are a “low trust environment.” He doesn’t speak for this one.

UPDATE 4: Welcome Instapundit readers. Tom Foremski and Save the Internet refuse to own up to misrepresentation of the story.

Here are the facts:

1. Craig’s List isn’t blacklisted by Cox Cable and never has been.
2. Craig’s List puts out an improper TCP window size; other sites don’t.
3. Improper TCP causes some personal firewalls grief, and Cox used to distribute one, from Authentium.
4. As soon as the Craig’s List bug came to Authentium’s attention they created a patch, which you can get from Cox today. This patch probably ignores the initial window size Craig requests.
5. Craig’s List still puts out an improper TCP window size.

So how about a little honesty, Craig, Matt, Tim, and Tom?

UPDATE 5: Craig Newmark still refuses to acknowledge his bug. All he has to do is correct his TCP settings and the whole problem goes away. Why won’t he?

UPDATE 6: Go look at the system status page at Craig’s List and you’ll see some interesting problems with all sorts of other firewalls, including their own. And you’ll also see that their problem with the personal firewall Cox Cable gives away has had a known workabound since Feb. 23th. Why all the misdirection from Craig, Save the Internet, and Matt Stoller?

Incidentally, eBay is a minority shareholder in Craig’s List, and the sole owner of Skype. Is Craig doing his master’s bidding?

UPDATE 7: Authentium responds to Craig’s lying post. Their story is verifiable, Craig’s is fabricated.

Andy Kessler, that tricky devil, has an essay on net neutrality in the Weekly Standard where he paints both sides as the bastards they are:

IN THE LONG RUN, technology doesn’t sleep. You can’t keep competitive King Kong in chains. But why wait a decade while lobbyists run interference? If Congress does nothing, we will probably end up paying more for a fast network optimized for Internet phone calls and video and shopping. But this may not be the only possible outcome. Maybe the incumbent network providers–the Verizons, Comcasts, AT&Ts–can be made to compete; threatening to seize their stagnating networks via eminent domain is just one creative idea to get them to do this. A truly competitive, non-neutral network could work, but only if we know its real economic value. If telcos or cable charge too much, someone should be in a position to steal the customer. Maybe then we’d see useful services and a better Internet. Sounds like capitalism.

What new things? It’s not just more bandwidth and better Internet video–how about no more phone numbers, just a name and the service finds you? How about subscribing to a channel and being able to watch it when and where you want, on your TV, iPod, or laptop? How about a baby monitor you can view through your cell phone? Something worth paying for. And that’s just the easy stuff.

We don’t even know what new things are possible. Bandwidth is like putty in the hands of entrepreneurs–new regulations are cement. We don’t want a town square or a dilapidated mall–we want a vibrant metropolis. Net neutrality is already the boring old status quo. But don’t give in to the cable/telco status quo either. Far better to have competition, as long as it’s real, than let Congress shape the coming communications chaos and creativity.

He has some interesting alternatives to the bankrupt regulations coming from the content side.

H/t: Red Bank TV.

Commenting on a tete a tete between Tom Evslin and yours truly, Doc makes a a very astute point:

Tom Evslin nails a number of problems with Net Neutrality, while not sparing the carriers, either. Be sure to read the comments, too. They start with one from Richard Bennett. In this post on his own blog Richard points to this Wharton report, which for the most part I agree with.
The key point is Tom’s. What we need is competition.

Indeed we do need more competition, and we’ll get it from Cable going head-to-head with with DSL and fiber-to-the-home, with WiMax and WiFi in the background. And on that note, the Wireless Communications Association has come out in opposition to the regulations.

Jim Lippard points to a the error at the heart of the New Republic’s editorial on net neutrality:

TNR has, like many others, wrongly inferred that rules which applied solely to telco telephony and last-mile networks have also applied to the Internet and Internet Service Providers, when in fact ISPs and backbone providers have been under no such constraints.

They didn’t come to this wrong conclusion without a lot of help; this claim is repeatedly made by the common carrier regulators, but it’s baseless.

Susan Crawford sees dark forces of conspiracy at work in a report by the Center fir Advanced Studies on National Preparedness and neutrality. If you don’t understand how the Internet works, it’s easy to become paranoid and confused as you learn more.

She is soundly rebutted in a comment by Tony
Rutkowski, former head of the Internet Society:

Since the inception of public communication systems, because they are critical to societal and governmental functioning, mechanisms have been instituted to control traffic flows based on priortization. You can find related provisions in the very first international agreements such as the Dresden Treaty of 1850. These capabilities are especially critical during times of national emergency or network restoration.

Today, as public communication infrastructures worldwide increasingly become reliant entirely on TCP/IP protocols, means are necessary to control access and provide varying quality of service on a service and user basis. Much of this work has already been accomplished over the past several years in the context of IMS and NGN work. You should also review the work of the NSTAC – which has existed since the early 80s after the AT&T breakup – in treating this subject.

What Kay is pointing out is that some of the NetNeutrality provisions being bandied about in legislation are antithetical to long-standing concerns about our critical national communications infrastructure. Those are concerns we should all share.

The net neutrality hysteria is fueled by misinformation and ignorance, the only cure is education.

We’ve won a convert. USA Today’s technology pundit Andrew Kantor has seen the light:

A big technology issue in Washington is network neutrality. It’s the debate of how the companies that own the Internet’s “pipes” should treat the information moving over those pipes.

A neutral Net — at least one version of it — would have them treat all data equally, from the slimiest spam to the highest-quality video. The Comcasts, Coxes, Time-Warners, and Verizons of the world wouldn’t be able to give preference to any content, even if someone wants to pay for it.

Proponents of Net neutrality spin it as a way to prevent those big network providers from discriminating against the little guys (who might be competing with them). They want to be sure that Time Warner doesn’t ‘lock out’ companies that compete with it — say, up and comers like YouTube — or give preference to their own content.

Without a Net neutrality law, those proponents say that providers would be able to, in the words of Chris Johns of Public Knowledge, “look at the packets going over their lines, and block or degrade access based on how much protection money their clients have paid them.”

Not too long ago, I was very much on their side. “Imagine you make a phone call to a friend,” I wrote then, “but instead of hearing it ring, you get a recording: We’re sorry, but the person you are calling has not paid Verizon to carry his or her conversations.

But I was wrong.

We all want fair and non-discriminatory treatment of all the services on the Internet, the debate is about how we achieve that end. The regulations proposed by Net Neutrality advocate are sadly out-of-date and counter-productive. Kantor’s a bright guy, so let’s hope he’s the harbinger of more conversions.

The Wharton School convened a panel of experts to analyze network neutrality regulations. Here’s a summary of their findings:

Network neutrality became a hot issue last fall when top executives at AT&T and BellSouth noted that companies like Google, Yahoo and Vonage were essentially distributing their services for free on the backs of telecommunications companies. “For a Google or a Yahoo or a Vonage, or anybody, to expect to use these pipes for free is nuts,” said Ed Whitacre, chairman of AT&T, in November.

That comment set off a heated argument on the issue that became “even more crazy than most debates in Congress,” says Gerald Faulhaber, a Wharton professor of business and public policy. Indeed, on the eve of the June 8 vote, Internet giants were lobbying intensely for the amendment, with Google CEO Eric Schmidt urging users in an undated open letter to “take action to protect Internet freedom.”

Faulhaber convened a meeting of scholars — including David Farber, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, Christopher Yoo, a Vanderbilt law professor, and Michael Katz, an economics professor at the University of California Berkeley’s Haas School of Business — to consider the issue. The group concluded that mandating network neutrality could have adverse effects on Internet development and result in unforeseen consequences. Any legislation “is a problem when the Internet is in a state of flux,” says Faulhaber.

I don’t agree with all of their facts, but their conclusion is certainly correct: this is not the time to impose new regulations on broadband providers. Regardless of how we assess the potential dangers of a smarter Internet, it’s way too early to know how to regulate it.