Internet – Page 6 – Richard Bennett

What’s good for Google is good for the Internet

Anna Eshoo used to be my Congressional representative, so I paid particular attention to her remarks in the recent Markey Committee hearing on Internet privacy. Frankly, she’s an embarrassment. She started her remarks by jumping all over Scott Cleland for being a shill of the broadband industry, which would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic. Scott started his remarks by disclosing who pays him, and I didn’t hear any disclosure from Rep. Eshoo about who’s paying her (see: Open Secrets for details of Google employee contributions to Eshoo and for Google PAC bucks. This Congresswoman has raised $3 million from PACs.)

She carried Google’s water, essentially saying: “Google is entitled to rape and pillage personal information for their own purposes, but nobody else better mess with it in the slightest way.” You can see the video of the hearing here, warts and all. Eshoo, like her colleague Zoe Lofgren (D, Google) has a place in these hearings, but it’s at the table with all the other lobbyists, not on the dias.

Aside from Eshoo, it wasn’t a totally bad hearing. Markey likes to simplify issues to the point that they’re all so black-and-white that you can’t see why they warrant discussion, but the witnesses were (with one exception) pretty clear on the fact that DPI is simply a technology, and as such has no moral significance. What matters, obviously, is how it’s used.

After all the hand-wringing, it should be clear that DPI isn’t a privacy issue in its own right because it’s simply a tool for harvesting information out of network packets. The privacy issues are solely in the realm of the information itself: who provides it and under what terms, who processes it, and who retains it. And these same issues have to be addressed for all personal information, on the Internet or off it, in the packets or on the web site.

But the pattern here is something that’s all too common in Congress: this technology has a scary name, so it must be bad. The focus on the technology with the scary name then takes up the time that should be spent on the important issue, privacy.

But privacy isn’t black-and-white, so we better not talk about it; it might be bad for Google.

Technorati Tags: privacy Internet Google Eshoo

House Anti-Trust Task Force Hearing on Google

C-Span has the archived video of the Conyers hearing on Google’s proposed ad deal with Yahoo: House Judiciary Committee Hearing on Internet Competition Recently, a number of transactions and potential transactions have raised anti-competitive and privacy concerns in the field of online advertising, online search, and web platform interoperability. Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) chairs a … Continue reading “House Anti-Trust Task Force Hearing on Google”

C-Span has the archived video of the Conyers hearing on Google’s proposed ad deal with Yahoo:

House Judiciary Committee Hearing on Internet Competition
Recently, a number of transactions and potential transactions have raised anti-competitive and privacy concerns in the field of online advertising, online search, and web platform interoperability. Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) chairs a House Judiciary Antitrust & Competition Policy Task Force hearing to examine the state of competition with respect to various online markets.

It’s quite long but as a bonus it’s also quite boring. Google maintains there will be no price-fixing because ads are sold in auctions, Microsoft points out that the auctions have a floor price and a subjective quality index.

The smoking gun was produced: Google proposed this deal to Yahoo the day after Microsoft made their tender offer.

Google’s girl, Zoe Lofgren, tried to spin the old “two guys in a garage can take Google down” myth, but I doubt anyone with a room temperature IQ is buying that nonsense.

There was one wild card on the panel, the Ask The Builder guy who seemed overly fond of the sound of his own voice.

Of all the members, Issa gets it the best. And he should, because he actually started and built a successful technology business before going to Washington.

Lofgren and Conyers – what can I say without being rude?

Let’s make data centers obsolete

We currently get most of our Internet content, especially video, from large data centers. The high cost of these data centers, and their data comm lines, is a huge barrier to entry to new content providers. This is why 20% of the Internet’s traffic today comes from a single source. So what options to we … Continue reading “Let’s make data centers obsolete”

We currently get most of our Internet content, especially video, from large data centers. The high cost of these data centers, and their data comm lines, is a huge barrier to entry to new content providers. This is why 20% of the Internet’s traffic today comes from a single source. So what options to we network architects have to bring about a shift in the Internet’s content architecture such that a few large companies don’t monopolize content?

One is the approach taken by NADA in Europe to create a universal network of P2P-enabled Nano Data Centers:

NADA is seeking to leverage advancements in Peer-to-Peer technology to connect the Nano Data Centers to enable them to work together to provide services to end users.

The set top box would essentially be split in two – one half facing the end user with all the typical functionality and services, while the other half acts as the Peer, or Nano Data Center.

“They isolate it using virtualization technologies, and that secure compartment is now talking to all the other set top boxes, co-ordinating and shifting stuff around. Each of the set top boxes has plenty of storage in it so we can put them together and build a massive data store for all those YouTube videos, Flickr pictures or whatever. We’re using Peer-to-Peer under the hood to provide a service,” Dr Ott said.

This approach, or something like it, has tremendous promise.

The server farm replacement needs to be an always-on device, separate from display machines like PCs and TV sets, inexpensive, easily expandable, and easily manageable. The devices that most resemble it today are home gateways and set top boxes, and the home gateway is actually a better leverage point than the set top box we have today.

I think I’ll build a prototype and see what happens.

Pew Study: Broadband is Healthy

The Pew Internet and American Life Project released their latest report on broadband in America today, and it looks pretty rosy. Pew makes a great deal out of the fact that broadband use isn’t rising among America’s poor, but that’s hardly surprising. You sort of need a computer, some education, and an income of some sort to make much use of broadband, so until those issues are addressed you’re not going to see much change over the 25% broadband use among Americans with household incomes below $20,000. Not many of these people have health insurance either, and I imagine they’d choose it before broadband if you asked. Broadband isn’t growing among the richest Americans either, having reached 85% among $100,000+ households. What are these people doing that’s so much more fun than reading blogs?

Some highlights I found interesting:

* Broadband is getting cheaper:

Overall, home broadband users reported that their monthly payment for internet service was $34.50 â€“ 4% less than the figure of $36 per month reported in December 2005.2 This decline in monthly broadband bills is half the rate (8%) reported over the February 2004 to December 2005 timeframe.

* DSL and cable are losing share to Fiber and Wireless:

* Prices aren’t falling faster because users choose premium services:

One possible reason that usersâ€™ monthly broadband bills did not fall as fast from 2005 to 2008 as was the case in the 2004-05 interval is the existence of pricier premium service. Most (54%) of broadband users say they subscribe to basic broadband service, but nearly one-third (29%) say they subscribe to a premium service at a higher price.

* Price isn’t the reason more people don’t have broadband, it’s lack of interest:

Still, one-third (33%) of non-internet users say they are simply not interested in the internet, with another 12% saying they donâ€™t have access. Some 9% of non-users say the internet is too difficult or frustrating for them and just 7% say it is too expensive.

The overall state of broadband in America isn’t nearly as dire as Google’s Internet For Everyone coalition maintains, but they’re going to spin this report to say that it is.

DOJ Not Asleep at the Wheel

Justice Department to review Google-Yahoo deal: The U.S. Justice Department plans to gather information from third parties in a probe of the advertising deal struck last month between Google and Yahoo, according to sources familiar with these types of investigations. Within the next week, the Justice Department is expected to issue civil investigative demands (CIDs) … Continue reading “DOJ Not Asleep at the Wheel”

Justice Department to review Google-Yahoo deal:

The U.S. Justice Department plans to gather information from third parties in a probe of the advertising deal struck last month between Google and Yahoo, according to sources familiar with these types of investigations.

Within the next week, the Justice Department is expected to issue civil investigative demands (CIDs) that seek documents from the third parties, said one source, noting the information requested could range from a general request on the competitive landscape to very specific requests involving Yahoo and Google.

Third parties that are expected to receive the CIDs include competitors, customers like major advertisers, and potential partners, the source added.

Not a moment too soon.

Does Google want to nationalize the Internet?

This is pretty damn amazing. At the Personal Democracy Forum, Vint Cerf declared that the government should own and control the Internet: Should the Internet be owned and maintained by the government, just like the highways? Vint Cerf, the â€œfather of the Internetâ€ and Googleâ€™s Internet evangelist, made this radical suggestion while he was sitting … Continue reading “Does Google want to nationalize the Internet?”

This is pretty damn amazing. At the Personal Democracy Forum, Vint Cerf declared that the government should own and control the Internet:

Should the Internet be owned and maintained by the government, just like the highways? Vint Cerf, the â€œfather of the Internetâ€ and Googleâ€™s Internet evangelist, made this radical suggestion while he was sitting next to me on a panel yesterday about national tech policy at the Personal Democracy Forum.

This is extremely bizarre at many levels. The net neutrality juggernaut started as a campaign to protect free speech, and now it comes all the way around to ceding control of the Internet to the government? Like the government of China?

For Cerf, this is the greatest of all possible flip-flops. While working for WorldCom in 2002, Cerf wrote RFC 3271, warning of the dangers of government involvement in the Internet:

â€œInternet is for everyone – but it wonâ€™t be if Governments restrict access to it, so we must dedicate ourselves to keeping the network unrestricted, unfettered and unregulated. We must have the freedom to speak and the freedom to hear.â€

How quickly they forget.

H/T Jim Harper at TLF.

Technorati Tags: net+neutrality

Supernova 2008 Wrap-up

Supernova was an interesting experience. It’s not my usual crowd, more a Web 2.0/Social Networking scene than my hard-core networking and tech policy people, but there was a fair bit of overlap. I met some people whose blog work I’ve read for years – Steve Gillmor, J. D. Lasica, Kevin Marks, Susan Crawford, and Kevin Werbach, the organizer. Some other people I’ve discussed and debated things with over the years, such as Joi Ito, were also there, but I didn’t have a chance to talk to them in the general rush of events and what-not, and Doc Searls was unfortunately too ill to attend. Doc and I have been missing each other at conferences for years now, so the tradition may as well continue.

While most of the discussion was about monetizing social networks, there were excursions into network policy and technology at several junctures, and Kevin committed to making these themes larger in next year’s show. The hard-core telecom guys were in Vegas for NXTComm, but they wouldn’t have contributed all that much anyway.

Regarding “monetizing,” it strikes me as odd to build a social networking site, get a million members, and only then start to think about making money from it. You’d think that any smart business would begin with a “revenue model” and then design a service around it, but this is a different world. There are only about four ways to make money from the Internet anyway:

1. Sell subscriptions
2. Sell ads
3. Sell stuff
4. Facilitate some sort of financial transaction and take a cut.

If I were in that business, I’d market exclusivity because there are just too many hooligans and ruffians on the Internet. Toss Metcalfe’s Law out the window and adopt Bennett’s Law, that the value of a network is the mean of the value of the individual members. If I want to mix with street people, I’ll go downtown. But that’s just weird thinking.

Several of the speakers declared Google the new Evil Empire, which is quite realistic and on-point, and the tussle between the search and ads monopoly and poor little Facebook featured prominently in one panel.

I explained that the Internet as we know it today – IPv4 with TCP and UDP – isn’t actually the be-all and end-all of innovation nurture. It permits experimentation among applications with limited requirements for bandwidth and delay, and a whole new set of applications will show up as soon as we have a network that can deliver more data with less delay.

Conveying that one point to an audience of eager innovators was worth the hassle of getting up at 6:30 in the morning, although it didn’t seem so until I caught up on my sleep.

Kevin is a great host, and the conference was well-organized and smooth. I hope to do it next year, when (real) networking is a bigger theme.
Technorati Tags: net+neutrality supernova2008

Internet History Lesson

See Vanity Fair for a nice synopsis of Internet history, based in interviews with key contributors like Paul Baran and Larry Roberts down to social networking people. Here’s their article summary: Fifty years ago, in response to the surprise Soviet launch of Sputnik, the U.S. military set up the Advanced Research Projects Agency. It would … Continue reading “Internet History Lesson”

See Vanity Fair for a nice synopsis of Internet history, based in interviews with key contributors like Paul Baran and Larry Roberts down to social networking people. Here’s their article summary:

Fifty years ago, in response to the surprise Soviet launch of Sputnik, the U.S. military set up the Advanced Research Projects Agency. It would become the cradle of connectivity, spawning the era of Google and YouTube, of Amazon and Facebook, of the Drudge Report and the Obama campaign. Each breakthroughâ€”network protocols, hypertext, the World Wide Web, the browserâ€”inspired another as narrow-tied engineers, long-haired hackers, and other visionaries built the foundations for a world-changing technology. Keenan Mayo and Peter Newcomb let the people who made it happen tell the story.

It’s long, but parts of it are very interesting, and there are audio clips and a nice little slideshow.

Internet Fairness, or Not

My latest piece for The Register is up: Dismantling a Religion: The EFF’s Faith-Based Internet. In it, I explore the difference between the way the EFF wants to manage the Internet and the new way the IETF folks are discussing. Bottom line: the Internet has never had a user-based fairness system, and it needs one. … Continue reading “Internet Fairness, or Not”

Bottom line: the Internet has never had a user-based fairness system, and it needs one. All networks need one, actually.

On that note, the TCP-Friendly folks remind us:

The network will soon begin to require applications to perform congestion control, and those applications which do not perform congestion control will be harshly penalized by the network (probably in the form of preferentially dropping their packets during times of congestion).

An actively-managed Internet is a functional Internet.

My First Baseball Game

Thanks to Retrosheet, I can identify the first major league baseball game I ever saw in person, an epic 4-3 victory by the Yankees over the Senators on July 3, 1959. Winning pitcher Whitey Ford scored the winning run, Ryne Duren got the save, Mickey Mantle hit a single and Tony Kubek went 3-5 playing … Continue reading “My First Baseball Game”