Recycling Garbage Abroad

Advocates of network neutrality regulations have been largely unsuccessful in advancing their agenda in the US. The one case in which they claim to have secured a victory was the Vuze vs. Comcast action in the FCC, which was severely tainted by Vuze turning to porn to resuscitate its dying business: In a bid to … Continue reading “Recycling Garbage Abroad”

Advocates of network neutrality regulations have been largely unsuccessful in advancing their agenda in the US. The one case in which they claim to have secured a victory was the Vuze vs. Comcast action in the FCC, which was severely tainted by Vuze turning to porn to resuscitate its dying business:

In a bid to increase their revenue, among other things, Vuze has added a catalog of HD adult videos to their BitTorrent client. For a few dollars a month Vuze users can subscribe to the latest hotness. Of course, all torrents on the erotica network are well seeded.

The same FCC commissioners who levied an unlawful fine against CBS for the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction ordered Comcast to give free bandwidth to a porn site. (Feeling good about that, Chairman Copps? [ed: OK, that was a cheap shot, but Copps and I know each other.])

Not deterred by this spotty track record, wannabe neutrality regulator Cory Doctorow trots out the well-worn arguments for the overseas audience in a Guardian column that stinks of Dow Chemical’s overseas pesticide dumping:

Take the Telcoms Package now before the EU: among other things, the package paves the way for ISPs and Quangos to block or slow access to websites and services on an arbitrary basis. At the same time, ISPs are instituting and enforcing strict bandwidth limits on their customers, citing shocking statistics about the bandwidth hogs who consume vastly more resources than the average punter.

Between filtering, fiddling connection speeds and capping usage, ISPs are pulling the rug out from under the nations that have sustained them with generous subsidies and regulation.

Doctorow supports his arguments with a series of fanciful metaphors since there aren’t any real abuses for UK subjects to be upset about. Here’s a portion of my reaction in the comments:

Let’s take a closer look at Doctorow’s non-metaphoric claims:

“Between these three factors – (1) reducing the perceived value of the net, (2) reducing the ability of new entrants to disrupt incumbents, and (3) penalizing those who explore new services on the net – we are at risk of scaring people away from the network, of giving competitive advantage to firms in better-regulated nations, of making it harder for people to use the net to weather disasters, to talk to their government and to each other.”

I’ve numbered them for easy reference. So where’s the proof that these things are happening? For (1) we have this:

“ISPs would also like to be able to arbitrarily slow or degrade our network connections depending on what we’re doing and with whom. In the classic “traffic shaping” scenario, a company like Virgin Media strikes a deal with Yahoo…”

How do we know that ISPs want to slow or degrade our access, which would seem to drive us to a different ISP? The metaphoric example is offered as the proof. See the relevance?

For problem (2) , Doctorow offers:

“Unless, that is, the cost of entry into the market goes up by four or five orders of magnitude, growing to encompass the cost of a horde of gladhanding negotiators who must first secure the permission of gatekeepers at the telcoms giants…”

The problem with this, of course, is that the barriers to entry for new search and video services are the edge caches Google would like to install in the ISP networks, which do in fact give them a fast lane to the consumer (why else would Google want them?) and raise obstacles to start-ups. But American neutralists say these entry barriers are good because their friend Google wants to erect them, not a telco. Double standard.

And for (3), the evils of metered billing, we have this lovely little thing:

“Before you clicked on this article, you had no way of knowing how many bytes your computer would consume before clicking on it. And now that you’ve clicked on it, chances are that you still don’t know how many bytes you’ve consumed..”

Please. Metered billing systems aren’t going to operate on the differences between web pages. If Doctorow believed what he said about the Pareto Curve, he’d certainly be able to appreciate the difference between reading a thousand web pages vs watching a thousand videos. High bandwidth consumers aren’t doing anything “innovative,” they’re most likely downloading free porn. Who is this guy kidding?

Doctorow’s fiction may be very enjoyable, but his understanding of the Internet and his policy prescriptions are nonsense. Read the book, take a pass on the law.

What’s especially sad is how Doctorow tries to pander to the overseas audience by using a tonne of Brit slang, going on about “punters,” “Quangos,” pounds and pence, and making a tube reference; NN is all about tribal ID, and he gets just that much of it.

Blackberry dominates the world

Everybody knows we have our first Blackberry-toting president, but how many know that BlackBerry outsells Apple? An aggressive “buy-one-get-one” promotion by Verizon Wireless helped RIM’s BlackBerry Curve move past Apple’s iPhone to become the best-selling consumer smartphone in the U.S. in the first quarter of 2009, according to market research firm The NPD Group. RIM’s … Continue reading “Blackberry dominates the world”

Everybody knows we have our first Blackberry-toting president, but how many know that BlackBerry outsells Apple?

An aggressive “buy-one-get-one” promotion by Verizon Wireless helped RIM’s BlackBerry Curve move past Apple’s iPhone to become the best-selling consumer smartphone in the U.S. in the first quarter of 2009, according to market research firm The NPD Group.

RIM’s consumer smartphone market share increased by 15 percent to nearly half of the entire smartphone market in Q1 2009 versus the prior quarter. Apple’s and Palm’s market share both declined 10 percent each.

Part of this is driven by the new iPhone coming around in June, but Curve is not exactly state of the art in the Blackberry world. Take this as another example of conventional wisdom not being too wise.

What slows down your Wi-Fi?

The Register stumbled upon an eye-opening report commissioned by the UK telecom regulator, Ofcom, on sources of Wi-Fi interference in the UK: What Mass discovered (pdf) is that while Wi-Fi users blame nearby networks for slowing down their connectivity, in reality the problem is people watching retransmitted TV in the bedroom while listening to their … Continue reading “What slows down your Wi-Fi?”

The Register stumbled upon an eye-opening report commissioned by the UK telecom regulator, Ofcom, on sources of Wi-Fi interference in the UK:

What Mass discovered (pdf) is that while Wi-Fi users blame nearby networks for slowing down their connectivity, in reality the problem is people watching retransmitted TV in the bedroom while listening to their offspring sleeping, and there’s not a lot the regulator can do about it.

Outside central London that is: in the middle of The Smoke there really are too many networks, with resends, beacons and housekeeping filling 90 per cent of the data frames sent over Wi-Fi. This leaves only 10 per cent for users’ data. In fact, the study found that operating overheads for wireless Ethernet were much higher than anticipated, except in Bournemouth for some reason: down on the south coast 44 per cent of frames contain user data.

When 90% of the frames are overhead, the technology itself has a problem, and in this case it’s largely the fact that there’s such a high backward-compatibility burden in Wi-Fi. Older versions of the protocol weren’t designed for obsolescence, so the newer systems have to take steps to ensure the older systems can see them, expensive ones, or collisions happen, and that’s not good for anybody. Licensed spectrum can deal with the obsolescence problem by replacing older equipment; open spectrum has to bear the costs of compatibility forever. So this is one more example of the fact that “open” is not always better.

Interlocking Directorates

The New York Times reports that regulators have an interest in the structure of the Apple and Google boards of directors: The Federal Trade Commission has begun an inquiry into whether the close ties between the boards of two of technology’s most prominent companies, Apple and Google, amount to a violation of antitrust laws, according … Continue reading “Interlocking Directorates”

The New York Times reports that regulators have an interest in the structure of the Apple and Google boards of directors:

The Federal Trade Commission has begun an inquiry into whether the close ties between the boards of two of technology’s most prominent companies, Apple and Google, amount to a violation of antitrust laws, according to several people briefed on the inquiry.

I doubt this will go very far, as the interlocking directors (Eric Schmidt and former Genentech CEO Arthur Levinson,) will simply resign before any enforcement action is imminent, but it does raise some interesting questions about the market for mobile phone operating systems, currently split between Apple, Google, Microsoft, Palm, and a few others. These systems are rife with limitations, each of which could be considered a network neutrality violation when viewed in just the right way.

I imagine Apple itself might wish to give Dr. Schmidt his walking papers before he becomes an anti-trust problem, which he actually isn’t at this point. The FTC’s interest in this obscure situation is probably a signal that the Administration wants to be viewed as an anti-trust hawk without doing anything substantial.

But this is what the law calls an “occasion of sin.” Dear me.

What Policy Framework Will Further Enable Innovation on the Mobile Net?

Here’s the video of the panel I was on at the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee’s “State of the Mobile Net” conference in DC last Thursday. This was the closing panel of the conference, where all the loose ends were tied together. For those who don’t live and breath Washington politics, I should do what … Continue reading “What Policy Framework Will Further Enable Innovation on the Mobile Net?”

Here’s the video of the panel I was on at the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee’s “State of the Mobile Net” conference in DC last Thursday. This was the closing panel of the conference, where all the loose ends were tied together. For those who don’t live and breath Washington politics, I should do what moderator Blair Levin didn’t do and introduce the panel. Levin was the head of the TIGR task force for the Obama transition, the master group for the review of the regulatory agencies and the administration’s use of technology. Kevin Werbach is a professor at the Wharton School, and took part in the FCC review for the transition along with Susan Crawford. He runs the Supernova conference. Larry Irving was part of the review of NTIA for the transition, and is a former Assistant Secretary of Commerce. Ben Scott is the policy guy at Free Press, and Alex Hoehn-Saric is legal counsel to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.

Regulatory policy needs to be technically grounded, so I emphasized the tech side of things.

The Privacy Hearing

Here’s some news on Boucher’s privacy campaign: It’s not clear how broad a law Boucher has in mind, though it’s likely to be some codification of generally accepted data-privacy practices. Those include telling people when you collect data and why, letting them choose to join in or not, using the data only for the reason … Continue reading “The Privacy Hearing”

Here’s some news on Boucher’s privacy campaign:

It’s not clear how broad a law Boucher has in mind, though it’s likely to be some codification of generally accepted data-privacy practices. Those include telling people when you collect data and why, letting them choose to join in or not, using the data only for the reason you collected it, letting people see and correct the information and destroying it when its not longer needed.

But engineer Richard Bennett argued that DPI and network management techniques were getting a bad name and are simply the logical extension of the tools used in the early days of the internet.

Hoping to convince the subcommittee not to write legislation, AT&T’s chief privacy officer Dorothy Atwood said that the committee’s previous hearings and investigations have led to “robust self-regulation,” code-words for “no laws needed.” There’s some truth in that statement, since last summer, the subcommittee single-handedly ended ISPs dreams of letting outside companies spy on their subscribers in exchange for a little more revenue.

If the privacy is the problem, it needs to be the focus of the bill, not one of many techniques that may be used to compromise it, of course.

What I Did This Morning

While California was sleeping, I enjoyed a bit of broadband politics in the heart of the beast, testifying at the House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet on Communications Networks and Consumer Privacy: Recent Developments The Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet held a hearing titled, “Communications Networks and Consumer Privacy: Recent Developments” … Continue reading “What I Did This Morning”

While California was sleeping, I enjoyed a bit of broadband politics in the heart of the beast, testifying at the House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet on Communications Networks and Consumer Privacy: Recent Developments

The Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet held a hearing titled, “Communications Networks and Consumer Privacy: Recent Developments” on Thursday, April 23, 2009, in 2322 Rayburn House Office Building. The hearing focused on technologies that network operators utilize to monitor consumer usage and how those technologies intersect with consumer privacy. The hearing explored three ways to monitor consumer usage on broadband and wireless networks: deep packet inspection (DPI); new uses for digital set-top boxes; and wireless Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking.

Witness List

* Ben Scott, Policy Director, Free Press
* Leslie Harris, President and CEO, Center for Democracy and Technology
* Kyle McSlarrow, President and CEO, National Cable and Telecommunications Association
* Dorothy Attwood, Chief Privacy Officer and Senior Vice President, Public Policy, AT&T Services, Inc.
* Brian R. Knapp, Chief Operating Officer, Loopt, Inc.
* Marc Rotenberg, Executive Director, The Electronic Privacy Information Center
* Richard Bennett, Publisher, BroadbandPolitics.com

It went pretty well, all in all; it’s really good to be last on a panel, and the Reps aren’t as snarky as California legislators. I’ll have more on this later.

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Google’s Sweet Book Deal

If you read books, you’ll want to know what Robert Darnton has to say about the pending Google book deal, in Google & the Future of Books – The New York Review of Books. Here’s a teaser: As an unintended consequence, Google will enjoy what can only be called a monopoly—a monopoly of a new … Continue reading “Google’s Sweet Book Deal”

If you read books, you’ll want to know what Robert Darnton has to say about the pending Google book deal, in Google & the Future of Books – The New York Review of Books. Here’s a teaser:

As an unintended consequence, Google will enjoy what can only be called a monopoly—a monopoly of a new kind, not of railroads or steel but of access to information. Google has no serious competitors. Microsoft dropped its major program to digitize books several months ago, and other enterprises like the Open Knowledge Commons (formerly the Open Content Alliance) and the Internet Archive are minute and ineffective in comparison with Google. Google alone has the wealth to digitize on a massive scale. And having settled with the authors and publishers, it can exploit its financial power from within a protective legal barrier; for the class action suit covers the entire class of authors and publishers. No new entrepreneurs will be able to digitize books within that fenced-off territory, even if they could afford it, because they would have to fight the copyright battles all over again. If the settlement is upheld by the court, only Google will be protected from copyright liability.

A policy change of this magnitude should not be negotiated behind closed doors to the detriment of all purveyors of information but Google.

Time Warner Cable bides its time

Not surprisingly, Time Warner Cable has decided to put its consumption-based billing trials on hold: Time Warner Cable Chief Executive Officer Glenn Britt said, “It is clear from the public response over the last two weeks that there is a great deal of misunderstanding about our plans to roll out additional tests on consumption based … Continue reading “Time Warner Cable bides its time”

Not surprisingly, Time Warner Cable has decided to put its consumption-based billing trials on hold:

Time Warner Cable Chief Executive Officer Glenn Britt said, “It is clear from the public response over the last two weeks that there is a great deal of misunderstanding about our plans to roll out additional tests
on consumption based billing. As a result, we will not proceed with implementation of additional tests until further consultation with our customers and other interested parties, ensuring that community needs are being met. While we continue to believe that consumption based billing may be the best pricing plan for consumers, we want to do everything we can to inform our customers of our plans and have the benefit of their views as part of our testing process.”

Time Warner Cable also announced that it is working to make measurement tools available as quickly as possible. These tools will help customers understand how much bandwidth they consume and aid in the dialog going forward.

The public response was somewhat less public than it may appear, as most of it was ginned-up by a few activist bloggers and the interest groups that are generally in the middle of these things, such as Free Press’ “Save the Internet” blog. In this case, the Internet was saved from a plan that Free Press’ chairman Tim Wu had previously lauded for its fairness in allocating network resources:

“I don’t quite see [metering] as an outrage, and in fact is probably the fairest system going — though of course the psychology of knowing that you’re paying for bandwidth may change behavior,” said Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia University and chairman of the board of public advocacy group Free Press.

Of course, the “psychology of knowing that you’re paying for bandwidth” is actually meant to change behavior.

Free Press is now crowing that the postponement of the trial signals a great victory for the Internet:

“We’re glad to see Time Warner Cable’s price-gouging scheme collapse in the face of consumer opposition. Let this be a lesson to other Internet service providers looking to head down a similar path. Consumers are not going to stand idly by as companies try to squeeze their use of the Internet.

The Freeps should have chosen their words a bit more carefully. The dilemma that TWC faces does indeed relate to “squeezing,” but that doesn’t actually originate exclusively (or even primarily) at the cable company’s end of the bargain. TWC’s consumption per user has been increasing roughly 40% per year, and there’s no reason to assume it will do anything but increase as more HDTV content becomes available on the web, people connect more devices, and video calling becomes more popular. TWC’s capital expenditures are 20% of income, and the company lost $7.3 billion in the course of spinning out from Time Warner, Inc. last year. Some of TWC’s critics have charged that their bandwidth is free (or nearly so,) citing “high speed data costs of $146 million.” In reality, TWC pays six times that much for the interest on its capital expenditures alone ($923M.)

Heavy users squeeze light users by leaving less bandwidth on the table, and the flat-rate pricing system squeezes them even more by making them pay a larger share of the costs of bandwidth upgrades than those who actually use them. No fair-minded and rational person can look at the costs of operating a network and conclude that flat-rate pricing for a single Quality of Service level is the best we can do.

Continuous upgrades are a fact of life in the broadband business, and aligning their costs with the revenues carriers collect is one of the keys to creating an economically sustainable broadband ecosystem. We’ll take that up in another post.

UPDATE: Dig into the comments for some discussion of transit and peering prices.

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Thinking about Caps

Time-Warner’s bandwidth metering plan continues to attract attention, in part because a couple of prominent tech journalists are taking an activist position against it: Nate Anderson is unabashedly opposed to most revenue-enhancing plans that come from ISPs and carriers, and Stacey Higginbotham imagines she’ll be personally affected since she lives in one of the trial … Continue reading “Thinking about Caps”

Time-Warner’s bandwidth metering plan continues to attract attention, in part because a couple of prominent tech journalists are taking an activist position against it: Nate Anderson is unabashedly opposed to most revenue-enhancing plans that come from ISPs and carriers, and Stacey Higginbotham imagines she’ll be personally affected since she lives in one of the trial cities, Austin. The latest development is a threat by Rep. Eric Massa of upstate New York to ban usage-based pricing by law:

Massa has wasted no time backing the issue, sending out two statements last week about his displeasure with TWC’s caps. “I am taking a leadership position on this issue because of all the phone calls, emails and faxes I’ve received from my district and all over the country,” he said in one. “While I favor a business’s right to maximize their profit potential, I believe safeguards must be put in place when a business has a monopoly on a specific region.”

TWC’s plan to meter usage, which differs from Comcast’s cap system in several significant respects*, wouldn’t seem odd in most of the world: volume-based service tiers are the norm for commercial Internet services in the US, and for residential services in most of the world. This is largely because the costs for providing Internet service are significantly related to volume, owing to the interconnect costs born by ISPs (it’s not continuously variable, it’s more like a step function that ratchets upward in chunks as new hardware has to be added to keep up with peak load.) These folks are essentially wholesalers who buy an interconnect to the larger Internet through a transit provider or a carrier. If they’re too small to build an extensive private network, they buy transit and if they’re larger they pay for circuits to and from peering centers, which aren’t free even if you build them yourself (they take parts to build, and parts aren’t free.)

It’s not unreasonable to tie pricing to volume in principle, given that some users consume hundreds or thousands of times more bandwidth than others; we certainly charge 18-wheelers more to use the freeways than Priuses. The argument is over what’s a reasonable fee.

And to answer that question, we have to understand the role that Internet service plays in paying for the infrastructure that supports it. There has never been a case in the United States or any other country where Internet service alone generated enough revenue for a carrier to cover the cost of building an advanced fiber optic network extending all the way from the core to the detached single-family residence, even in the muni fiber networks toward which the neutralists are so partial; in places like Burlington, VT, Lafayette, LA, and Morristown, TN, the service the city offers over fiber is triple play (Internet, TV, and voice.) Without TV and voice, the take-up rate of the service is too low to retire the bonds. It’s simple economics.

So what happens when triple-play customers decide to download all their TV programs from the Internet and replace their phone service with a combination of cell and Skype? Revenues plummet, obviously. So the cable company wants to hedge its bets by replacing triple-play revenue with a higher bill for the higher usage of the remaining indispensable service. That doesn’t seem evil to me, as long as there’s some competition in the market, and the infrastructure is continually upgraded. Over time, the infrastructure will be paid for, and the price per byte will decline.

One of problems that we have with broadband policy in the US is lack of connection between infrastructure costs and service prices. TWC seems to be trying to solve that problem, and I’d like them to have some freedom to experiment without every member of congress within striking distance of a camera crew giving them grief.

In the meantime, TWC would help themselves a great deal if they adopted the policy of printing each customer’s monthly usage on the bill. They shouldn’t do anything about it for the time being, just show the amount for the next six months. At the end of that period, if they want to run a trial or two, the consumers will be able to place the service levels in perspective, and there will be a lot less whining. If service levels are adopted, there also needs to be a policy of re-evaluating them every year. If TWC had done these two things, this whole brouhaha could have been avoided. And yes, I’d be glad to sign on as a consultant and keep them out of trouble.

*Comcast has an elastic cap that can’t be increased by paying higher fees. If you exceed it for three months in a row, you’re ejected. It’s elastic because it takes three simultaneous conditions to activate.

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