Tag: net+neutrality

Liveblogging the FCC, Panel 2

See First Panel here, and the live video here. David Farber, former FCC chief tech, and CMU: What would you need 300 baud for? It motivated faster TTYs. We’re moving to faster networks, and that will stimulate new applications. If this going to lead to a better world, or to 1984? Don’t cut off the … Continue reading “Liveblogging the FCC, Panel 2”

See First Panel here, and the live video here.

David Farber, former FCC chief tech, and CMU:
What would you need 300 baud for? It motivated faster TTYs. We’re moving to faster networks, and that will stimulate new applications. If this going to lead to a better world, or to 1984? Don’t cut off the future with bad regulations. Big rush to restrict P2P traffic. It’s not all illegal, but it’s hard to tell. Peak loads are hard to restrict with monthly caps. Three dollar surcharge on video downloads.
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Liveblogging FCC hearing in Pittsburgh

Here’s the video link. (Didn’t hear Congressman Doyle, Martin, or Copps.) Adelstein: (Misstates findings of Pew study on broadband adoption. Price is not really the issue, lack of interest is.) Complains about smackdown by the Third Circuit. Tate: Don’t forget about piracy and the children. McDowell: Don’t dry up the capital. Engineers solve engineering problems, … Continue reading “Liveblogging FCC hearing in Pittsburgh”

Here’s the video link.

(Didn’t hear Congressman Doyle, Martin, or Copps.)
Adelstein: (Misstates findings of Pew study on broadband adoption. Price is not really the issue, lack of interest is.) Complains about smackdown by the Third Circuit.
Tate: Don’t forget about piracy and the children.
McDowell: Don’t dry up the capital. Engineers solve engineering problems, not politicians and bureaucrats. Applause.

Panel 1:
Mark Cuban, Blog Maverick: Special-purpose networks better at what they do than the generic Internet. Multicast is the game-changer for IPTV, but it departs from the generic Internet model. Right.
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Court calls FCC “arbitrary and capricious”

The Third Circuit delivered the big smackdown to the FCC over the wardrobe malfunction incident: The court said the FCC is free to change its policy without “judicial second-guessing,” but only with sufficient notice. “Because the FCC failed to satisfy this requirement,” the court added, “we find its new policy arbitrary and capricious under the … Continue reading “Court calls FCC “arbitrary and capricious””

The Third Circuit delivered the big smackdown to the FCC over the wardrobe malfunction incident:

The court said the FCC is free to change its policy without “judicial second-guessing,” but only with sufficient notice. “Because the FCC failed to satisfy this requirement,” the court added, “we find its new policy arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act as applied to CBS.”

It also found that CBS could not be held strcitly liable for the actions of independent contractors — another argument the FCC made for its finding. “The FCC cannot impose liability on CBS for the acts of Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake, independent contractors hired for the limited purposes of the halftime show,” the court said.

This ruling has implications for the proposed sanctions against Comcast: both involve post-hoc rules and both involve sticking it to someone other than the bad actor. The court doesn’t approve of the FCC making rules after an incident has occurred, which is exactly what the FCC proposes to do in the cast of Comcast’s management of P2P. Notice and rule-making have to precede sanctions, not follow them.

And the bad actor notion also applies. The Court found that Jackson and Timberlake were the bad actors, not CBS. In the P2P case, the users who congested the network are the bad actors, not the operator who sought to rein them in.

Chairman Martin, note this well.

Also of interest: the Court noted that most of the complaints against CBS were junk:

The Opinion notes CBS’s research indicating that over 85 percent of those complaints came from forms produced by activist groups. Many of the protests were filed in duplicate, “with some individual complaints appearing in the record up to 37 times,” CBS asserted.

The same can be said of the junk comments manufactured by Free Press against Comcast, of course. Free Press employed the electronic equivalent of seat-warmers to flood the FCC with junk comments, to the tune of 30,000 duplicate complaints.

Network World on Martin’s rash order

Network World’s Brad Reed has a pretty good news piece on the order FCC chairman Kevin Martin is trying to sell to the Comission’s Democrats. He quotes one of my favorite people, me: Network architect and inventor Richard Bennett, who has long been critical of net neutrality advocates, says he has some concerns about the … Continue reading “Network World on Martin’s rash order”

Network World’s Brad Reed has a pretty good news piece on the order FCC chairman Kevin Martin is trying to sell to the Comission’s Democrats. He quotes one of my favorite people, me:

Network architect and inventor Richard Bennett, who has long been critical of net neutrality advocates, says he has some concerns about the precedent the FCC sets if it votes to affirm Martin’s recommendation. In particular, he worries that the principles in the FCC’s policy statement are far too broadly defined and they will be used to encumber upon traffic management practices that are necessary for ISPs to keep their QoS high for the majority of their customers. Bennett says while ISPs should be barred from engaging in anticompetitive behavior by actively discriminating against rival online content, it should be allowed to slow or even stop transfers that are degrading the Web experience for other users.

“Even in this case where the FCC has banned the used of application-based discrimination, it’s perfectly reasonable for ISPs to discriminate against applications on behalf of a particular user,” he says. “Say you’ve got two customers, and one is using VoIP and the other is using BitTorrent. You’re going to need to give VoIP traffic preference over BitTorrent in order to ensure quality of service.”

I actually said something a little different. I want the ISP to allocate bandwidth fairly among users of a given service tier, and then prioritize within each account. So if the same user is running BitTorrent and Vonage at the same time, I want the Vonage traffic to have priority. Martin’s order would ban that practice, and that would be a Bad Thing.

The fact that Martin is proposing to do just that tells you that the FCC is not ready to impose regulations on ISPs yet. More study is needed, and some public comment on the proposed rules.

Kind of like, you know, a formal rule-making procedure. Hell of an idea, eh?

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Google not censoring PFF – or are they?

UPDATE 2: On further analysis, it seems that we were right the first time. Google does in fact flag as containing malware the majority of PFF’s PDF documents on net neutrality, and none of these documents actually does contain malware, viruses, or exploits. It’s a case of “guilt by association” as they share a directory … Continue reading “Google not censoring PFF – or are they?”

UPDATE 2: On further analysis, it seems that we were right the first time. Google does in fact flag as containing malware the majority of PFF’s PDF documents on net neutrality, and none of these documents actually does contain malware, viruses, or exploits. It’s a case of “guilt by association” as they share a directory with some infected files. This doesn’t mean Google is deliberately censoring free-market ideas on net neutrality, but they certainly are interfering with the public’s access to them. This is more a case of incompetence than of deliberate censorship, however.

Let’s apply the same standard to Google that its net neutrality partners have applied to Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon. ISPs shape traffic on their first mile networks, sometimes with blunt instruments and sometimes with surgical tools. According to Free Press and Google’s other partners in the net neutrality “let’s micro-manage broadband” coalition, blunt instrument management is a sign of anti-competitive bias.

How does Google look if we judge their actions by the yardstick they propose for ISPs? Guiilty as sin. Now you see why this is an important story.

UPDATE: See the comment by Erica George of Stop Badware. It’s actually Google that identifies malware-infected sites, and Stop Badware simply works the process of removing black-listed sites when their problem is resolved. These stories are hard to get right, but we try.

In a now-deleted post, I complained about certain net neutrality criticisms being apparently censored by Google. This was an error by my part, as I rushed a reader e-mail into a blog post without doing my research. Here’s a comment by PFF on the matter:
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Marketplace Story on FCC and Comcast

I’m on today’s edition of Marketplace, FCC considers Comcast’s net blocking They illustrate the rationale for treating applications differently by playing an audio clip with an interruption. It’s very clever.

I’m on today’s edition of Marketplace, FCC considers Comcast’s net blocking

They illustrate the rationale for treating applications differently by playing an audio clip with an interruption. It’s very clever.

Kevin Martin Passes the Test

Note: this is an update on my earlier story, which incorrectly said that the AP reported that Chairman Martin was seeking to impose “fines” on Comcast. In fact, the story used the word “punish” rather than “fine,” and a headline writer at the New York Times added “penalty” to it: “F.C.C. Chairman Favors Penalty on … Continue reading “Kevin Martin Passes the Test”

Note: this is an update on my earlier story, which incorrectly said that the AP reported that Chairman Martin was seeking to impose “fines” on Comcast. In fact, the story used the word “punish” rather than “fine,” and a headline writer at the New York Times added “penalty” to it: “F.C.C. Chairman Favors Penalty on Comcast” (I won’t quote the story because I’m a blogger and the AP is the AP, so click through.) Much of the initial reaction to the story was obviously colored by the headline.

Martin’s concept of punishment is to order the company to do what it had already told the public it was doing, phasing out one system of traffic management in favor of another one. It’s a non-penalty punishment, akin to forcing a misbehaving child to eat the candies she’s already enjoying. Now back to our story.
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Robbing The Cookie Jar

What do you do if your mom finds out you’ve been robbing the cookie jar? Blame your little brother, of course. And that’s the essence of the net neutrality campaign that the Internet’s major monopoly has been waging against its little brothers the telecom and cable companies. The San Francisco Chronicle is running my Op-Ed … Continue reading “Robbing The Cookie Jar”

What do you do if your mom finds out you’ve been robbing the cookie jar? Blame your little brother, of course. And that’s the essence of the net neutrality campaign that the Internet’s major monopoly has been waging against its little brothers the telecom and cable companies.
The San Francisco Chronicle is running my Op-Ed on the subject tomorrow, details and a link to follow.

Seoul Declaration

The Seoul Declaration For the Future of the Internet Economy signed by OECD ministers isn’t half bad. There’s no wacky net neutrality language in it, and plenty of commitment to protect privacy and intellectual property. This must have taken a lot of work, as the forces of evil were in full tilt to corrupt this … Continue reading “Seoul Declaration”

The Seoul Declaration For the Future of the Internet Economy signed by OECD ministers isn’t half bad. There’s no wacky net neutrality language in it, and plenty of commitment to protect privacy and intellectual property. This must have taken a lot of work, as the forces of evil were in full tilt to corrupt this document. But it’s OK.

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Vuze Shows True Colors

Vuze is the Palo Alto peer-to-peer indexer that helped bring the net neutrality circus to the FCC with their publicity stunt of a complaint against Comcast. They’ve maintained their business was nothing to do with piracy, and all about innovative delivery of legal content. It turns out it’s mainly piracy after all: This month, Vuze … Continue reading “Vuze Shows True Colors”

Vuze is the Palo Alto peer-to-peer indexer that helped bring the net neutrality circus to the FCC with their publicity stunt of a complaint against Comcast. They’ve maintained their business was nothing to do with piracy, and all about innovative delivery of legal content. It turns out it’s mainly piracy after all:

This month, Vuze did an about-face. Unleashing the software’s search engine, it enabled users to find and retrieve content indexed by some of the world’s most popular BitTorrent search engines. These include Mininova, an index site in the Netherlands now under legal assault from Dutch anti-piracy authorities. As a result, users don’t have to fire up a second file-sharing program to find free, pirated versions of the titles Vuze offers on a pay-per-view basis. They can do it through Vuze’s search engine.

Mininova is all about piracy, and if Vuze is searching it, so are they. It can’t be long until Hollywood and the studios terminate their agreements with Vuze and relegate them to their ultimate destiny as the Google of piracy. Except they’ll have lots of fun competition. For one, the reigning Google of piracy is actually Google.

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