April 2008

The internet wars continue to escalate in Canada, where the Canadian Association of Internet Providers has brought a complaint against Bell, the country’s largest DSL provider.

As the National Post Reports:

The legal brief, released Friday, is part of an escalating dispute before the federal regulator over Bell’s unilateral move to downgrade the Internet services of targeted Internet users, including customers of its competitors.

The CAIP isn’t the only group getting involved in the issue. The National Union for Public and General Employees today issued a call for the Liberal Party to join the campaign for net neutrality. The NDP, the Liberals main rival to the left, have been at the forefront on this issue. But the Liberal Party has been dragging their feet while the Conservative minority government let’s business have free reign to run the internet as they see fit.

My friend Brian Boyer has a great post about net neutrality on his blog, The Sixth W. He explains why journalists should care about net neutrality. What it comes down it, he says, is:

The Internet is amazing because it lets all voices be heard. If this bozo [Neil Berkett,  head of Virgin Media and net neutrality opponent] gets his way, new media will become a tool of corporations. Citizen journalism and non-profit media are toast. No money? No speech.

This is as simple, elegant and urgent an explanation as to why anyone concerned about free speech should care.

This site does a good job of distorting the net neutrality debate. According to the group, it is really evil Google who wants to stick consumers with a bigger bill, not the ISPs, who they claim, are only looking out for the people’s best interests. And the criticism that ISPs are blocking sites they don’t like or agree with? Well, this group says, that only happened in Canada, so it doesn’t really matter. I’d say that matters a great deal.

The CBC looked into the groups claims. In 2005, Canadian telecom giant Telus blocked a pro-union website supporting striking Telus workers. And the cable company Shaw blocked the VoIP service Vonage in an attempt to get consumers to cough up an extra $10 a month. The CBC also found a few other claims, including one of AOL blocking email critical of the company.

Of course, when groups like this say there have “only” been a few instances, they want to lull the public into a false sense of security. No one is going to try to reshape the internet overnight. If they did, there owuld be a massive public outcry. Instead, the strategy is to try to push a liitle at a time and hope no one notices or is too bothered. Well, even one instance of a website being blocked for political reasons bothers me.

Some people are willing to go to great lengths to protect the internet. Over at Don’t Stay a Virgin, Tania Derveaux has offered to make love to any virgin who defends net neutrality. Well, that’s one way to get the message out.

Personally, the site looks like a joke to me, so don’t get too excited, lads. She’s made similarly outlandish offers in the past. But it looks serious enough to MSNBC, who have written a piece about Ms. Derveaux’s offer.

Either way, people are starting to pay attention to net neutrality. And all it took was a little nudity. Who would’ve figured?

Some people have asked me, “What exactly is this net neutrality thing? What does ‘a series of tubes’ mean? Is there some way you can explain it so my four-year-old child can understand?” No, I cannot. But John Stewart and John Hodgman can. Check out the video and have all your net neutrality questions answered.

Though once the enemy of BitTorrent, last week Comcast called for a “P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities,” which would “clarify what choices and controls consumers should have when using P2P applications as well as what processes and practices ISPs should use to manage P2P applications running on their networks.”

It sounds to me like Comcast wants to appear to be playing nice with P2P services like BitTorrent while exercising strict control over the services their customers can actually use. The announcement was made with file-sharing site Pando. As the New York Times reports,  Pando is a company with deep ties to NBC and other big content providers whose embrace of P2P technologies has little to do with freedom on the net and is all about bringing down their own distribution costs.

Though the technical problems associated with the last mile means a couple of cable and phone providers currently dominate the ISP market, it doesn’t have to be that way.

Rep. Anna Eshoo proposed a bill last week to give up currently unused wireless spectrum to any company willing to offer “free, family friendly service” to consumers. The wireless spectrum could reach up to 95 percent of Americans with speeds of 200 kbps, slow by broadband standards; but hey, free internet is free internet.

Lawrence Lessig, Stanford law professor and net neutrality advocate, gave a rousing speech at the FCC’s open forum in Palo Alto Thursday. In front of the full five-member FCC panel, Lessig offered his criticism of the FCC’s failure to act on net neutrality.

“We are facing these problems because of a failure of FCC policy,” Lessig said. “The FCC failed to make it clear to the network owners that if they are building the internet they need to build it neutrally.”

In addition to Lessig’s presentation, the event was also notable for Comcast’s absence. After trying to pack the hall at the last FCC public hearing to keep out neutrality advocates, the company decided not to attend this time.

Engineer Robb Topolski took Comcast to task for their secret attempt to block BitTorrent last year. He was the first to uncover Comcast’s actions and he presented the FCC with his findings.

“Consumers were harmed when (Comcast) decided it would do something secretive and non-standard on the Internet,” Topolski said according to CNET. “The situation continues today. It has not stopped, despite all the wonderful agreements between BitTorrent and Comcast. I’m a ham radio operator. And Comcast is jamming authorized communication (on the Internet). I ask that before you leave today you signal your intent to stop these interferences.”

According to AT&T we’re going run out of internet by 2010, an apocalyptic scenario parodied in this week’s South Park.

During a speech in London this week, AT&T Vice President for Legislative Affairs Jim Cicconi announced that the demands of downloaders and video viewers will eat up every inch of AT&T’s capacity within three years.

“In three years’ time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today.”

Think about that. In three years, Cicconi believes 20 homes will be the equal of the entire global internet, a system that currently has 1.3 billion users. Is this man right in the head?

Of course AT&T’s doomsday predictions are driven by their bottom line. The company has been pushing to cap their customer’s bandwidth usage, and if they can convince enough gullible people that the internet will soon be maxed out, they may land a few more supporters in their camp.

Do they expect us to be sympathetic? They charge a high price for the service. If demands of consumer  change, then quit whining and make the necessary investments to the infrastructure so AT&T can meet those demands. Instead, they think they can take out their frustration on their customers for using the service they pay for.

Gizmodo surveyed the big ISPs on their bandwidth management practices. The results? All but Verizon basically said they were willing or are currently using traffic shaping techniques. Verizon offered the only stand against throttling, saying “We don’t manage our network by throttling, slowing or curbing service, either on DSL or FiOS.” They went on to say Verizon is “reluctant to get into the business of examining content that flows across our networks.”