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Sergey Brin: The Scary State Of Freedom On The Internet

Mellisa Tolentino — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 17:10:33 +0000

“I am more worried than I have been in the past. It’s scary.”

That was what Google co-founder Sergey Brin stated about the state of Internet freedom during his interview with The Guardian.

Brin recalled how the openness of the internet decades ago enabled them to build Google into what it is today. But the freedom of the internet as we know today may soon come to an end as threats ranging from certain national governments trying to control internet access of their people and the entertainment industry’s attempts to stop piracy, to the rise of “restrictive” walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple, aim to take control of the Internet as well as its users. Nowadays, it seems everyone has rules of their own. And the problem with too many rules is stagnation.

“You have to play by their rules, which are really restrictive,” Brin said. “The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine, is the web was so open. Once you get too many rules, that will stifle innovation.”

Five years ago, it never crossed Brin’s mind that any government would be able to put restrictions on using the internet. Now, he has to take a step back and swallow his words as he watch how governments are censoring the Internet from requiring the use of a real identity in creating a social networking profile to the introduction of a sealed, “national internet.”

Ricken Patel, co-founder of Avaaz, the 14 million-strong online activist network which has been providing communication equipment and training to Syrian activists, shared the same sentiments as Brin in stating that “We’ve seen a massive attack on the freedom of the web. Governments are realising the power of this medium to organise people and they are trying to clamp down across the world, not just in places like China and North Korea; we’re seeing bills in the United States, in Italy, all across the world.”

Evil Facebook and Evil Apple?

But it’s not only restrictive governments that Brin warns against. He also alerts people to the walled gardens of Facebook and Apple, which pose a lot of restrictions that controls user actions and freedoms. Brin also didn’t hold back when it comes to Google and Facebook not being the best of internet buddies.

“Facebook has been sucking down Gmail contacts for many years,” he said.

Google and Facebook’s rift started in 2010, long before there was Google+, when Google banned Facebook from accessing Gmail contacts by tweaking the Terms of Service for its Google Contacts Data API. The new ToS stated that Facebook had no access to Gmail contacts unless Google is allowed access to Facebook’s data. So Facebook came up with a plan to go around Google’s back by importing Gmail contacts via an alternate Google feature. In the end, Facebook removed support for importing Gmail contacts, leaving Facebook the clear winner as Google still didn’t gain access to Facebook’s data, though they made it difficult for Gmail users to add their Gmail friends on Facebook. Yeah, Gmail users suffered because Google got greedy.

Protecting users’ data

As for the battle against piracy and taking down hackers, Brin is bothered by the fact that their company is being used by the US government to get information, since a lot of people’s data are on their servers. Brin stated that they do their best to protect everyone’s data, but sometimes they are forced to hand over data and are legally restricted from informing the users that their data had been acquired by the government.

“We push back a lot; we are able to turn down a lot of these requests. We do everything possible to protect the data. If we could wave a magic wand and not be subject to US law, that would be great. If we could be in some magical jurisdiction that everyone in the world trusted, that would be great … We’re doing it as well as can be done,” Brin stated.

Brin’s rant emphasizes the evolution the web’s undergone since its early days, and even dates Google as the company that launched over a decade ago with the utopian goals of not being evil. As Brin seeks to reshape his company into a more cohesive consumer service, he battles walled gardens in many more ways than he once did at the onset of Google, which came out the gates fighting for access to the web’s burgeoning collection of content.

Sergey Brin: The Scary State Of Freedom On The Internet is a post from: SiliconANGLE
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In the same vein:

Connected Homes, Piracy Are Bread Crumbs for Organized Spies

Mellisa Tolentino — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 17:00:29 +0000

Most of us feel safe and secured when we’re at home. But how safe are we from prying eyes when it comes to the onslaught of connected devices expected to invade our homes in the coming years?

CIA sees all

With the dawn of smart homes, you’d think that your life would be a lot easier. Like your refrigerator telling you you’re running out of ice cream and ordering another pint of Chunky Monkey for you, or your washing machine telling you which laundry detergent to use for a particular garment’s type of fabric. But what if all this extra data running through your home’s devices, your privacy ends up compromised?

While talking at a summit earlier this month for In-Q-Tel, the Central Intelligence Agency’s venture capital firm, CIA Director David Petraeus expressed his excitement over having all your household devices being used for spying.

“Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters — all connected to the next-generation internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power computing,” Petraeus said, “the latter now going to cloud computing, in many areas greater and greater supercomputing, and, ultimately, heading to quantum computing.”

These connected devices can be used for spying just by gathering geolocation data. Though the CIA has restrictions when it comes to spying, gathering geolocation data is a different matter, especially after the 2008 carve-outs to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

But that’s not the only thing intriguing Petraeus about the internet of things; he also wants to use this technology in creating new online identities for his undercover spies and sweeping away the “digital footprints” of agents who suddenly need to vanish.

But creating new identities for his agents is quite difficult, since proud parents are quick to announce that their sons will be CIA agents on social media platforms. But social media isn’t such a downfall for the CIA, and it turns out Facebook’s new Timeline can help. Petraeus is especially happy with Facebook’s Timeline since it tells almost the complete story of your life, including your activity in the various locations you’ve been to. It helps to easily create a new identity by backdating or filling in new items for every year.

Organized spying?

In July of last year, the Motion Picture Association of America, Recording Industry Association of America and other copyright holders, have signed an agreement with AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon to curb piracy. The agreement stated that the ISPs agree to send “copyright alerts” to subscribers whose Internet connections are used for copyright infringement. Repeat offenders will not be disconnected from the Internet, but could be slowed down instead.

Most people laugh at the notion, but seriously, were they just giving out an empty threat to ward off pirates? Apparently not.

According to RIAA CEO Cary Sherman, the ISPs are still on board with the program and it will be implemented by July 1, 2012.

“Each ISP has to develop their infrastructure for automating the system,” Sherman said. They need this “for establishing the database so they can keep track of repeat infringers, so they know that this is the first notice or the third notice. Every ISP has to do it differently depending on the architecture of its particular network. Some are nearing completion and others are a little further from completion.”

So how does this work? The “graduated response” program requires ISPs to send out one or two educational notices that informs their customers that they are being accused of downloading copyrighted content illegally. If the customer ignores their warnings, the ISP sends out “confirmation notices” asking their customer to confirm if they have received previous notices, while also informing the customer of the risks they incur if they don’t stop pirating material. If the customer doesn’t stop pirating materials on the web, the ISPs can choose from a list of penalties, or what the RIAA calls “mitigation measures,” which include throttling down the customer’s connection speed and suspending Web access until the subscriber agrees to stop pirating, pressuring the customer to comply. If their customer complies, then the mitigating measures can be waived by the ISPs.

Previous anti-piracy measures were of course trashed, and it will be interesting how pirates, hackers and hacktivists will react to the RIAA and ISPs looking at their customers’ web activities.

Connected Homes, Piracy Are Bread Crumbs for Organized Spies is a post from: SiliconANGLE
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In the same vein:

How Technology and Markets Made Net Neutrality Moot

George Ou — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 18:09:07 +0000

Before the courts have even ruled on Verizon’s lawsuit against the FCC‘s proposed Net Neutrality regulations, it appears that technological progress will make the wireless device neutrality portion of the FCC rules moot. One of the key aspects of Net Neutrality was the effort to curb the proliferation of “walled garden” wireless carrier networks. Internet industry players feared that the proliferation of closed proprietary networks would limit their direct access to customers over the Internet and they supported FCC regulation that would forbid wireless carriers from imposing any network limitations on devices.

Even if the network limitations were requested by the device maker and customers liked the limited but inexpensive 3G access, these devices and services were threatened by FCC Net Neutrality regulation. When I was interviewed last year by NPR’s Laura Sydell regarding the FCC’s Net Neutrality proposal, I raised the concern that Net Neutrality would essentially outlaw popular devices like the Amazon Kindle e-Reader. Sydell responded that closed Internet devices like the Kindle should be outlawed by the Government. I disagreed and argued that the market and technology were the best arbitrators in this dispute and it appears that I was right.

The first three generations of the Kindle e-Reader were limited enough in capability that it was possible to offer limited 3G wireless access to text and low quality images. Now that the Amazon Kindle Fire has transitioned to a color display and dual-core microprocessor capable of rendering high quality images and High Definition (HD) video, it’s doubtful that future generations of Amazon e-Readers will not come with lifetime access to a limited Internet. With hot pre-order numbers for the color Kindle Fire and abysmal pre-order numbers for the Kindle Touch 3G, the future of walled garden Internet devices is almost certainly dead.

It’s also notable that the FCC had also considered regulating Apple’s Ap p Storeon behalf of Google in 2009. That discussion came up in my interview with Laura Sydell and she expressed her enthusiasm for app store regulation as well. But it appears that my faith in a market based approach will be proven correct and that any excessive market control exerted by Apple will be contained by the market place.

When Apple revolutionized the phone and wireless industry in 2007 with the Apple iPhone, Apple appeared untouchable. Only 4 years later, Apple has slipped to third place with a mere 20% market share in smartphones.

In 2010 when Apple’s iPad succeeded in the Tablet computing space where all others have failed before them, Apple appeared untouchable. Just one year later Android devices have crept up to a 27% market share. Even more ominous for the iPad’s dominance is survey data from Retrevo indicating that the Amazon Kindle Fire could outsell Apple’s iPad this holiday season. The lesson in all of this is that technology and the market can move swiftly and wisely before the ink on any new regulation is dry.

[Cross-posted at High Tech Forum]

How Technology and Markets Made Net Neutrality Moot is a post from: SiliconANGLE
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In the same vein:

Reacting to the Broadband Speed Data

richardbennett — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 18:31:45 +0000

Over on the Innovation Policy Blog I take a look at the FCC’s broadband speeds report and some of the reactions to it:

The results are surprising to some because they contradict a widely-circulated myth to the effect that America’s residential broadband users were not getting what they paid for. The FCC’s previous study, based on comScore data, claimed that Americans were getting only half the peak download speeds they expected to get, and that story fits the desired narrative of some public interest professionals perfectly. The old report was flawed on several grounds – there weren’t enough measurement servers for one – but mainly by the fact that it didn’t know which service tiers the measured users were actually on and tried to guess them from the observed speeds:

The trade-off made in applying this methodology is that subscribed speed tiers are inferred from observed speeds, rather than known directly (from, say, subscribers’ bills). For example, some machines in the data were tested more than 100 times: if any one speed read was more than 10% above the actual subscribed tier, the machine would be wrongly identified as subscribing to a higher speed tier. Alternately, if the maximum measured speed was substantially lower than the actual subscribed tier, that machine could be wrongly identified as subscribing to a lower speed tier. Both could bias the advertised tier upward or downward.

It’s fairly obvious that you can’t very well estimate advertised speed from observed speed without bias, and this method penalized the ISPs who offered actual performance above the advertised “up to” rates; the new study found that four of America’s largest ISPs (Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Cox) are in this group, giving users more than they paid for. This methodology was used because it was expedient: The National Broadband Plan needed the data on a short time line and couldn’t worry too much about accuracy.

Check it out.

[Cross-posted at High Tech Forum]

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In the same vein:

What’s Holding Netflix Back?

richardbennett — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 21:52:23 +0000

Broadband usage fees and limits are back in the news again: the New York Times editorialized against them recently, and the Washington Post’s Cecilia Kang reported that “experts” have concerns about them. We covered this issue in a previous post on AT&T’s usage limits back in March, but it’s worth revisiting the issue to examine the latest round of complaints.

Broadband usage caps or service tiers follow from the principle that the more of a resource you use, the more you pay. This principle applies to practically every commodity, service, or utility that we use and isn’t the least bit controversial in the abstract. Broadband has traditionally been a flat-rate, unmetered service in the United States, but not so in the rest of the world. This was possible because of infrastructure competition in the U. S. and also because patterns of broadband usage have been very uniform. As Internet applications become more diverse, the patterns are changing and usage-based pricing is a response. It makes no more sense for light consumers of bandwidth to subsidize heavy users than it would to make those who eat salad for lunch subsidize the consumption of Porterhouse steaks by others.

What’s the Beef with Caps?

Critics fear that usage caps are aimed at stifling the growth of Internet TV in general and Netflix in particular. The Times says that usage caps are unfairly applied to Internet streaming but not to garden-variety television viewing over cable and the cable-like telco services such as Verizon’s FiOS and AT&T’s U-verse:

Caps can be used anticompetitively — to discourage the use of services that rival an Internet service provider’s in-house offerings. For instance, AT&T points out that Netflix hogs 30 percent of peak-hour Internet traffic in North America. Netflix also competes with television offerings on AT&T’s U-verse network. Watching TV on U-verse does not count against the data cap. Streaming Netflix does.

And Kang raises a similar point, albeit less stridently:

Why would a user watch HD feature films on Hulu or Netflix if they could blow past their monthly data limits? And is it fair if Comcast or AT&T doesn’t charge by the bit for their own television services?

Both writers presuppose a fact that’s not really a fact. Whether it’s fair to exempt particular services from overall usage limits depends in part on the nature of the service. Many different kinds of traffic transit modern broadband networks, with many different costs of delivery and potential for congestion. Live TV in particular does not stress a cable network the same way that Netflix does. Live TV is broadcast throughout the cable system on dedicated channels that can be watched by millions of viewers at a time without any effect on network load. If every TiVo in America is tuned to the live broadcast of American Idol, the cable network is no more stressed than if only one person is watching.

Netflix doesn’t work this way. If everyone of Netflix’ customers uses their system at the same time, the Internet would simply back up in a colossal fashion. This is because Netflix is a personalized service in which every user gets a unique copy of the movie or television program they’re watching, regardless of how many other people may be viewing the same content. So the comparison of live TV to streaming isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison. The pertinent comparison would come between cable partner services such as HBO Go or Hulu and Netflix, and here the complainers have no case: These services, which load cable networks the same way that Netflix does, are not exempt from usage caps. This is the fact that the writers get wrong.

To Peak or Not to Peak

The Times also points out that usage caps are a blunt instrument that apply to both peak load and non-peak load hours. This is a fair point that we’ve made ourselves: An exemption of traffic from usage caps that doesn’t contribute to congestion has much to recommend it.

The Times fails to appreciate that relaxed off-peak usage limits aren’t going to help Netflix in any substantial way because streaming is not a time-shiftable service. Unlike P2P piracy or Amazon digital video rental, Netflix doesn’t transfer a file to the end user’s computer that can be brought out of a local archive and played at will. Netflix is a real-time, peak hour experience that can only be transferred at the same time that it’s viewed. While the theory of exempting non-peak usage is sound, the use of this argument in the context of a plea to protect Netflix from predatory usage limits falls well far of the mark.

Faulty Arithmetic

The Times makes some other observations about the cost of bandwidth that are faulty as well, asserting that upgrades to current network systems are extremely inexpensive and a better means of addressing the broadband capacity crunch than usage caps. These arguments circulated the network neutrality debate with great vigor, but the passion with which they’re delivered doesn’t make them any more sound today than they were five years ago. Broadband networks are shared resource systems in which a very small number of users can sap capacity faster than the service provider can add it. Bandwidth is consumed by software, which has little or no cost, but it’s provided by hardware that has substantial unit costs that correlate with distance.

The current capacity crunch was created by video streaming systems that move packets a few feet before handing them off to the far-flung broadband networks that then must move them hundreds of miles. The cost imbalance between the two sides of the broadband equation motivates usage caps, and it goes unmentioned in the Times’ editorial and Kang’s interviews with policy experts.

In our previous analysis, we showed that the usage limits currently employed by Comcast and AT&T don’t impair the ability of American consumers to use the Netflix system:

The accounting is straightforward: According to Netlfix, they stream videos at an average rate of 1.5 Mbps into the AT&T network, which works out to 675 Kilobytes per hour. That comes out to 222 hours of streaming TV per month, or 7 hours a day plus change, for ADSL users. For U-Verse users, the cap allows 370 hours of streaming per month, which is 12 hours a day…

Netflix streams at a higher rate into the Comcast network, but the end result is well over seven hours a day of video programming before the user encounters the limit.

Barriers to Netflix’s Growth

Netflix is in the news today for two legitimate reasons: They recently announced a 60% price hike that enraged its customers; the reaction was termed a “social media firestorm” by multiple news organizations. Netflix has up to now given streaming video users a free ride on the charges paid for DVD rental, but they would like to grow the high-margin side of their business, streaming, while shrinking the low margin side of the business, DVD rental. Netflix also reported slower growth in new subscribers in the most recent quarter, adding about as many new subscribers as analysts expect them to lose when their price rises at the end of the summer. It’s likely that the costs of the content Netflix streams will rise substantially over the course of the next year as well. Over the last five days, Netflix stock has fallen from $280 to $269 a share.

The only conclusion that should be drawn about Netflix and usage caps is that caps are a non-issue. There are many things that might prevent Netflix from growing as astronomically as it has in the past two years, but usage caps are not high on the list. Netflix has traditionally been a very customer-friendly organization with a well deserved reputation for honesty. It would be shame if they were to tarnish that image by attempting to shift the blame for customer anger at an outsized price increase onto the ISPs that have enabled their service to flourish so far.

[Cross-posted at High Tech Forum]

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In the same vein:

Free Press’s Contrived Outrage at the FCC

Seton Motley — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 17:59:50 +0000

We have recently heard very much about the Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)-induced flood of released documents.

They show that the anti-free market group Free Press worked quite closely with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) uber-Democrat Commissioner Michael Copps in advance of the December 21 FCC Internet power grab, executed so that the Commission could then impose the ridiculous Network Neutrality.

This knowledge certainly helps explain why the technologically inept Free Press was cited fifty-three times in the FCC’s absurd write-up of their absurd December Internet folly.

Which makes Free Press’s outrage at said order – for allegedly not going far enough – more than a mite bizarre.

It makes one wonder if this outrage is also perhaps in part a perpetually predetermined inevitability.

Sure, Free Press wants the whole Huge Government hog on all things, and they’re disappointed when they don’t get it. But they are, like all Leftists, patient incrementalists.

They’ll push for as much as they can get, “begrudgingly” take it – and come back soon thereafter for even more.

The federal government didn’t get to spending 25% of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) overnight. It took little additional incremental nibbles for decades – until one day we woke up to find a federal Leviathan consuming one-fourth of all we produce.

Free Press continually acts completely insane – at which they are REALLY convincing – and continually asks for completely insane, Huge Government policy outcomes.

The FCC then does an obnoxiously large percentage – but not all – of what Free Press wants. Free Press goes on cue ballistic – and the Commission looks by comparison “reasonable.”

But as we’ve seen with the December Net Neutrality and the April wireless Internet “data roaming” power grabs, this FCC is anything but “reasonable.”

Free Press’s behavior is not dissimilar to that of the East German judge in the Soviet Union-era Olympics.

Back then, a panel of judges would otherwise score a U.S. gymnast or other athlete with 9.8s and 9.9s – and the East German judge would file a 6.8, just to screw with us.

Free Press is the Media Marxist equivalent of the East German judge – the outlier, the score you throw out.

But an important point must now be made.

Substantively, there is almost NO difference between Free Press and their cohorts – Public Knowledge and the Media Access Project.

These groups were just as underwhelmed and thusly outraged by, for instance, the December Internet power grab as was Free Press – providing further cover for an outrageously overreaching FCC.

But Public Knowledge and Media Access Project try to distance themselves from Free Press via stylistic differences – they calmly and “rationally” push for the exact same irrational policy prescriptions as Free Press.

Demanding the exact same Huge Government free market assaults – but not including Free Press in their tiny Media Marxist gaggles.

So we will continue to see the staid tones of Public Knowledge and Media Access Project – and Free Press’s rending of garments and scratching of lampposts.

But the differences in appearance belie an identical Huge Government intent.

And these ultra left wing groups – regardless of style – all provide the perfect, identical cover for an ever more encroaching FCC.

[Cross-posted at Big Government]

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In the same vein:

Comcast Users Unable to Reach The Pirate Bay, ISP Says “It’s Not Us”

Kit Dotson — Thu, 12 May 2011 17:14:30 +0000

The Pirate Bay is investigating an issue that seems to primarily affect US subscribers to Comcast cable Internet: basically, they can’t get to their favorite tracker. When this news hit the wires six hours ago, the spark lit the flames of old controversies stirred by other ISPs and net censorship—however, Comcast was quick to deny any direct involvement in the apparent loss of access.

According to TorrentFreak, most journalistic analysis currently doesn’t blame Comcast for the basis of the problem anyway,

Although downtime is nothing new for users of the popular BitTorrent site, this time around the connectivity issues appear to be affecting only a select group.

Several tests and numerous user reports reveal that Comcast subscribers from all across the United States are unable to connect to The Pirate Bay. The traceroute from Comcast connections stops at thepiratebay.piratpartiet.se, as it’s supposed to, but The Pirate Bay website does not appear.

Although there’s been a lot of talk about censorship lately, it seems doubtful that this is an intentional blockade on Comcast’s part. That said, there is clearly a mismatch between the Comcast network and The Pirate Bay site which leaves access to the rest of the Internet unaffected.

Jason Livingood, Executive Director Internet Systems Engineering at Comcast told TorrentFreak: “Please note that we do not block websites and we are NOT blocking The Pirate Bay.”

The dropped access looks to have been going on almost 20 hours now.

While the poor access seems to affect primarily US customers who use Comcast, reports have also come in that it hits a small number of other subscribers as well. Even some non US users have reported issues reaching The Pirate Bay. TPB themselves have even reported a notable drop off of traffic from the USA as well signaling perhaps some hints as to exactly where the trouble might be situated.

In the midst of this snafu, a webserver at TPB died causing a loss of access to pretty much everyone. No news on if that’s the actual culprit (but why an ailing webserver would primarily only affect Comcast users would be an interesting pm,ostmortem.)

Torrent sites are a common enemy of Internet carriers and providers due to their huge costs in the way of bandwidth. ISPs tampering with people’s connectivity to sites that provide torrents (or BitTorrent traffic itself) raises the specter of censorship as well as fears of the slippery slope of losing out on basic net neutrality for providers. Furthermore, there’s also fears that copyright-laden industries like movies and music might get a stranglehold on communication in order to protect their bottom line.

In the United States and other countries providers are shielded by safe harbors for acting as common carriers, but that doesn’t stop governments from reaching out to get sites like The Pirate Bay blocked. There are also plenty of do-no-gooders out there looking to make a name for themselves by taking letters of mark from said copyright industry governors, groups such as BREIN who laud themselves on how many torrent sites they’ve shuttered.

For those affected by what we’re currently going to tentatively guess is a routing issue, it appears that proxies and TOR nodes are largely unaffected, especially those that use non-US exit nodes.

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In the same vein:

Understanding Verizon v. FCC

jamesdelong — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 18:22:25 +0000

The DC Circuit yesterday dismissed the appeals of the FCC Net Neutrality order filed by Verizon and MetroPCS on the grounds that they were filed prematurely – no appeal can be taken until the order is published in the Federal Register, an event that has not yet occurred.

It would be a mistake to regard this as a defeat for the companies. Their decision to file an appeal at this point was a precautionary move taken because of the complex procedural tangle that surrounds issues of finality and appealability. [For the details, see Which Court Gets to Hear the Net Neutrality Appeal? (Jan. 21); More on the Verizon Appeal of the Net Neutrality Regulation (Jan. 24); Update: Appeals of the FCC Net Neutrality Rule (Feb. 3).]

Had the companies failed to file, they would have left the door open for the FCC to argue later that they should have filed earlier, and that their failure to do so had forfeited the chance to argue that the appeal must be heard in the DC Circuit because it involves licensing. Now, that possible attack is barred, and the court’s opinion explicitly left undecided the issue whether the DC Circuit is the only appropriate forum for the appeal. The crucial language in the opinion is: “Regardless of whether the order is reviewable by way of a petition for review, 47 U.S.C. § 402(a), or a notice of appeal, 47 U.S.C. § 402(b), the prematurity is incurable.”

So the appellants are well-satisfied. They would have preferred an immediate and total win, of course, but that was never a likely or expected result.

[Cross-posted at Digital Society]

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In the same vein:

FCC Broadband Test Means Better US Internet Visualization and 10,000 Free Wireless-N Routers

Kit Dotson — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 18:44:32 +0000

Last year we saw the Federal Communications Commission finally take a long hard look at the Internet and the way access to it is sold to customers. As part of a U.S. wide test of broadband providers from the vantage of the end-user, the FCC has partnered with Samknows to give away preconfigured Wireless-N routers that will collect data on Internet connections.

To become part of the process, ISP customers need only sign up at TestMyISP.com.

In a particularly smirk-inducing play, the website for the initiative has SamKnows comparing themselves to Batman. To give everyone an idea of what they’re up to and why, here’s what their FAQ has to say,

We’re striving for greater transparency within the broadband market. There’s simply nothing else like it out there anywhere (to the best of our knowledge anyway!). The statistics will provide a whole new means of looking at broadband services, levelling the playing field and making the industry more accountable and work harder for the consumer.

Presently one might look at a 16Mbps headline speed and assume that it means the service will be good for online gaming. An incorrect assumption is being made here – raw speed is far less important than many think. Latency and packet loss are far more important for online gaming. Our network will measure both of these factors (and many more) across all of the ISPs – greater insight into how the ISP’s perform, more insightful information for the consumer.

Just like Batman (kind of) we’ve taken it upon ourselves to do this because nobody else has! We think it’ll generate some fantastically interesting data, which we intend to share with you.

The FCC has been pushing for greater transparency and regulation of ISPs and Internet connectivity—especially important noting their newest proposal with the Open Internet Order—and one way that they’ll be able to support the grounds for their decisions will be with actual data flowing out of the Internet. Right now, most of this information comes from ISPs themselves, research organizations who run websites that offer to test the broadband connections for users, and volunteers who run obscure apps on their computers to aid in the collection of data.

With 10,000 routers in the field that transparently run their own data collection for later analysis spread appropriately across the United States a great deal of technographic data could be collected as to Internet penetration, use, bandwidth, and actual connectivity. Statistically this will include some things that pure volunteer and ISP-oriented data would probably miss out on.

So who is Batman? Samknows is an ISP reliability and transparency industry watchdog founded in 2008 who tout themselves as attempting to provide accurate data to customers. They even release a monthly ISP Report Card newsletter. They claim to have “invented a technology to measure broadband performance, establishing it as the provider of choice to Governments and ISPs around the world.” They intend to remain a free resource for customers and get their software embedded into a myriad of Internet devices to build the most accurate picture of global broadband performance.

The testing will do a lot more than just attempt to compare overall service and speed to what the ISP tells customers they’re selling but a comprehensive collapse of all the elements that go into a data connection. They’ll be studying a variety of factors including jitter (variation in time between packet arrivals), latency and packet loss for ICMP and UDP, DNS query resolution time and failure rate, and even video streaming performance. A great deal of this information might even give the FCC a lot of reasonable information on how to implement or not regulate things like Net Neutrality.

It wasn’t until the end of the FAQ that I actually became interested in what SamKnows meant to do with the data. In an act pure-of-heart as geeks go, they point out that people will have access to the graphs of their own usage data. They even include a series of screenshots of what their statistics will look like.

The sort of data collected over the three year long testing period should provide some very interesting statistics about US Internet topography as experienced by end-users and I am hoping for some really interesting visualizations to emerge. Who knows, they might even get the data released to something like Google Public Data Explorer, an act which would enable watchdog groups and journalists to sift their own way through the data.

Oh yes, I almost forgot, the Samknows Wireless-N router is yours to keep if you end up getting one and complete the testing period.

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In the same vein:

The Future History of Net Neutrality

jamesdelong — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 18:59:32 +0000

While working on a non-DigSoc project, I ran across this statement from the Association of American Railroads:

• In fact, from 1980 through 2009, U.S. freight railroads reinvested more than $460 billion — more than 40 cents out of every revenue dollar — back into their networks.

• The main alternative to the vertical integration model is the “open access” model, in which multiple railroads operate over tracks they do not own. The right-of-way is owned by the government or a government-approved manager.

• When Argentina and Mexico restructured their rail industries, an “open access” regime was initially considered but met with an overwhelmingly negative response from potential investors who were not interested in committing funds to railroads if competitors could appear at any time and capture the economic benefits of those investments. Investors realized that in a capital-intensive industry like railroading, “open access” simply entails too much risk for private investment.

• Investors also recognized that “open access” would make it more difficult to operate a railroad efficiently and profitably due to government interference and a lack of coordination between infrastructure investment decisions and operational goals.

• Where open access has been implemented, additional rail-to-rail competition has been slow to develop and problems have abounded. As Mercer Management Consulting, a firm deeply involved in rail restructurings all over the world, testified at a U.S. Senate hearing, “No country has been successful in implementing [open] access without providing significant and, in some cases, unexpected government subsidy of rail service.”

The U.S. rail model is of “vertical integration,” in which a railroad generally both owns the track and operates trains over that track. The efficient U.S. model has resulted in huge productivity gains, sharply lower average rail rates, and massive reinvestment by railroads back into their systems.

It may seem that transporting bits is a lot different from transporting coal and machinery, but there are many commonalities among different types of networks, and one of the failures of the net neutrality movement is its lack of interest in learning from experience in other areas.

[Cross-posted at Digital Society]

The Future History of Net Neutrality is a post from: SiliconANGLE
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