Nayanee Gupta's weblog

Following the discovery last week that Comcast was interfering with file-sharing among customers using disingenuous methods, AP News reported that two Senators on Friday called for a congressional hearing to investigate reports that phone and cable companies are unfairly stifling communications over the Internet and on cell phones.

Senators Bryan Dogan, D-N.D., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, have called for the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee to investigate whether such incidents were based on legitimate business policies or unfair and anticompetitive practices and if more federal regulation is needed.

It is particularly interesting to note that telecom companies have asserted that Net Neutrality is a “solution in search of a problem”, and that further regulation would stifle the innovation and healthy competition needed to bring the best possible service to the customer.

Now, I have two issues with this : first, where’s the competition? Ever since the FCC made it difficult for fledgeling ISP providers to compete with the incumbents, (not to mention the series of telecom company mergers that have taken place in the past two years), the telecom-cable duopoly is the the only thing that allows customers to have a choice. Thus, most urban and suburban regions in the country have a choice of two internet providers, three if they are lucky. Rural areas usually have no choice at all. (Go here to read an interesting article that busts the myth of competition in the telecom sector, which is constantly cited as the reason for not imposing further regulation on the internet. The article states that “The problem is that the FCC’s definition of “effective competition” doesn’t work very well. If multiple providers exist in a region of the country, then that region is dubbed “competitive,” even though only a few homes and businesses may actually have a choice between providers. The report also noted that the FCC has trouble getting accurate competition data, since it relies on third parties to provide it, and those parties rarely have an obligation to do so.”)

Second, net neutrality violation is not a myth. Here are previous examples of data discrimination by service providers :
Madison River Communications : In 2005, a rural North Carolina telephone company, Madison River Communications, was fined by the FCC for blocking VoIP services (provided by Vonage) from it’s internet customers. The terms of the settlement, which could at best be described as a slap on the wrist, drew scathing comment from critics. Madison River was required to not block VoIP services — for only 30 months — after which it could, presumably, resume it’s discriminatory business strategies.

Telus : Canada’s top telecom company blocked access to a pro-union site during a labor dispute, by blocking the server on which it was hosted. Researchers at Harvard, Cambridge and the University of Toronto found that Telus’s actions resulted in an additional 766 unrelated sites also being blocked for subscribers.

Verizon : In September 2007, Verizon Wireless prevented NARAL, a pro-choice organization, from sending text messages to its members coordinating a public demonstration.

And so forth.

Data discrimination is the biggest factor that, for me, tilts the argument in favor of regulations to keep Internet service “content unbiased”. To quote Sir Tim Berners-Lee, “If I pay to connect to the net with a given quality of service, and you pay to connect to the net with the same or higher quality of service, then you and I can communicate across the net, with that quality of service.”

Posted by Nayanee at 05:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I just came across this rather witty visual of where the net neutrality issue could be headed.

( Source: SteveX Compiled (http://blog.stevex.net/)

Posted by Nayanee at 01:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For everyone following the debate on Internet data discrimination and Net Neutrality, this has been an interesting week.

On Friday, AP news reported that Comcast was actively interfering with file-sharing among some customers of it’s high-speed internet service. AP news reported that :
“The interference, which The Associated Press confirmed through nationwide tests, is the most drastic example yet of data discrimination by a U.S. Internet service provider. It involves company computers masquerading as those of its users.”

The service discrimination was noticed by users of file-sharing systems like BitTorrent and Gnutella, which generate disproportionately large amounts of internet traffic.

To test these claims by Comcast users, AP reporters did some testing of their own, using a King James Bible (picked because it is not copyright protected and has a convenient file size). Using BitTorrent, an AP reporter in New York attempted to download the Bible from two computers, in San Francisco and Philadelphia respectively, which were connected to the Internet through Comcast. In two out of three tries, the transfer was blocked. In the third, the transfer started only after a 10-minute delay. When the reporters tried to upload files that were in demand by a wider number of BitTorrent users, those connections were also blocked.

The blocking mechanism used by Comcast was described thus :
“when one BitTorrent user attempts to share a complete file with another user, each PC gets a message invisible to the user that looks like it comes from the other computer, telling it to stop communicating. But neither message originated from the other computer - it comes from Comcast. If it were a telephone conversation, it would be like the operator breaking into the conversation, telling each talker in the voice of the other: “Sorry, I have to hang up. Good bye.”“

This incident brings up an interesting angle to the net neutrality debate. Last year, as part if it’s acquisition of BellSouth, FCC stipulated that AT&T could not prioritize Internet traffic based on origin. However, there were no conditions about prioritizing traffic based on it’s type, which is what Comcast is doing.

The practice of managing the flow of Internet data is known as “traffic shaping”, and is already widespread among Internet service providers. Typically, applications needing more bandwidth are slowed down, giving priority to other traffic.

While Comcast customers, as well as the affected software vendors acknowledge that company has the right to manage it’s network, Comcast’s tactic of interfering with network traffic by making their computers impersonate those of their users’ is seen as deceptive. That is to say, Comcast does not merely kill the file upload by blocking the transmission of packets, it sends a reset (RST) packet to the Comcast customer, pretending to be the host computer at the other end of the BitTorrent transmission. This is, interestingly, the same “censorship” technique used by the government of China to terminate connections that matched filtered keywords.

So what’s the difference between closing the connection outright as opposed to using falsified resets? In my opinion, it is fraud. Simply closing the connection would be a truthful statement on Comcast’s ability to manage high-density peer-to-peer applications; a customer could use this information to decide wether Comcast’s service fulfills their needs. By sending the reset packets, Comcast is essentially lying to it’s customers who are affected.

In the end, I believe, this has less to do with Net neutrality, and much more to do with one company’s deceptive practices.

Posted by Nayanee at 12:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last week I came across an interesting comment on activism in college campuses by Economist Thomas Friedman. Friedman calls this generation of college students the generation Q (for quiet), and it makes an interesting contrast to the instances of successful activism we’ve been reading about — Sinclair Broadcasting being forced to halt their propaganda attack against John Kerry before the 2004 elections, or more recently, and closer home, Virginia Senator George Allen’s infamous “Macaca moment” during the run-up to the 2006 Senate Elections. Allen’s insensitive remarks about a campaign aide of foreign descent, captured and instantly posted on YouTube, unleashed a wave of public outrage, infamously caused Allen to lose the election.

However, Friedman contends that this generation of youth is “too quiet, too online, for its own good, and for the country’s own good.” While online activism has had more than it’s share of success, Friedman says, big change can only be wrought by unplugging the computer and coming face to face with lawmakers in large numbers. This follows in the same vein as Sunstein’s argument that the more time we spend on a customized web, the less we are in touch with life on the “street”. Friedman says that virtual politics is just that - virtual.

Posted by Nayanee at 07:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In this entry I’d like to divert from my Net neutrality thread and talk a little about this week’s class readings — emergence of democracies on the Internet, how they organize and advocate for their cause. I look at these issues through the lens of my personal life, specifically as the parent of a child who has autism. Three years ago we learned that my daughter had autism. I have, since then, aggressively used every available resource to obtain information about, and manage my daughter’s therapy. In this regard, the information, the dialogue and the support system(s) that I have found on the Internet have proven invaluable.

Parents of Autistic Children right now have a highly active, vocal and committed presence on the Internet, consisting of advocacy and fundraising, parent information and support groups. The vast and rich information available on the Web, combined with the contribution of dedicated parents’ groups, has led to a very strong Web-based movement for Autism awareness and treatment. Many aspects of these small “minority” groups, loosely follow the patterns in Benkler and Ito’s discussions, and I will attempt to discuss two of them here.

1. Direct democracy : Autism Parents have formed a well-knit community of parents helping parents. A very significant factor that brings the group together is that currently there is no proven treatment for the disorder; mainstream debate is split into the behavioral, developmental and biomedical camps. Thus, for anxious parents who are looking every which way for help, experiences shared by other families provides great support and information — helping them bypass hyped-up therapies which are are expensive without actually being proven useful. In this sense, the collective knowledge of the group provides good checks and balances against many of the therapies advertised by the medical establishment.

Parents gain immensely from sharing views, about treatments, providers, schools, etc, thus forums are very loosely monitored, if at all. Discussion is very democratic, and everyone gets to voice their opinion. Even though blogging isn’t the norm in this group, relevant news or information pieces are forwarded to different lists till it percolates down to almost every member of this community.

2. Optimal amount of structure : Some of the more organized ( and geographically localized) parent groups — like the one in Fairfax County, where I live, have a minimal structure designed to best serve the group’s objectives. One member may take on the onus of following Autism related legislation, and keeping parents informed about what action they need to take; another might moderate discussions among parents, and a third might maintain data on available resources. Each of these responsibilities would be assumed voluntarily (we are, after all, talking about parents who have scant free time on their hands), and are very inclusive, i.e. another group member who wishes to co-share the agenda is always welcomed to the “post”.

In conclusion, for every Autism parent like myself, the Internet has yielded far more than it’s promise in providing a medium to share collective knowledge, and I believe that for this particular group, these benefits will continue into the forseeable future.

Posted by Nayanee at 01:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Net neutrality has been been hotly debated for the past 5 years, with digital freedom advocates and academicians joining together with Internet companies to advocate the enforcement of Net Neutrality regulations that would ensure that the Internet continues to thrive in the manner that it was intended to; critics of this principle include cable and telecom companies who insist that Net neutrality is a solution in search of a problem. The NCTA (National Cable and Telecom Association) contends that
“Network neutrality is no such thing. The idea behind proponents of network neutrality is that somehow there is a problem and we need to provide a solution. There is no problem today - a cable customer can go anywhere they want on the web. It is in our business interest to keep a cable customer happy.”

Recent regulations passed by the FCC have not been very encouraging for net neutrality proponents. In June 2005, the US Supreme Court overturned a federal court decision that would force cable companies to share their infrastructure with Internet service providers such a Earthlink. The case (FCC vs. Brand X) pit the FCC and the cable companies against Internet service provider Brand X. The FCC won the decision on a legal technicality — by changing the classification of cable provided Internet transmissions from the category of “telecommunications services” to the category of “information services”. This exempts cable broadband services from the common carrier requirements that apply to telecommunications services (which says that cable networks should be like phone lines, on which any service provider can operate), and thus from having to share their networks with ISPs.

Soon after this, the FCC went on to decide that telephony provided Internet services (DSL) were also categorically “information services” and thus exempt from common carrier regulations. This deregulation was needed, in their opinion, to level the playing field between DSL and broadband cable.

Now, first of all, I do see why the FCC has categorized Internet data transmission separately — applications like streaming video, data encryption and VOIP are different in nature and bandwidth requirement from wired telephony. However, it then follows that the FCC should define carrier requirements for the “information services” category, specially in the context of improving “last mile” services.

Not doing so would increase the monopolistic power of DSL and cable broadband providers; as an example, my DSL service at home is poor (Yahoo and Gmail take disproportionately long to load), yet, I have a choice of only 1 other provider to switch to, if I should so wish.

With this near monopoly in sway, service providers have very little incentive to price their services competitively. In September this year, the Justice Department told the FCC that Internet service providers should be allowed to charge a fee for priority web traffic. Further it (the Justice Department) has taken the position that it is opposed to Net Neutrality because it would hamper the development of the Internet. But more on that in my next post.

Posted by Nayanee at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)