Nayanee Gupta's weblog

How well do the presidential candidates score on their Internet policies? Where do they stand on contentious issues like net neutrality?

Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry of the Personal Democracy Forum evaluated the Democratic candidates and this is what they had to say —
“Of the eight Democrats running, only two have demonstrated that they really understand the transformational power of the Internet: John Edwards and Barack Obama. Hillary Rodham Clinton is a disappointment. The rest of the field is worse.”

While the Net neutrality issue is split along party lines (with Democrats supporting neutrality regulation, and Republicans favoring a free market approach), only Edwards and Obama have addressed the issue in depth.

Edwards, who scored top points for his cogent policies, calls for a national broadband policy to “help make the internet affordable and accessible to all Americans”. He is also the only candidate who has urged the FCC to require open use of new broadcast spectrum that is currently being auctioned.

Obama not only supports net neutrality, he goes further in arguing that “technology offers the tools to create real change in America,” by connecting citizens to each other —including “giving Americans the chance to participate in government deliberations and decision-making in ways that were not possible only a few years ago.”

Clinton’s policy initiatives on enhancing the Internet’s power seem vague and insufficient in most areas. Further, though she is a co-sponsor in the Senate of legislation calling for net neutrality, she has not mentioned the topic since becoming a candidate. Overall, she scored a B for her efforts, as did Joe Biden, the only other Democratic candidate who received a B or higher for his policies.

While the full data on the Republican candidates is yet to come in, Romney was rather vague on the subject. McCain, who was vehemently embarrassed by Yahoo’s actions in China, has a very middle-of-the-road “let’s watch and wait” stance on imposing net neutrality regulations. In his view “….. until some foul has been committed, I don’t think it should be interfering in the market, and probably shouldn’t be trying to micromanage American business and innovation.”

So definately not in the pro-net neutrality camp.

However, will the overall change in political climate - elections looming up ahead, Democrats in charge of the House - bear any significance on Internet regulation? Senators Byron Drogan (D-N.D.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) are hoping it will. They plan to re-introduce net neutrality legislation in December to set the stage for Congressional debate in 2008, even though such bills have failed to pass several times in the past.

While the spotlight will certainly help generate more debate on the issue, my feeling is that absent an external, independent panel reviewing the actual extent of the strain on the current network from bandwidth-hogging applications, and without a clear demarcation between the technical limitations vs. anti-competitive measures driving the current trends, the DoJ will continue to be on the side of “letting competition thrive”, i.e. reject calls for net neutrality.

Posted by Nayanee at 11:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In what sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy, researchers at Penn State University found that files used by Web administrators to regulate search engine agents (called crawlers or bots) significantly favored Google over it’s close rivals, Yahoo and MSN.

Systems administrators use text files called (robots.txt) to regulate web crawlers, and to keep their servers from getting overloaded. In the robots.txt file, the Web administrator has to explicitly specify which search engines are “favored”, and researchers found a strong correlation between a search engine’s market share and the access given to it’s crawlers.

Google “bots” were favored more than twice as often as those of Yahoo and MSN.

This raises a few interesting points, among them being that Google’s dominance is being further reinforced, at another level — the level of Systems administrators and policy decision makers, who are the de-facto gatekeepers of the web — with an almost-*power law* kind of effect. On the other hand, this could arguably be called a human bias in endorsing what one feels is a superior product.

Scott Cleland, who generally seems to have it in for Google, makes some interesting points in his analysis of the study results, among them being :
“…. what these findings may mean is that consumers are not in fact choosing a search engine based on its algorithm, but choosing implicitly through learned behavior that Google has better access to the content the user wants than other search engines do. “

Is Google slowly heading in the direction of Microsoft, where the force of it’s market share and name brand gradually overshadow the quality and innovativeness of the product?

Posted by Nayanee at 02:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Was it network management or data discrimination? Comcast’s “denial of service” incident, which I wrote about earlier, provided a fresh impetus to Net Neutrality proponents in their crusade for improved regulation of Internet service. Public interest groups like Public Knowledge and Save the Internet called on Net Neutrality champions in the Senate to move more aggresively on their agenda. Comcast customer John Hart filed a lawsuit against the company for interfering with his file sharing.

However, caught up in the hype was the question of what exactly the Net Neutrality camp was protesting. Were Comcast’s actions, however deceptive they may have been, driven by the need to manage network traffic or were they indeed discriminating against file-sharing services BitTorrent and Lotus. And how could we ensure a clear separation of the two motives that would be transparent to the user. I decided to dig a little deeper into the technical details of the incident to improve my understanding of the issue and help me separate facts from rhetoric.

On the first point, George Ou of ZDNet has a very informative article in which he explains what actually happened, and what it got publicized as —

“Comcast was found to be actively resetting TCP connections on BitTorrent peer-to-peer file trading connections by forging TCP reset packets that appear to be coming from the BitTorrent peers. When most of us hear the term “forged TCP reset packets”, it sounds like Comcast has crossed the line of reasonable network management Comcast is guilty of application discrimination. So when word of this got out, all hell broke loose and the knifes were out for Comcast’s blood.”

Ou says that the TCP reset packets seem to have originated from the host, or “upload” machine because of the way the modem transfer protocol is written. He quotes Richard Bennett, who designed the protocol —

“Cable modems have a crappy upstream protocol. When it wants to send, it sends a request to send packet to the controller, and waits for a reply that gives it a time slot. But the RTS packet is sent in a contention slot, such that any two stations sending RTS in the same cycle will collide, and then nobody gets to transmit. The more data you have queued at the cable modem, the more likely a collision.

The network is physically large, with a long propagation delay relative to the size of the collision window. And when collisions start to happen, they ripple as more and more stations have data queued for transmission. So the only way to make this protocol stable is to actively limit the amount of data queued at the cable modem for upstream delivery, and only way to do that for Torrent is to stifle connections at the TCP level. I’ve tried to scheme up a better way to do this, and there isn’t one.”

Meaning, essentially, that it is the flawed design of the modem itself, which, under certain traffic conditions, makes the return TCP address look “forged”.

So there we have it from the horse’s mouth. Comcast doesn’t specificially block you from using BitTorrent, it simply limits the number of simultaneous uploads you can perform at once, to avoid a possible network meltdown. Thus, “content-based discrimination” is one thing they cannot be accused of in this instance, although the company’s repeated denials, and refusal to explain their traffic management practices did affect their image.

And this plays into the problem that I have with some of the more vocal public interest groups in the Net Neutrality camp - their arguments are sometimes based on perceptions that, technically, don’t have a leg to stand on. And when confronted with a strong techncial argument — as in this case that the network routing was just not sophisticated enough to deal repeated demands for large bandwidth — their stand is weakened. To win the network neutrality argument, each side needs to be on a strong footing vis a vis the nuts and bolts of the internet, and not make far flying assumptions which would only hurt their position.

So what would it take for the “content discrimination” issue to become more transparent, without having to call in the experts? Susan Crawford offers a possible solution, which she calls “Structural separation”, which stipulates a financial separation network providers, and any content they carry over the network.

David Isenberg expands on the concept, saying —
“If, instead, we had a law that said, “Network operators must not have a financial interest in any of the content carried by that network,” we could be assured that any network operator’s network management would be for the sole purpose of running the network. Such a law would keep government out of the network management business. Enforcement would be via financial audit.”

Thus, the network provider would gain nothing out of content or services, because it would own no services, applications or content.

Improved disclosure of network bandwidth capacity and network management practices wouldn’t hurt either.

Posted by Nayanee at 06:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The European Commission today announced it’s plan to come up with a centralized regulatory framework for it’s telecommunications companies, with the goal of restructuring telecom companies by separating the Internet and telephone services into separate divisions.

“I have come to the conclusion that the instrument of functional separation should be added to the remedies tool box of national telecom regulators, to be available for the stubborn cases where other remedies have been tried, but have failed to deliver the desired regulatory outcome,” stated EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media Viviane Reding, in a speech last October 11.

While broadband penetration is fairly high in Europe, many of the bigger telecom companies dominate service because of their ability to bundle Internet services with landline or wireless phone service. The functional separation of the telecom companies would give a leg up to the so-called “alternative access providers”, who, while not offering bundled services, do offer Internet service at lower rates.

The proposal has met with fierce resistance, not only from the big telecom companies, but also from regulators in other member states, including France and Germany,

This should provide an interesting preview to how similar action by the FCC would be viewed within the US!

Posted by Nayanee at 11:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)