In a counter move, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has released software that helps users determine whether online hiccups they are experiencing are genuine network delays or evidence of deliberate network traffic manipulation.

Commenting on this, EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney Fred von Lohmann said that “Comcast is discriminating among different kinds of Internet traffic based on the protocols being used by its customers. When confronted, Comcast has been evasive and misleading in its responses, so we decided to start gathering the facts ourselves.”

While I completely agree that Comcast has been misleading in it’s practices, and evasive in it’s handling of the matter, the “data discrimination” comment gets into a thornier issue. As I mentioned in an earlier post, data discrimination is the unwelcome byproduct of traffic shaping (which, legally, a company is allowed to do). Applications requiring higher network capacity tend to be the first to be terminated, because they strain the network disproportionately.

Activists in the net neutrality debate already seem confused between data discrimination for traffic-shaping vs. content discrimination, i.e. refusal to carry traffic from content or applications providers; the EFF using the words in this context helps to further muddle the issues.

That said, Verizon recently announced that it would “provide customers the option to use, on its nationwide wireless network, wireless devices, software and applications not offered by the company. Verizon Wireless plans to have this new choice available to customers throughout the country by the end of 2008.”

This is definitely a shift in direction for Verizon…. Makes one wonder about something Ed Felton said about maintaining the threat of regulation, while leaving the issue unresolved – a position which puts the big internet service providers on their guard. And that is perhaps a sufficient condition to maintain net neutrality in the long run.

While West Africa is relatively well connected by undersea cable, the Indian Ocean’s eastern African seabed is the only one in the world without a submarine fiber-optic cable, forcing the region to rely heavily on limited and expensive satellite links. As a result, countries along the coast and in its hinterland have some of the highest communications costs in the world (about 2000 to 3000 times that of developed countries).

“Unlike previous cables that were built on the “closed-club” structure, EASSy is built on a Hybrid SPV Development model. This model will allow smaller operators to participate in the cable consortium at reduced individual entry investments. EASSy also adheres to the main development objectives of “open access”, “non-discriminatory” and “affordable pricing.”“

All good things. So one would think that everyone was happy about this. Apparently not. Ethan Zuckerman (who we read in our first class, sending emails to his buddy in Mongolia, while enlightening us on the intricacies of Internet protocol) writes in his blog that cartel-like behavior among the investors in the undersea cable project will keep broadband services overpriced. From his blog -

“Why’s the connectivity likely to be so expensive? Because EASSy is currently planned to operate financially with the same cartel structure used for the West African SAT-3 cable. While this high-capacity cable connects over a dozen nations with moderate to high bandwidth demands, it’s very sparsely used. Why? Because the owners of the cable - former state-owned telecom companies in Africa and major international telcos - have agreed to fix the prices for bandwidth so high that most African entrepreneurs choose to use expensive, slower satellite connections than pay the extortionate monopoly rents demanded by the SAT-3 owners.

Those of us who hope that the revolution in voice connectivity we’ve seen on the African continent, brought by entrepreneurial cellphone companies, spread to data connectivity can’t help but be frustrated that EASSy is based on such an uncompetitive structure. Telecommunications companies have been suing the SAT-3 consortium for competitive access to their cable; early evidence suggests that the SAT-3 pricing structure is preventing businesses from using the capacity of the cable. Why would EASSy try to replicate the same bad situation?”

This clearly reinforces a point that was made in class - internet connectivity can do wonderful things, but a strong government, infrastructure and transparent regulating bodies are absolutely essential for ensuring that businesses operate in the interests of the customers. This is true not only for the internet, but for all new technologies and services. A very non-libertarian view, no doubt, but that is the truth in much of the underdeveloped world.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

“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.

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!

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.”

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

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.”

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.

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.

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.

The topic under discussion was the forthcoming auction for the 700 MHz frequency space vacated by TV broadcasters next year, which Google wants to bid for. For more on why would Google be interested in bidding for this frequency read here,

Discussion also centered around the FCC adaptation of 2 our of 4 of Google’s proposed recommendations for network neutrality, which, I quote from Robert Cringley’s post are “1) users should be able to download software from anywhere and use it on their communication devices without restriction; 2) users should be able to use any communication device that meets the technical requirements for connecting to the network no matter who made the device; 3) third-party resellers should be able to buy wholesale bandwidth from auction winners, and; 4) other networks should be able to connect to the 700-MHz network.” Cringely feels that Google should stay out of the wireless business for it’s own safety, and given what I am reading about the telecoms’ fierce turf protection, I would generally tend to agree.

One of the discussion attendees, a VP at Verizon, sort of sidestepped the neutrality argument by trying to focus on the choices that the consumers did have… but the overall attitude of the big telcom providers is that laying down the cable gives them the right to collect tolls every which way possible. I don’t believe companies like Google, or even net-neutrality regulations, stand a chance against the Verizons and the Bell companies who wish act as if they run a monopoly.

Instead, I believe, (in a move that sounds counter-intuitive even to me) that we should forget about enforcing net-neutrality, and give the telcoms a run for their money by opening up their backyard to full-fledged competition. This would increase the “last-mile” service options that consumers have; it will give smaller companies the chance to provide specialized services like streaming video or encryption; and even give Google and other content providers freedom to form partnerships if they choose (channeling Christopher Yoo’s arguments). Yes, it would give telcom companies full license to block sites as they want, and manipulate service options — but one gets the sense that they are doing so anyway, and will probably continue to, so long as the competition in the field is limited.

A couple more points will come in the next entry.