Posts Tagged ‘Net Neutrality’

SOPA on a Rope

November 11th, 2011

SOPA-on-a-ropeThe current bill in Congress known as SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) or as it’s known in the Senate, PROTECT IP (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property) is just beginning to get coverage in the non-technical press.  In draft, this was called the E-PARASITE Act (Enforcing and Protecting American Rights Against Sites Intent on Theft and Exploitation Act). Seriously, who names these things?

From the names, it all sounds like goodness right? Theft, exploitation, piracy, who wants that?  If only it were that simple.

The intent of the bill is to crack down on illegal online file sharing.  There’s ample room for debate about how damaging online piracy truly is, and whether or not it makes business sense for content providers to aggressively attack their customers, but that’s a topic for another day.  Even if we accept that online piracy threatens to destroy the music and movie industry (just like VHS tapes and writable CDs did), the proposed bill is absolutely not the way to go about preventing it.

There are lots of articles out there on why this is so.  You can read the bill yourself, or read others’ analyses here, here, or here.  However, let me try and boil down the basics for you.

The Great Firewall of the USA: Enforcement of SOPA will require the creation of a Internet filters by all domestic ISPs to control what sites you are allowed to visit. This may be well intentioned censorship, but it’s still censorship, and it puts the mechanisms in place for less benign intentions. Do we really want to head down that slippery slope?

Online Security: Let’s face it, once the firewall goes up, many of us will find ways around it. This will involve a combination of foreign or rogue DNS servers, proxies, or VPN services. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to believe that once you start getting your Internet delivered through black market servers that your online security will be at greater risk.

No More Safe Harbors:  The current law allows web site owners some protection under the “safe harbor” clause.  That means that if you were to post a comment on this article containing some illegal content, the owner of the content could demand I take it down, and I would be obliged to do so. But if the owner wanted to sue for damages, he couldn’t sue me as the website owner.  Rather, he’d have to come after you as the one who posted it.  Under SOPA, that protection is gone.  If you upload a funny Big Bang Theory clip to Facebook, CBS can sue Mark Zuckerberg for damages. SOPA will undoubtedly result in far fewer sites taking on the risk of letting you post things on them. The web will become a lot less participatory.

Loss of Due Process:  This is perhaps the most egregious implication. Under SOPA, website owners are guilty until proven innocent.  Based only on an accusation of having illegal content on your site, anyone can demand that the ISPs block access to your site, and may further demand that all banks stop doing business with you.  Sure, you can appeal to the court, but that could take months or years to settle. In the meantime, you’re out of business.

As the major backer of SOPA, the entertainment industry is making lots of assurances that the provisions of SOPA would never be used for anything but the most noble of causes.  They are full of it.  These same people have already collaborated with the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to stretch the In Rem Forfeiture clause (allowing for the immediate seizure of property used in the commission of a crime) to include domain name seizures of websites with no warning or due process.  They are wielding this with a broad brush and have repeatedly seized domains eventually found legal by the courts, but by then put out of business.  Oops.

This whole SOPA mess has also created some strange bedfellows.  The tech community and most high tech companies have come out against it.  Along side them are Michele Bachmann and her Tea Party Coalition.  Ironically, the Tea Party and the Techies were on staunchly opposite sides of the Net Neutrality debate, so this is a somewhat uneasy alliance.

On the other side we find the Hollywood studios, music companies, and the organizations like RIAA and the MPAA that lobby for them.  We also find VP Joe Biden and several key Democratic legislators who have historically been supportive of anything Hollywood wants.  To her credit, Hillary Clinton has expressed some concerns about SOPA, and Obama claims to be on the fence.

To that end, Obama is currently taking input on the issue.  If you want to oppose the bill, go to the White House website and sign the online petition.  As of this writing, we are still a few thousand signatures short of the “pay attention to me” threshold.  Yes, you have to create a White House account to sign the thing, but it only takes a minute.

On the other hand, if you think SOPA sounds like a great idea and want to know how to support it, please write a long letter and mail it to your local animal shelter. They are always looking for material to line the bird cages with.

 

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Former Senator Chris Dodd breaks promise not to become a lobbyist

March 2nd, 2011

Chris Dodd Bobblehead

Chris Dodd's ethics bobble with the breeze (Photo by DonkeyHotey on Flickr)

Recently retired Senator from Connecticut Christopher Dodd said upon leaving office he would not seek to become a corporate lobbyist.   But that was two months ago, and times change.  The former five-term Democratic senator announced yesterday he accepted a job as head of the Motion Picture Association of America.

Technically, Dodd is legally barred from becoming a lobbyist for two years after leaving the Senate. However, like so many retired legislators before him, he skirts that rule by not officially being hired as a lobbyist.  Still, as the head of one of the most high profile lobbying groups in the country, it’s a distinction without a difference.

Interim MPAA CEO and president Bob Pisano told Hillicon Valley last month that his organization’s unwavering focus was on increasing the federal government’s efforts to stop online film piracy. Pisano also talks up the importance of COICA and how happy he is that Homeland Security has been seizing domains in violation of the First Amendment and basic due process, even taking down tens of thousands of perfectly innocent sites.

It remains to be seen how or if Dodd’s new million dollar job will change his previously professed positions on related issues. He was on record as a big supporter of Net Neutrality. However, the MPAA has come out against net neutrality, claiming it would hamper its efforts to “fight piracy.” He was also against ISP data retention, which the MPAA has supported (again as a way to fight piracy). On copyright he was somewhat non-committal, but did talk about how fair use rights are important. A position likely to disappear once he takes the role formerly filled by Jack Valenti—the man who once declared that fair use doesn’t exist.

Dodd co-authored the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. This legislation was targeted at improving the accountability and ethics of the banking system.  Too bad Dodd’s own ethics now seem to be bobbling in the breeze.

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Boehner says Net Neutrality is reinstating the Fairness Doctrine

March 1st, 2011

Speaker John Boehner

Boehner ties Net Neutrality to a political agenda

Speaker Boehner addressed several tech points in his speech to the National Association of Religious Broadcasters on Sunday. He railed against Net Neutrality and new FCC regulations that he characterized as a government takeover of the Internet.  He went on to say:

“Now, you know the old saying: ‘If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.’ Well in Washington, it’s more like, ‘If you can’t beat ’em, tax ’em and regulate ’em,” Boehner said in his speech. “So, some members of Congress and the federal bureaucracy are still trying to reinstate – and even expand – the Fairness Doctrine. To them, it’s fair to silence ideas and voices they don’t agree with, and use the tools of government to do it. “

Opposing Net Neutrality has been pretty standard Republican boilerplate.  Much like with the healthcare debate, the GOP prefers that corporations make decisions for consumers rather than the government. The new twist here is the conflation of Net Neutrality with the Fairness Doctrine.

The Fairness Doctrine was introduced in 1949 and required that broadcasters present controversial issues of public importance in a manner that was honest, equitable and balanced.  Reagan overturned the policy by executive order in 1987.

Republicans are apparently afraid the Internet might become a place of fair and balanced treatment of controversial issues.  This is a confounding stance, not to mention that the distributed nature of content creators on the Internet would make such a rule impossible to enforce.  Yet the larger issue is that Net Neutrality has absolutely nothing to do with editorial content.

Net Neutrality simply guarantees that the ISPs who provide the backbone for and access to the Internet cannot preferentially treat one content type over another.  This assures that you have equally speedy access to Fox Nation and the Huffington Post.  It means your access to Netflix won’t be throttled by Time Warner, or that Comcast will cut a deal with Microsoft to make Bing twice as fast as Google.

There is nothing about any proposed or existing Net Neutrality rules that in any way attempts to legislate editorial content on the web.  Nothing.  Tying Net Neutrality to the Fairness Doctrine is either an act of colossal ignorance or a blatant attempt to mislead and confuse voters.

We report, you decide.

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Net neutrality proponent Tim Wu named senior advisor to the FTC

February 9th, 2011

Tim Wu

Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu heads to the FTC

Columbia Law School professor Wu is credited with having coined the term “Net Neutrality.”  He is an outspoken advocate for an Internet free from corporate or government censorship or content restrictions. He starts his position on February 14th where FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz says that he will be “working on issues at the nexus of consumer protection, competition, law, and technology.”

Clearly, Wu will not be focused on net neutrality per se, but as knowledgeable tech savvy advocates for consumers go, this guy is the real deal.  All of which makes his appointment as a senior advisor to the Federal Trade Commission a little surprising given the Obama administration’s tendency to opt instead for industry insiders who advocate for the agenda of big business.

The FCC continues to waffle on issues like Net Neutrality. Meanwhile. Victoria A. Espinel, as Obama’s Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (a position informally known as the copyright czar) is working with Homeland Security to seize domain names of websites without due process.  The government appears repeatedly to treat the Internet more as a threat to corporate America rather than as an asset to its citizens.

However, the FTC is flying a decidedly different flag.  In addition to Wu, the agency also appointed Ed Felton as it’s chief technologist a few months ago.  He’s probably best known for his efforts to expose problems with electronic voting machines, and for his vocal advocacy against DRM (Digital Rights Management) as a way to lock music, movies, and TV shows.

It’s not clear what’s in the water over at the FTC, but let’s hope it finds its way into drinking fountains across Washington D.C.

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Internet Kill-Switch Bill is ill-timed, ill-named, just ill

February 2nd, 2011

Easy Button

The kill-switch that doesn't exist (Photo by Craig Dugas on Flickr)

Sen. Lieberman reintroduced his ‘Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010’ this week. The bill has been widely dubbed the Internet Kill-Switch Bill, and its reemergence unintentionally coincided with Egypt shutting off its own Internet connection.  Egypt is back online today, but debate rages anew over whether or not the President should have the power to shutdown the web. What’s being widely ignored is that Lieberman’s bill doesn’t really provide the President with that power. Rather it broadens the power he already has to make the Internet go dark.

Under the Communications Act of 1934 the President has very broad power to shut off any or all wired or radio communications networks in the event of war or even the threat of war. This would include throttling the Internet.  Lieberman’s bill would broaden the definition of threats to explicitly include cyber-threats, But it’s not at all clear this power doesn’t already exist.

Over the last decade the threat of terrorist acts have widely been accepted politically as existential threats to America.  Clearly, a major attack on our communications networks would be considered an act of terror, and the threat of such an attack would allow the President a great deal of latitude to prevent such an attack, including shutting down parts or all of the network.  Lieberman’s proposal does little to change the scope of executive power in such a situation.

However, the bill’s primary purpose is to create a plan that would force the private providers of critical digital networks to come up with ways of managing their traffic in the event that something bad happens.  Is that a good thing?  Yes, in the sense that any competent network should have plans in place to deal with cyber-attacks.  Yet there are already ample incentives for any private provider to have such plans in place. Lieberman’s proposal would legislate what is already considered standard practice.  While the bill doesn’t obviously do much harm, it doesn’t do any obvious good either.  And it does create additional federal bureaucracy, which would seem ill-advised at a time when both sides are looking for ways to cut administrative expenses.

While Lieberman’s bill doesn’t create an Internet Kill-Switch, the specter of Obama having a big red button on his desk that would sever the web looms large in the minds of conservatives and liberals alike.  Yet this nervousness is ill-founded.  Such a button does not exist.  The mechanisms by which the government would shut off the Internet would be that it would have to coerce or demand the cooperation of private telecommunications providers to cut off their external network connections. The sheer number of companies managing such extra-national networks makes such a prospect considerably larger than Mubarak’s turn down of the three Egyptian ISPs.  It would take days to weeks for the government to effectively kill the American Internet, if it was possible at all—and more than enough time for any particular cyber-attack to do its damage.  Further, the prospect of a President getting widespread ISP cooperation to execute an Egypt-style quelling of popular dissent is even more remote.   The “kill-switch” as a defensive measure is neither practical or effective.

If people are truly concerned about the Internet remaining a free and open means of communication for everyone, they should be supporting true Net Neutrality legislation, not fretting about mythical kill-switches.

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What you likely don’t know about Net Neutrality

January 2nd, 2011

Budding Web Surfer

Net Neutrality: keeping the web free for the next generation (Photo by Ilya Haykinson on Flickr)

A recent Rasmussen poll showed that a mere 20% of us are following the debate on Net Neutrality.  Meanwhile 54% are opposed to the FCC making any Net Neutrality regulations, while 21% were in favor.  A likely explanation is that most Americans don’t really understand what Net Neutrality is.

The FCC recently approved a new slate of so-called Net Neutrality rules.  The new rules ensconced a few tenets of Net Neutrality, but also propped open the door for companies to engage in some very non net neutral business models.  The result being that almost everyone wound up unsatisfied by the result.  Still, the vote came down strictly along party lines which bolstered the perception that Net Neutrality is a liberal vs. conservative issue.  Net Neutrality is often positioned as a government takeover or government regulation of the Internet.  It’s not either of those things, nor is it particularly political in a left vs. right sense.  But those perceptions are driving public opinion nonetheless.

The question is, what is Net Neutrality, independent of any specific proposed policy or rules?  At its core, Net Neutrality is simply freedom of the Internet.  It is a belief that Internet network access is a public resource that should not favor any content over any other.  That as a user of the Internet, you should be entitled to access any site or service with the same pricing and speed from the provider of that connection.

This means that your Internet Service Provider (ISP) cannot charge you more for using Yahoo! than Google.  It cannot provide speedy access to Netflix while throttling Hulu.  It cannot make it prohibitively expensive to do online banking with Citibank, while providing bargains for banking with Chase.  It cannot prohibit you from accessing The Drudge Report because it doesn’t like its political views.  As far as the network is concerned, traffic is traffic, and no preferential treatment shall be given.

The talk of government regulation of the Internet is not really accurate.  It sounds as if the government would be regulating content.  Instead, Net Neutrality proposes that the government regulate ISPs to insure they do not regulate the content of the Internet.  Net Neutrality is about insuring freedom for consumers and making sure ISPs don’t take that away.

Analogies have been made to the power company charging you more to run a TV than a washing machine, or giving you a discount for running Maytag appliances.  Rather, you pay for the kWHs you use, rather than whether you burn them using your PS/3 or your dishwasher.   Net Neutrality is simply ensuring that same agnosticism applies to your ISP.

In fairness, most ISPs have not yet tried to implement service structures that would not be net neutral.  However, there have been a few trial balloons floated, so there is justifiable reason for consumers to be concerned.  This is the primary motivation for trying to get Net Neutrality rules into effect now, before ISPs change to content biased business models.  It wil be much more difficult and much more disruptive to companies to force them to change after the fact rather than putting rules in place up front.

Viewed another way, Net Neutrality is like the Second Amendment, albeit for Internet rights rather than gun rights.  Your right to access the Internet content of your choice shall not be infringed.  This sort of basic freedom should appeal to card-carrying ACLU members as much as Tea Partiers.

So why does anyone oppose Net Neutrality?  Profit.  Being an ISP is a profitable business.  Demand is increasing while costs are decreasing, meaning that profit margins continue to rise.  A fast Internet connection is becoming a near must-have for households.  It’s like a car or a TV.  Most families would not chose to live without it.  So while ISPs are making good money with today’s net neutral business models, they fully recognize there are opportunities to make even more money by shifting to less content neutral pricing.

But wait, shouldn’t the free market sort all this out?  As a consumer, why would you opt for a restrictive ISP over a more open one?  The reason being that the vast majority of America lacks any serious market competition in the ISP space.  Only 4% of the market is served by 3 or more ISPs, while 78% is served by 2 ISPs.  If free markets were operating in the ISP space, you would not expect America to rank 28th in global speed of Internet connections while having comparatively more expensive ISP service.   The markets should have sorted that out by now as well.

The bottom line being that government rules enforcing that ISPs honor Net Neutrality wouldn’t be required if instead government required that ISPs unbundle their services and sell wholesale network access to small ISPs such that true competition existed in the market.  Either method works, and many other countries have successfully implemented the unbundling regulations.  However, American ISPs are understandably opposed to either option, and both options require some level of government intervention.  The alternative is that we simply have to trust that ISPs will be good citizens and not place profit motives over the interests of their customers—and history suggests that the customers rarely end up on the good end of that bargain.

Net Neutrality is not about restricting the Internet or your ability to post or access content on it.  On the contrary, its only goal is to ensure your continued ability to surf without restrictions or penalties.  While some government rules do impose constraints, Net Neutrality is one of those that promotes and ensures freedom.  What could be more American than that?

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USPS vs. Internet: pick a side

November 14th, 2010

USPS v Internet

Which is the more vital part of U.S. infrastructure? (created by Tim)

The venerable U.S. Postal Service announced last Friday that it lost $8.5 billion in the fiscal year that ended in September.  It is on pace to be completely broke by the end of 2011.  It is seeking freedom from onerous requirements that mandate Congressional approval for changes to delivery schedules and routes, closing post offices, and setting rates.

Meanwhile, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), who is set to lead the House committee overseeing postal affairs, is determined to assure the USPS doesn’t require a taxpayer bailout, but is not supportive of helping it either.  Instead he’s urging the post office to consider further cost cuts so that it lives within its revenue.  This leaves the USPS in a bind no private company would have to endure.  The USPS can’t raise its rates, and it can’t cut back its service offerings either.  It doesn’t even have the right to go out of business.

A combination of two outside forces have dealt the USPS dramatic blows to its business model.  Delivery companies like FedEx and UPS together with the adoption of the Internet have significantly eroded the need for and the value provided by the USPS.  While it was an essential and effective part of our national infrastructure at one time, those days are largely gone.

Given the current groundswell of grassroots enthusiasm for private businesses being able to do things more efficiently than the government, it’s inexplicable why Congress is clinging to this anachronistic heavily federally regulated and backed delivery system.

It’s conceivable the argument could be offered that the postal service is a vital part of our communications infrastructure and in our national interest to assure it keeps running.  But if that’s true, it would be impossible to then argue that the Internet should remain under the auspices of private companies, and remain unregulated.

At its core, this is an ideology issue.  Either the government has an obligation over our communications infrastructure or it doesn’t.  If it does, then stop worrying about telephone companies and the post office and pay attention to wireless carriers and Internet service providers.  That is unarguably the core of our national communications network today.  If the government has no such obligation, then set the USPS free.  Let it live or die as a for profit company, or be bought out by one of its competitors.  That is the nature of capitalism.

Republicans are currently on both sides of this issue.  They want the post office alive and well and under the government’s thumb, yet they oppose regulation or nationalization of  ISPs and wireless carriers.  Points which are ideologically at odds with each other.  It’s time to pick a side.

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