Endorse Net Neutrality Now Or Face Big Business Takeover Of The Internet

The push by the big internet broadband access providers (telecoms - dsl & cable companies -cable modems), also called “last mile providers”, for higher 2-tiered rates is back with vengeance, as evidenced in Federal Communications Commission (FCC), hearings touring the country.

The current Internet rates controversy basically centers around end-user fees for multi-tier pricing for video viewing resulting from enormous bandwidth requirements. What seems to be completely missing from this proposed new multi-tiered rate debate - is the large media network organizations such as CBS, Clear Channel Communications, Citadel Broadcasting Corporation, Gannett Co. Inc., Liberty Media Corporation, Knight-Ridder and Fox Broadcasting Company (“Who Owns the Media” recommended link here), among countless others that stream their TV and/or radio broadcasts on to the Internet COMPLETE with advertising embedded/included. And they are lobbying very hard to put these new bandwidth requirement costs onto the backs of the typical Internet viewer (consumer).

The future of the U.S. newspaper industry will be almost entirely dependent on the Internet for survival and the speculation is many future newspapers will be “free” to the consumer and entirely supported by advertisers “streamed” on to the Internet. Large newspaper groups like MediaNews Group (largest), Cox Newspapers, Hearst Corp., and Tribune Company are consolidating resources like advertising and Internet media now in preparation for the digital future of the newspaper industry.

Just how are the “last mile providers” able to get away with what seems
to be the obvious? By keeping the consumer downloading abuse topic the dominant Net Neutrality controversy and by keeping the large media corporation “concept” who is the single most factor largely responsible for the enormous bandwidth requirements- completely out of the multi-tier internet access debate entirely. That’s how!

Are the consumers at fault for viewing the video and causing the network congestion??? Why oh why are NOT these major media networks that are offering the TV programs streamed on to the Internet the focus of this debate. It seems amazing to me that these media companies who are largely responsible for the TV program streaming with advertising embedded and who are responsible for the added network infrastructure costs, have shifted this financial burden onto the viewers with proposed multi-tiered Internet access rates.

I CHALLENGE ANYONE ANYWHERE TO FIND ANYWHERE IN THE MEDIA COVERAGE - THE REAL CONCEPT THAT LARGE MEDIA CORPORATIONS ARE MOSTLY RESPONSIBLE FOR THE EXCESS BANDWIDTH REQUIREMENTS FROM VIDEO STREAMING OF CURRENT/PROPOSED TV AND RADIO PROGRAMS AND THE PROPOSED MULTI-TIERED INTERNET ACCESS FEE STRUCTURES, SUCH AS THE CORPORATIONS ALREADY MENTIONED ABOVE - IN THE NET NEUTRALITY CONTROVERSY!

This proposed and misguided multi-tiered “consumer” fee structure would amount to a selfish and extremely profitable “corporate free ride” for the organizations mostly responsible for the enormous excess bandwidth requirements from video streaming. Even the much quoted “Beyond Network Neutrality” 2006 by Professor Chistopher Yoo, completely misses this important excess bandwidth responsibility observation.

Open Internet vs Closed Internet — A Clash of Cultures

“The iPhone is making AT&T reconsider its approach to data and video”, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said. (Consumer pays additional cost for video streaming including embedded advertising).

The Independent Film and Television Alliance (IFTA) public statement:
“That openness of the Internet is threatened by the power of a small number of broadband providers to discriminate unilaterally against some categories of users or types of traffic or to accord preferential treatment to certain content providers over others, all under the ambiguous claim of “network management.”

Google’s Andrew McLaughlin has said, “it’s more of an FTC issue than an FCC one”.

U.S. Senators Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) stated on July 16, 2007 that “Net Neutrality is crucial to the democracy and economic growth of the United States.”

Bellsouth’s William L. Smith told reporters that he would like the Internet to be turned into a “pay-for-performance marketplace” where his company would be allowed, for example, to charge Yahoo for the right to have its site load faster than Google.

FCC public policy statement, September 23, 2005 - “The availability of the Internet has had a profound impact on American life. This network of networks has fundamentally changed the way we communicate”.

Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg says that web applications (like search engines, online video, VoIP telephone) need to “share the cost” of broadband - broadband that’s already been paid for by the consumer. “We have to make sure that the application providers don’t sit on our network and chew up bandwidth. We need to pay for the pipe.”

Future of Music Coalition (FMC), states “A tiered system would be especially problematic for the music community because the open Internet has fueled a music revolution. Small and independent musicians now have the type of access to fans that was once only open to the largest and most well financed artists…If telecoms have their way, this golden age of music could come to an end. They will replace the Internet’s level playing field with a system that will once again make money the driving force behind exposure”.

HDnet owner Mark Cuban states that “we need multiple tiers of service on the Internet. … I want the telcos and the cable companies …to work out a way to exchange traffic at multiple quality of service levels.” Cuban eludes to his exclusive opportunity to buy off other Internet providers to ensure that HDnet’s video web content works faster and better than video on the other sites.

Comcast’s David Cohen says “network neutrality is nothing more than a solution in search of a problem.”

Virgin Media CEO Neil Berkett, stated in an interview “this net neutrality thing is a load of b****cks”, and revealed that Virgin is already in talks with unnamed content providers about paying to have their content delivered faster than others.

“We need to be conservative in this debate and preserve what has worked in driving this economy,” Stanford law Professor Lawrence Lessig said. “And what has worked is a neutral network.”

Independent Film & Television Alliance president Jean Prewitt has stated
“We must not allow a small group of companies to engineer the Internet by reference only to their own financial interests”.

Steve Peterman, co-creator and executive producer of the popular TV series Hannah Montana, spoke on behalf of the Writers Guild of America stated “Net neutrality laws will ensure a diversity of new content can surface without interference from big-media gate keepers.”

Motion Picture Association of America CEO Dan Glickman, blasted potential government interference with the Internet, referring to Net neutrality as “a clever name” but also a practice that would interfere with broadband providers’ efforts to curb movie piracy.

Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T stated “The surge in online content is at the center of the most dramatic changes affecting the Internet today,” he said. “In three years’ time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today.”

Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has said “Recent attempts in the US to try to charge for different levels of online access web were not “part of the internet model,” and has warned that if the US decided to go ahead with a two-tier internet, the network would enter “a dark period… What’s very important from my point of view is that there is one web.”

“Thanks to Wikipedia, you can choose between five definitions of Neutrality,” states telecom lawyer Rhys Williams of Bird and Bird.

Caroline Fredrickson of the ACLU stated “at stake is whether we should allow a handful of giant corporations to stifle free expression on the Web for their own gain.”

Comcast, ATT, Qwest, Time-Warner and other broadband gate keepers are currently allowed to discriminate against video content delivered by the BitTorrents of the Internet world and strengthens enormously the competitive position of Big Media’s new Hulu.com as the leading and “safe” web distribution method for video.

Internet access providers say any regulation will impede U.S. competitiveness by stifling innovation and hurt consumers who benefit from network management practices they insist are “reasonable and nondiscriminatory.”

These same large media companies profits would be excessively enormous if they were NOT held accountable for the excess bandwidth necessary for these Internet streamed TV shows to be viewed, as these same companies make money from advertising that is broadcast with these shows - just like the current TV business model. The consumer potentially could face double or triple Internet access costs above what they are paying now in May 2008. Internet access bills in excess of $100.00 would be common and do more to create a intellectual and educational divide than any other single factor in the United States.

The problem that some cable operators are trying to deal with is that a very small handful of users who are heavy down loaders can sometimes impose significant delays on other network users because of the way cable high-speed networks work. Comcast estimates that only .01 percent of its 11.5 million users fall into this category.

P2P or Peer-to-Peer file sharing has been held largely responsible for the Internet bandwidth abuse accusations by the “last mile providers”, rightly or wrongly. BitTorrent is a popular protocol designed for transferring files over a Gnutella style network. It is peer-to-peer in nature, as users connect to each other directly to send and receive portions of the file. However, there is a central server (called a tracker) which coordinates the action of all such peers. The tracker only manages connections, it does not have any knowledge of the contents of the files being distributed. When you download a file using BitTorrent, you’re connecting to several peers who are distributing chunks of the file you’re downloading.

In order to send data back and forth, you and your peers exchange IP addresses. (IP addresses are like mailing addresses for sending data over the vastness of the internet.) When you’re downloading copyrighted material, sometimes disingenuous organizations will join in the download and log your information, like your home IP address. Once they have your address, they can find out who your ISP is and contact them to complain about copyright-infringing activity. Proxies (PeerGuardian2 & BTGuard), have suddenly appeared for BitTorrent users to counter the IP eavesdropping issues. The cat and mouse game continues.

Currently, the most popular system for sharing files is a peer-to-peer network called Gnutella, or the Gnutella network. There are two HUGE differences between Gnutella and the old Napster style network architecture:
There is no central database that knows all of the files available on the Gnutella network. Instead, all of the machines on the network tell each other about available files using a distributed query approach.
There are many different client applications available to access the Gnutella network.

There are also two main similarities between Gnutella and the old Napster-
users place the files they want to share on their hard disks and make them available to everyone else for downloading in peer-to-peer fashion.
Users run a piece of Gnutella software to connect to the Gnutella network. At its peak, Napster was perhaps the most popular Web site ever created. In less than a year, it went from zero to 60 million visitors per month. Then it was shut down by a court order because of copyright violations, and wouldn’t relaunch until 2003 as a legal music-download site. When the courts decided that Napster was promoting copyright infringement due to it’s network architecture, it was very easy for a court order to shut the site down. The central database for downloadable software, movies or music was Napster’s Achilles’ heel.

Is Comcast discriminating “Throttling” against BitTorrent?

The Associated Press (AP) has reported that the results of an investigation it conducted on Comcast’s “traffic shaping” efforts as related to BitTorrent.

The bottom line, if the AP is correct, is that Comcast interferes with packets coming from both ends of a BitTorrent communication. Comcast allegedly inserts messages pretending to be one or the other end requesting that the transmission be reset. Susan Crawford has a technical explanation on her blog. Though Comcast was the first to make headlines with its anti-P2P policy, a bunch of other ISPs in the U.S. and elsewhere are throttling BitTorrent traffic as well.

But, Comcast users found an friend indeed to counter efforts to regulate the Comcast network when a peer-to-peer platform provider released a tool to help users track possible traffic manipulation by Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Vuze’s Aureus, a file sharing platform based on BitTorrent file-sharing technology, can download a free plug-in that checks Internet communications every 10 minutes. It assesses the number of attempted communications versus those interrupted by a reset packet, a tool that breaks connections with computers attempting downloads. As the time of this article, Vista has so far presented a challenge for these proxies. XP and Vista imposes a limit on the number of half-open TCP/IP connections. Patching this to a greater number can significantly increase your download speeds through P2P programs & web browsing (as well as PeerGuardian).

It’s pretty easy to tell if your ISP is one of the bad guys — you can view and try the five tests that will do it for you here .

According to Michael Geist, professor with Ottawa-based Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC), the plug-in is “certainly a positive development” in preventing the practice of traffic shaping, however, it will take much more to “put a dent” in the net neutrality issue.

As outrageous as it may seem, Comcast has an on-again/off-again, deny-everything approach to filtering BitTorrent, repeatedly changing its story about whether, and how much, and why, it is filtering BitTorrent connections that its customers initiate

For more absurdity - US colleges and their alumni may be offered the right to P2P file-sharing under one of the most radical copyright reforms in a hundred years, The Register has learned.

The amnesty would be part of a “covenant not to sue”, covered by a collective license that offers the right to exchange major label repertory over a participating college’s campus network. Rights holders would be compensated from a pot of money drawn from students’ tuition fees.

However, the proposals, which are still at the planning stage, have already drawn concern from publishers and smaller labels.

The plan is the brainchild of copyright reform advocate and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Advisory Board member Jim Griffin, and has been the music business’ worst-kept secrets. Warner Music Group hired Griffin to head up the initiative.

The 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty exempts ISPs from liability for hosting customer files that infringe copyright, and all around the world, and the individuals behind the curtain in the land of OZ of the telecoms industry have maintained the status quo. So why are ISPs then now lining up to enforce the network throttling and traffic shaping measures voluntarily? The interests of cash rich giant entertainment companies and giant phone companies in which they are in bed with.

EU votes to protect file sharing

Plans to cut off internet access to people accused of file sharing have a much bigger barrier now, after the EU voted to protect the rights of internet users.
A so-called ‘three strikes and you’re out’ plan, which is planned in France and proposed in the UK by the British Phonographic Institute (BPI), will now be much easier to challenge in the courts after a narrow vote in the European parliament which states that such bans conflicted with “civil liberties and human rights”. The amended bill squeaked through, 314 in favor to 297 against, against a background of heavy lobbying from both sides.

Bush Administration Restates Position on Proposed Internet Traffic Policing Rules

The Justice Department (DOJ), on Thursday said Internet service providers should be allowed to charge a fee for priority Web traffic.

The agency told the Federal Communications Commission, which is reviewing high-speed Internet practices, that it is opposed to “Net neutrality,” the principle that all Internet sites should be equally accessible to any Web user.

OMG - The Justice Department said “imposing a Net neutrality regulation could hamper development of the Internet and prevent service providers from upgrading or expanding their networks”. It could also shift the “entire burden of implementing costly network expansions and improvements onto consumers,” the agency said in its filing.

Barack Obama & Net Neutrality

Barack Obama made a promise Monday during an MTV sponsored town hall.
Obama is a “strong supporter for net neutrality,” he said in response to a question submitted by a member of MoveOn.org.

“What you’ve been seeing is some lobbying that says the servers and various portals … should be able to gate keepers and charge different rates to different Web sites and webcasts,” Obama said.

Preferred service would allow you “much better quality from the Fox News site while you’d be getting rotten service from some mom and pop site,” he said. “And that I think destroys some of the best things about the Internet, which is there is this incredible equality there.”

Obama speculated that Internet giants like Facebook, MySpace and Google might never have gotten off the ground had they not had the “level playing field” of the Internet.

“I want to maintain that basic principle” of online equality, he said, and pledged to appoint FCC commissioners who hold the same values.

Traditional news is suffering from a “lack of credibility if people fee