It looked like the Federal Communications Commission planned to put some teeth into the concept of net neutrality. Comcast’s potential penalty became a hot topic.

FCC chairman Kevin Martin suggested some punishment for Comcast, along with a side order of ‘quit blocking traffic’ as the Bits Blog noted. That was Thursday afternoon.

24 hours makes a difference in politics, and by Friday afternoon Martin sang a much different tune. Dow Jones said the FCC chairman had no plans to seek a fine against Comcast.

Instead, Comcast will be asked to stop its interference with P2P technologies like BitTorrent, and to advise the FCC if they are still managing traffic to the detriment of certain protocols.

Other FCC commissioners need to agree to this proposal, one that Comcast vowed to fight if that happened. That possibility motivated Martin to jettison the idea of a fine.

The main point of the whole Comcast issue may not be about network traffic control, but ultimately about billing. Time Warner Cable began testing metered Internet access in Beaumont, Texas, and if they find it cuts down on the usage of their network by their heaviest consumers, we won’t be surprised to see it spread quickly to other parts of the US, and other providers.

But faster speeds like those enjoyed in places like Korea and Japan? Nobody seems to be discussing better capacity or swifter service, just more rigid, video-killing control over broadband, and a return to watching a meter while using the Internet.

Comcast sits in a lonely place when it comes to the discussion over net neutrality. The cable company’s ISP service used network controls to hinder the operation of rapid file transfer services like BitTorrent, as was discovered last year.

The practice looks like it will dunk Comcast into hot water with the FCC. Comcast critic Free Press complained to the FCC about Comcast’s work, which the FCC appears ready to agree Comcast ran afoul of open access rules.

“The FCC now appears ready to take action on behalf of consumers,” Free Press general counsel Marvin Ammori said in a statement. “This is an historic test for whether the law will protect the open Internet. If the commission decisively rules against Comcast, it will be a remarkable victory for organized people over organized money.”

Any preliminary celebrating should be tempered with a dose of reality. As the Bits Blog claimed, ISPs use network management tools as Comcast does, with Comcast being unfortunate enough to get caught in a public fashion.

An FCC penalty may bring about a less desirable result than net neutrality advocates necessarily wanted, according to Bits. Comcast and other broadband providers could choose to implement billing based on usage rather than the unlimited access plans being offered today.

Such pricing hasn’t been common for consumers for years, and unlimited access likely spurred greater usage of the Internet, leading to its growth and creation of valuable services. One might even consider an FCC sanction that sends providers into usage billing schemes ends up being a convenient excuse for Comcast and others to jettison unlimited access plans en masse.

The FCC has had a rough start to the New Year. A long simmering issue over Internet traffic-shaping practices by Comcast has bubbled into an FCC investigation.

But Martin and the FCC itself will be investigated as well. The House Energy & Commerce Committee isn’t pleased with the FCC’s relaxing of media ownership rules, nor the process with which Martin has pushed through those corporate-friendly rules.

In December, the FCC voted to allow media companies to own newspapers and broadcast companies in the twenty biggest cities in the US. Reuters cited Martin’s contention that the ruling “may help to forestall the erosion in local news coverage.”

Homogenized ownership of broadcast media has been a fixture in broadcasting for some time. It’s common for one company, like Clear Channel, to own multiple radio stations in a single city. The Senate and the House aren’t happy with the FCC’s ruling.

While the House prepares to grill Martin, the FCC plans to take a long-overdue look at Comcast. In August 2007, Consumerist and other sites noted Comcast interfering with BitTorrent traffic, a move the provider later claimed was to improve overall network performance.

Comcast has long said they do not block traffic, but an AP report from October 2007 proved the company does interfere with torrents. An AP report cited Martin’s commenting at CES 2008, where he confirmed an investigation into the traffic shaping practice.

The issue of net neutrality will accompany that inquiry. By traffic shaping, Comcast gives some traffic priority over other transmissions on its broadband network. If the FCC finds no problems with that traffic shaping, regulations requiring a protocol-agnostic approach to providing service will be needed to ensure a uniform experience for consumers.

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/fcc-at-center-of-net-media-controversy-2008-01/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/eff-strikes-back-against-isp-interference-2007-11 http://www.webpronews.com/eff-strikes-back-against-isp-interference-2007-11#comments Wed, 28 Nov 2007 16:06:26 +0000 WebProNews Staff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=42204 The Electronic Frontier Foundation stepped up its criticism of traffic shaping practices by Comcast and others with a new initiative aimed at broadband customers.

As Mike Masnick at TechDirt points out, that’s a far-sight better than being jailed for it. He writes:

[I]t’s not clear why ISPs are now doing the bidding of the entertainment industry, and why casual, non-commercial file sharing deserves punishment as serious as losing your internet access completely. About the only "good" thing you can say about this new proposal is that at least it doesn’t involve throwing people into jail for casual file sharing.  

In Francophilic Quebec, the entertainment industry is also busy trying to shut down torrents. Their main target, because it was the only one that provided a name and address, is QuebecTorrent.

The legal departments of some of the largest players in the industry  — Sony BMG Music Canada, Universal Music Canada and EMI Group Canada – are suing Quebec Torrent and are seeking a court injunction to shut down the site. P2P fans fear such a court-approved action will provide the necessary legal precedent for the recording industry to shut other Canadian sites down as well.

But, as often is the case, the recording industry is casting a rather wide net. QuebecTorrent complains that the plaintiffs’ "vision of what constitutes a Peer to Peer website is rather limited. They present Peer to Peer and QuebecTorrent solely as pirates that deliberately infringe upon copyrights and are harmful to the music industry."

And finally, back in the US, entertainment and Internet mogul Mark Cuban, who ironically has invested in P2P companies in the past, is calling for the "quick death" of P2P via a tiered Internet service.

Taking the traditional telco and cable stance against Internet "freeloaders," Cuban called for cable companies to "charge a premium to those users who want to act as a seed and relay for P2P traffic." Doing so, he argues, will speed up cable connections.

Ryan Paul at Ars Technica disagrees:

[W]hat, exactly, is wrong with users saturating their connections? They are, after all, paying for that connectivity, and most ISPs are keen to market their higher-cost, higher-speed services. Dictating how bandwidth can be used will not make bandwidth any faster or cheaper, nor will attempting to play favorites with what kind of Internet traffic is legit or not.

But all three of these examples raise very important questions as to the amount of power we’re willing to grant ISPs to monitor what we do on the Internet and to report to "governing" authorities.

By "governing" authorities, I mean every multi-billion dollar corporation actually in charge of running things, not the band of rats in government now. Just ask Trent Lott and Dennis Hastert. They know how it works.

The more-bandwidth argument has been made most convincingly (read: most unemotionally) by British Telecommunications, when the company’s CTO Matt Beal opined that with enough bandwidth, there would be no need for traffic shaping, or prioritizing traffic, a goal that is exactly what has gotten the pro-Net Neutrality movement up in arms.

Let me put that simpler: Increase bandwidth capacity and the argument that traffic prioritization is necessary is moot.

With that in mind, it seems rather convenient that three of the five authors of a study comparing the costs of "differentiated" and "undifferentiated" networks are employed by AT&T.

This type of thing isn’t rare, companies commission studies all the time. Just when everybody was down on AOL’s enlistment of Goodmail’s services, Time Inc. released a study about the benefits of CertifiedEmail. Last month, Pitney Bowes, a company that bases its business around snail mail, played an interesting numbers game with a survey about email.

And who could forget Senator Ted Stevens’ Verizon-funded Net Neutrality poll disguised to be a poll about TV?

The point is, words and numbers can be put together to say anything you want. But for the remainder of this article, we’ll assume an AT&T-sponsored study on one of the core technical issues of the Net Neutrality debate hasn’t been doctored up.

“The study makes clear that there are substantial additional costs for the extra capacity required to operate networks in which all traffic is treated alike, and carrying traffic that needs to still be assured performance as specified in service level agreements (SLAs),” said principal investigator Shivkumar Kalyanaraman, professor of electrical, computer, and systems engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the institution AT&T made out the check to.

About 60 to 100 percent more costly in terms of extra capacity, according to the press release about the study.

“Clearly, an undifferentiated network in this context is less efficient and more expensive,” said coauthor K.K. Ramakrishnan of AT&T Labs. “We believe understanding the real impacts of the alternative strategies is important as the debate about network architecture unfolds.”

However, TechDirt CEO Mike Masnick, who’s been keeping track of exaggerations on both sides of the issue, notes:

It also doesn’t consider all the costs associated with a non-neutral network.… requiring 60% more bandwidth does not mean 60% additional cost. Furthermore… the cost of bandwidth keeps dropping, so it actually gets cheaper and cheaper over time. However, the cost of labor associated with setting up and maintaining a non-neutral network is likely to increase over time.

And that doesn’t even begin to address the limitless capacity fiber will offer once available everywhere (in the US, most likely 10-15 years later than the rest of the world), which the incumbents will own…

Wikipedia calls traffic shaping “an attempt to control computer network traffic in order to optimize or guarantee performance, low latency, and/or bandwidth.” 

And now that you know that, know this: a major British telecom does not favor traffic shaping.

BT Wholesale’s chief technical officer, Matt Beal, said in an interview with ZDNet UK that he found traffic shaping to be “quite Big Brother-ish.” 

Never mind this penalize-the-user stuff, he said – “It is up to us at the core of the network to make sure there is enough bandwidth for [our services and those of our competitors].”

This statement implies that BT is not trying to pass the figurative buck; equally important is the idea that it is not trying to monopolize anything, and Beal addressed that issue, as well.

“Beal said he did not care who owned the frequencies,” wrote ZDNet UK’s David Meyer. 

And while that was in reference to “the upcoming spectrum auctions,” rather than some existing technology, it’s still a good sign.

In fact, assuming that no one else from BT “clarifies” Beal’s statements within the next few days (that’s corporate-talk for denying something and/or applying damage control), net neutrality in the UK appears to have taken a relatively big step forward.

If BT would care to share its views with its American telecom relatives, we’d be much obliged.