Let’s say you’ve got a satellite with which you want to transmit video programming. And let’s say that, in addition to providing subscribers with live television programming, you want to provide your subscribers with relatively rapid access to a large library of pre-recorded video content. Your satellite doesn’t have enough bandwidth to stream each video to each customer in real time, so you’ve got to figure out a way to get the videos to as many customers as possible as quickly as possible. How would you do that?
Well, since we stipulated that you don’t have enough bandwidth to stream everyone’s videos to them in real time, the receiving devices will need some local storage so they can store the files until the user is ready to view them. You’ll want to transmit more popular items more frequently in order to minimize how long the user will have to wait until his desired program is transmitted. And you’ll want a mechanism for customers to communicate back to the satellite to request transmission of content that’s not on the regular rotation. Less-popular content can be beamed overnight, when the demand on the satellite is less.
And surprise, the preceding paragraph describes patent #5,404,505, which was granted to the Finisar Corporation back in 1995.
Continue reading →
Steven Colbert has discussed the concept of “Wikiality” on his show: that on Wikipedia, reality is whatever the majority wants it to be. We find evidence for this contention on the Wikipedia entry for network neutrality:
The debate has moved into the regulatory and legislative arena in a somewhat unusual way, because those who prefer to leave the status quo unchanged are advocating legislation in the U.S. to formalize elements of “net neutrality.” Those would want to change by introducing “non-neutrality” do not presently want any further legislation.
The two proposed versions of “neutrality” legislation to date would prohibit: (1) the “tiering” of broadband through sale of voice- or video-oriented Quality of Service packages; and (2) content- or service-sensitive blocking or censorship on the part of broadband carriers. These bills have been sponsored by Representatives Markey, Sensenbrenner, et. al., and Senators Snowe, Dorgan, and Wyden. Advocates of continuing with the status quo include content providers such as Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and several prominent social-action non-profits, and media critics such as Robert McChesney.
It’s fun to watch whoever wrote that twist himself into semantic pretzels to portray the advocates of change as defenders of the status quo without saying anything that’s literally untrue. Here’s a less truthy way of saying the same thing: Those who advocate the status quo of a regulation-free Internet oppose new regulation, while those who want to change the status quo are urging Congress to enact new regulations.
EFF highlights a very bad treaty being pushed for ratification in the Senate:
The Convention on Cybercrime is a sweeping treaty that has been waiting in the wings of the Senate for nearly three years. Now the administration is putting pressure on the Senate to ratify it in the next two days. If it does, it would mean the U.S. would enforce not just our own, but the rest of the world’s bad Net laws. Call your Senator now, and ask them to hold its ratification.
The treaty requires that the U.S. government help enforce other countries’ “cybercrime” laws – even if the act being prosecuted is not illegal in the United States. That means that countries that have laws limiting free speech on the Net could oblige the F.B.I. to uncover the identities of anonymous U.S. critics, or monitor their communications on behalf of foreign governments. American ISPs would be obliged to obey other jurisdiction’s requests to log their users’ behavior without due process, or compensation.
Apparently, the treaty is being held up by an anonymous Republican Senator:
Continue reading →
Derek Slater and Tim Armstrong have been having a debate over the merits of agitating for better digital rights management technologies rather than agitating for outright repeal of the DMCA’s anti-circumvention rules. I think Derek’s take on the question is dead on:
I am not a lawyer, but last time I checked, Title 17 is the Copyright Act–it’s meant to encouarge creation and distribution of artistic (and related) works insomuch as it benefits the public. Title 17 is not the Medical Privacy Act, nor the Privacy in Embarassing Pictures And Emotional Distress Act, nor the Confidentiality Agreement Enforcement Act. It’s the Copyright Act, and it shouldn’t be turned into a Christmas tree on which everyone hangs a pet project that they think technical restrictions might achieve.
Tim already knows this, and when he teaches his students about the Lexmark and Skylink cases, I suspect this is roughly his sentiment will be. Why this insight doesn’t apply in Tim’s cited examples, I don’t know.
Continue reading →
Matt Stoller thinks my New York Times op-ed is “just disgraceful.” Why?
Timothy B. Lee comes from the ‘Show-Me Institute’, a fake think tank that defends the teaching of Intelligent Design and is funded by corporate interests and foundations with a right-wing ideological slant. As a 501(c)3, they don’t have to release their donor list, but you can get a sense of who they are from reading the bios on the Board of Directors page.
Ok, so the corporatists dug up a shill from an ideologically oriented corporate funded think tank, had this guy write an Op-Ed rehashing fake arguments about competitiveness and broadband, and weirdly enough, his name sound almost exactly like world-reknowned expert Tim Berners Lee, who takes the opposite position.
For the record, I’ve had the name “Timothy B. Lee” since before Mr. Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web. Of course, that doesn’t rule out the possibility that the vast right-wing conspiracy contacted my parents in
anticipation of the network neutrality debate and convinced them to name me Timothy B. Lee.
Continue reading →
I’ve got a new op-ed over at the New York Times in which I compare today’s Internet regulation debate to the big “network neutrality” debate of the 19th Century: whether the federal government should regulate the railroad industry. As I explain, the pro-regulatory side won that debate, creating the Interstate Commerce Committee. And the results were not good: by the 1920s, the ICC was helping the railroads restrict entry and raise prices. In 1935, as a result of railroad and ICC lobbying, Congress gave the ICC authority over the trucking industry. And the surface transportation industry was uncompetitive for the half-century that followed. As a Ralph Nader report put it in 1970, the commission became “primarily a forum at which transportation interests divide up the national transportation market.”
Space constraints prevented me from elaborating very much on the history of the ICC, but there are a lot of striking parallels between the debate of the 1880s and today’s debate. One of the biggest issues was discriminatory pricing. Smaller farmers and merchants complained that the railroads offered larger shippers discounts that put the little guy at a disadvantage. There were even some arguments that railroad monopolies threatened democracy: the railroads tended to give politicians and prominent business leaders free passes on the trains, and there was even an accusation that a railroad refused to ship newsprint to a newspaper that was critical of the railroads.
Continue reading →
The relentless march of open standards online continues, as AOL effectively abandons its paid, premium offerings in favor of a free, advertising-supported model:
Besides e-mail, AOL will give away its proprietary software for accessing the once-premium offerings, as well as safety and security features such as parental controls.
Millions of subscribers are likely to drop their paid accounts, making the strategy risky for Time Warner and AOL. Subscriptions still account for about 80 percent of AOL’s revenues, contributing to 19 percent of Time Warner’s revenues in the first half of the year.
But AOL has little choice. As of June 30, AOL had 17.7 million U.S. subscribers, a 34 percent drop from its peak of 26.7 million in September 2002. AOL lost 976,000 subscribers in the past quarter alone.
Nick Gillespie notes that he called this trend years ago, in a 2000 article suggesting that the AOL Time Warner merger was nothing to sweat about:
Continue reading →
Prof. Picker has a post analyzing the copyright issues involved in last year’s BNetD case. In a nutshell, Blizzard makes popular games like Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo. They have an online matchmaking service called Battle.net for those games. One of the benefits of Battle.net (from Blizzard’s perspective) is that it checks your CD key and verifies that it’s (1) legitimate and (2) not already in use on Battle.net. This prevents someone from giving a single copy of the CD to 7 friends and then having an 8-way game on Battle.net.
But along comes the BNetD team, which creates server software that mimicks the functionality of Battle.net. BNetD fails to perform the CD key check that Battle.net performs, meaning that those without valid CD keys and those sharing CD keys can log on to a BNetD server. Blizzard sued the creators of the game, arguing that the program was an illegal circumvention device under the DMCA, as well as a violation of the software’s license agreement. Last year, Blizzard prevailed before the Eighth Circuit.
Continue reading →
This is the most embarrassingly clueless critique of network neutrality regulations I’ve seen in months. Music lawyer Chris Castle explains that the real reason that copyleftists like Larry Lessig are pushing network neutrality regulations is to ensure that ISPs don’t discriminate against peer-to-peer file-sharing programs. In addition to being riddled with technical errors (A VPN is not faster than an ordinary Internet connection, and TCP/IP packets aren’t marked with “DNS addresses”), his argument doesn’t even make sense:
The fundamental reason that massive file bartering can continue is that it doesn’t cost users anything more to use their high speed Internet accounts to send an email to their granddaughter as it does their granddaughter to illegally download 5 gigabytes a day of copyrighted materials.
One can easily understand why the Lessig/Fisher cabal supports “net neutrality” given their continued support of massive copyright infringement through “nodding and winking” litigation. However, it is easy to see how Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand could be used to make free riders pay for their use of the Internet for illegal purposes.
Many BitTorrent and p2p connections are excruciatingly slow as it is. Imagine if end users of these products found themselves dumped to the end of the line unless they wanted to pay for higher speed connections.
As far as I know, no network neutrality proposals to date would prohibit bandwidth metering. And they certainly don’t prohibit charging extra for higher-speed connections. I suppose that neutrality regultions could prevent ISPs from singling out P2P packets specifically for discrimination, but it’s not clear why ISPs would want to do that. If P2P applications use more bandwidth than other applications, then charging high-traffic users more would discourage P2P use without running afoul of anti-discrimination rules. And if other applications are equally bandwidth hogs, presumably ISPs would be interested in controlling those too.
Castle also has a weird, sneering attitude toward encryption. Apparently the only reason a user would want to encrypt his traffic is to hide illegal file sharing. It’s not like users ever transmit confidential financial or medical information over the Internet.
I hope Mr. Castle’s understanding of the law is better than his understanding of the Internet.
Incidentally, Specter’s op-ed demonstrates a shocking level of deference to presidential authority that strikes me as wholly inconsistent with our constitutional tradition:
The negotiations with administration officials and the president himself were fierce. The president understandably rejected a statutory mandate to submit his program to FISC, on the grounds that such a mandate could weaken the presidency institutionally by binding his successors. Indeed, such a mandate might not withstand a future president’s contention that it unconstitutionally limited his Article II powers to conduct surveillance without court approval. The president, however, did personally commit to submitting this program for court review should the bill pass. Even without a legal mandate, his sending this program to the FISC would be a powerful precedent to be considered by future presidents.
President Bush’s record of seeking to expand Article II power has been a hallmark of his administration. The president and vice president have vociferously argued that the administration had the authority for the program without any judicial review. Bush’s personal commitment to submit his program to FISC is therefore a major breakthrough.
Specter seems to consider it a great favor for the president to permit Congress and the courts to scrutinize his actions. “Weakening the presidency institutionally” is the whole
point of the Fourth Amendment. We don’t want a president so “strong” that he gets to invade the privacy of Americans without first submitting to court scrutiny.
That last sentence gets the situation precisely backwards: the president is offering to submit his program to FISC only
after Congress concedes that doing so is a matter of presidential discretion. The effect of that would be to ratify the administration’s expansive view of presidential power. Such a concession would weaken Congress and the courts the next time an illegal surveillance program is discovered. And it would further erode the principle that the executive branch needs to get permission from Congress and the courts before it conducts a search, not do as it pleases and then browbeat Congress into ratifying its actions after the fact.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.