In several of our previous podcasts (see episodes 34, 35,and 37), we’ve discussed what we’ve called the “Comcast Kerfuffle,” which was the controversy surrounding the steps Comcast took to manage BitTorrent traffic on its networks. Critics called it a violation of Net neutrality principles while Comcast and others called it sensible network management.

This week we saw a new kerfuffle of sorts develop over the revelation in a Monday front-page Wall Street Journal story that Google had approached major cable and phone companies and supposedly proposed to create a fast lane for its own content. What exactly is it that Google is proposing, and does it mean – as the Wall Street Journal and some others have suggested – that Google is somehow going back on their support for Net neutrality principles and regulation? More importantly, what does it all mean for the future of the Internet, network management, and consumers. That’s what we discussed on the TLF’s latest “Tech Policy Weekly” podcast.

Today’s 30-minute discussion featured two of our regular contributors at the TLF, who both wrote about this issue multiple times this week. Cord Blomquist of the Competitive Enterprise Institute wrote about the issue here and here, and Bret Swanson of the Progress & Freedom Foundation wrote about it here and here.  To help us wade through some of the more technical networking issues in play, we were also joined on the podcast by Richard Bennett, a computer scientist and network engineer guru who blogs at Broadband Politics as well as Circle ID and he also pens occasional columns for The Register.  Also appearing on the show was Adam Marcus, Research Fellow & Senior Technologist at PFF, who wrote a “nuts and bolts” essay full of excellent technical background on edge caching and net neutrality.

You can download the MP3 file here, or use the online player below to start listening to the show right now.

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SAN JOSE, Nov. 7 – This morning I’ve posted two articles on BroadbandCensus.com about the Wireless Communications Association’s conference here.

Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Net, has a very thoughtful post up on the Google Public Policy Blog today asking “What’s a Reasonable Approach for Managing Broadband Networks?” He runs through a variety of theoretical approaches to network load management. There’s much there to ponder, but I just wanted to comment briefly on the very last thing he says in the piece:

Over the past few months, I have been talking with engineers at Comcast about some of these network management issues. I’ve been pleased so far with the tone and substance of these conversations, which have helped me to better understand the underlying motivation and rationale for the network management decisions facing Comcast, and the unique characteristics of cable broadband architecture. And as we said a few weeks ago, their commitment to a protocol-agnostic approach to network management is a step in the right direction.

I found this of great interest because for the last few months I have been wondering: (a) why isn’t there more of that sort of inter- and intra-industry dialogue going on, and (b) what could be done to encourage more of it? With the exception of those folks at the extreme fringe of the Net neutrality movement, most rational people involved in this debate accept the fact that there will be legitimate network management issues that industry must deal with from time to time. So, how can we get people in industry — from all quarters of it — to sit down at a negotiating table and hammer things out voluntarily before calling in the regulators to impose ham-handed, inflexible solutions? What we are talking about here is the need for a technical dispute resolution process that doesn’t involve the FCC. If the anti-Net neutrality regulation crowd (and that includes me!) wants to be taken seriously when they talk about “self-regulatory” solutions, this sort of dispute resolution process becomes essential. And the pro-Net neutrality regulation crowd needs to understand that, even if they ultimately desire some role for the FCC here, regulatory resolutions to technical disputes are notoriously slow and ultimately will always be one step behind the technical dispute du jour.

Therefore, wouldn’t it be nice if, as Cerf suggests above, those parties with a technical dispute about network management had a way of talking things through immediately and before they went to the regulatory equivalent of mutually assured destruction?

All the relevant players in the broadband / Internet sector need to put their heads together and think about how to create a forum or process that can serve as such a technical dispute resolution mechanism. On a smaller scale, Comcast and Bit Torrent did this in a voluntary, bilateral fashion when they sat down to hammer out a collaborative agreement in March. As their press announcement noted:

Comcast Corporation and BitTorrent, Inc. announced today that they will undertake a collaborative effort with one another and with the broader Internet and ISP community to more effectively address issues associated with rich media content and network capacity management. While BitTorrent and Comcast are talking directly, they are also in discussions with other parties to help facilitate a broader dialogue and cooperation across industries.

But we know that countless more technical disputes will arise in the future at every layer of the Internet — not just with Comcast and BitTorrent. Thus, if we are really going to achieve “a broader dialogue and cooperation across industries” then what we really need is the equivalent of a multilateral trade negotiating process or forum to achieve sensible resolutions to complex technical difficulties surround Internet network management.

I am not prepared to say whether a new, formal organization is needed to accomplish this or if existing institutions and individuals (academic, trade associations, etc) might be able to work together to make this happen. For example, and I am just thinking out loud here so don’t quote me on this, what if we had the Internet Society working in conjunction with several major industry trade associations and some respected academic institutions to form some sort of collaborative, dialogue-oriented dispute resolution process? Sort of GATT or WTO for technical Internet dispute resolution.

Certainly that would be preferable to a politicized FCC taking over the show and making all these technical decisions, no? I’d be interested in hearing some input from others.

Here’s a good article by Declan McCullagh on New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s outrageous vendetta against Usenet. The article is good not only because yours truly is quoted.

I’ve been looking, and haven’t found a single advocate from the left or critic of Comcast’s network management practices that has said a word of support for Comcast on this subject. This is where Internet freedom is really in peril – and nothing?

Stuck with limited ISP choices, broadband users are increasingly angry with the growing number of providers that poke around in their customers’ traffic. From resetting Bittorrent sessions to sniffing packets for URLs, more and more providers are wielding their power as the “man in the middle” to monitor and manipulate traffic in unpopular and possibly illegal ways. While these practices can be beneficial, tech-savvy consumers are understandably agitated. Congress is now considering legislation that would outlaw these ISP practices.

Instead of urging lawmakers to enact sweeping new laws that would often do more harm than good, broadband users should look to the recent emergence of commercial secure tunneling services. These services remind us that the marketplace is perfectly capable of resolving skirmishes without government getting involved.

Numerous companies have begun to offer encrypted tunnels using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). These networks have long been used for a variety of reasons, and are popular with network security experts because of how well they protect data from outside snooping. By tunneling traffic through secure links, broadband users can break free from the constraints imposed by ISPs on certain types of traffic. Routing peer to peer applications through these tunnels makes them almost entirely indistinguishable from other types of traffic—even to stateful packet inspection tools like Sandvine that are undeterred by header encryption.

Tunneling traffic via encrypted, remote servers is also one of the toughest targets for ISPs. Many corporate users and university students connect to VPNs for necessary reasons, and there’s no easy way for an ISP to distinguish “legitimate” VPN traffic from the other kind. And with new secure tunneling firms popping up all the time, simply blocking the IP-address ranges of known tunnels is no solution. Absent a VPN Whitelist—highly infeasible given the growing number of VPNs in the wild—ISPs will soon realize that, no matter how much they invest in packet inspection tools like Sandvine and Phorm, informed users will always find a way to stay a step ahead.

Despite being the freest nation on earth, the United States has a spotty track record when it comes to Internet privacy and anonymity. Fortunately, VPN services can be based anywhere on the planet. Data retention laws (like the one pending in the current Congress) have little effect on the privacy of users who tunnel their traffic through a nation that doesn’t force ISPs to retain data. Gleaning useful intelligence from a VPN connection between the user and the exit node is impossible — even if your ISP captures every last byte you transmit, as long as your VPN service doesn’t retain data, government snoops or would-be hackers will be left with nothing but indecipherable garbage.

VPN services typically charge a small monthly fee, but not all of them cost money. Some VPN services only offer PPTP encryption. That’s enough to deter casual snooping, but it can be cracked with some determination. Other services offer more sophisticated IPSec or SSL based encryption that relies on the highly secure AES cipher. All of the world’s supercomputers combined cannot crack data that has been properly encrypted via AES and a strong password. Of course, by using a VPN service, you are placing your trust in the tunneling service rather than your ISP—so verifying the service’s commitment to privacy and reliability is paramount.

Tunneling services can also circumvent region-locking techniques used by content portals like those offered by the major television networks. People living outside the United States often cannot access desired content because of exclusivity agreements with content owners. Portals typically block foreign residents by running a reverse DNS lookup on visitors’ IP addresses, which reveals the user’s country of origin. But offshore VPN services conceal their users’ true location, causing users to appear as if they are located in the country in which the VPN server is based.

Like many other goods and services, VPNs can be used for good or evil. Some of the uses discussed here may even violate laws in certain nations or run astray of terms of service agreements. Despite the potential for misuse, the secure tunnel is a promising tool that will likely grow more popular as ISPs increasingly turn to deep packet inspection for both network management and profit-seeking purposes.