DISQUS

Today, I tried to "tune in" to the FCC's Webcast to watch the circus. But even though the machine was connected directly to my ISP's backbone and was unthrottled, I couldn't get the stream to work. RealPlayer (an application I don't like much anyway, because it's spyware) kept on saying, "Communicating..." but never showed me more than a still snapshot of the proceedings. And there was no audio.

I suspect that this was due to a lack of reasonable network management by the FCC as it streamed the meeting....

Several factors other than the r-squared law come into play when you send a wireless signal. The two most important are as follows. Firstly, there's atmospheric attenuation; the air absorbs some of the signal. Secondly, there's interference. The farther you are from the transmitter, the more noise your antenna will pick up trying to receive the signal from it. These, plus some other technical factors, can be compensated for by using an exponent larger than 2. A good rule of thumb for microwave transmission is to use an exponent of 3.5.

A bunch of activity in the docket during the past few days.

Topolski, who seems now to be in the employ of the lobbying group Free Press (Gee, I wish I was a big money lobbyist with the cash to hire just one person, let alone dozens, to lobby in DC -- but instead I'm doing something productive with my life), has fired back, with a response that comes across as rather petulant and whiny, at http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/retrieve.cgi....

The Nation Cable & Telecommunications Association (a cable providers' industry group) has filed a very good comment noting that every top tier university in the United States restricts or filters P2P; see http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/retrieve.cgi.... (And thank Heaven that the schools do it; research would grind to a halt if they did not.)

Free Press lawyer Marvin Ammori and MAP lawyer Harold Feld met with Kevin Martin's office and encouraged the FCC to stick it to Comcast.. (Gee, where do these two corporations -- actually, they're three corporations, because Free Press is composed of two corporations as a way of circumventing the tax code -- get the money for all of these lawyers? We small ISPs, as legitimate businesses with budgets, can't afford them.) See http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/retrieve.cgi....

MediaCom points out that its own AUP also prohibits P2P and the operation of servers, and that this is appropriate and good for quality of service. See http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/retrieve.cgi...

Ammori visited with Commissioner Copps' office, undoubtedly providing unsolicited advice on how to strangle Comcast. See http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/retrieve.cgi....

The CWA chimes in to support Free Press, demonstrating that the entire issue is becoming polarized along party lines: Democrats and unions on one side, Republicans (except for Kevin Martin?) and corporations on the other. And the actual small ISPs like me who can provide competition? I don't get to speak to the Commissioners; I'm lucky if I can get a few minutes with their aides. See http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/retrieve.cgi....

A law firm hired by Comcast fires back with a brief refuting the recent submissions by the lobbying lawyers of MAP and Free Press. See http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/retrieve.cgi...

And so it goes. All that money flying about, and no one considering the actual issue of what's best for citizens. Well, about all I can do is go out and climb onto another rooftop (I'm installing for another rural resident this afternoon whom we've just freed from having to use dialup.) If the FCC won't let me and people like me make a difference (and if they regulate us, we won't be able to), they're hurting our country.

By the way, I was gratified today to see one single submission in the docket that wasn't from a lawyer, a paid lobbyint, or the Free Press astroturf "spam generator." It's from the host of this blog, Richard Bennett, at http://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/prod/ecfs/retrieve.cgi...

Alas, this is a victory AGAINST the Internet rather than FOR the Internet. The lobbyists who prompted this decision lied, and lied, and lied again…. The truth is that Comcast never censored the Internet one bit (not even the site of the lobbyists, who were slandering it) and was preserving quality of service in the face of attempted bandwidth hogging. Big corporations are often evil, but in this case Comcast was doing The Right Thing and deserved praise, not a penalty. (We need to encourage them when they do that, so that it happens more often.)

This decision is particularly troubling because it lets the nose of the regulatory camel into the Internet’s big tent. If you can tell ISPs that they can’t manage bandwidth, next you’ll be telling them what content to carry and not to carry. In fact, the FCC is already floating a proposal for censored public Internet. That’s the last thing we need.

Oh, and Free Press is continuing to censor postings I've made to its blog. So much for free, open media and political debate!

Adam, as a small businessperson directly affected by the ruling, I have less occasion to be sanguine or congratulatory. Free Press lied, and lied, and then lied again to obtain it. They ran an "astroturf" campaign (they spent $700,000 on their Internet agenda in 2007 alone) to deceive the public, the media, and government officials, and it is going to hurt free enterprise, small business, entrepreneurship, and broadband deployment.

I was one of the very few independent ISPs who spoke up in this matter. Most of my colleagues failed to recognize how much damage an adverse decision could do, or told me they were "too busy" fighting off anticompetitive practices by the telephone and cable companies. They trusted government to do the right thing, not realizing how much harm it could do or how likely it was, under the circumstances, to do the wrong thing. They are only now becoming aware of what this decision bodes.

At this juncture, no one knows the precise content of the FCC ruling. However, if (as is speculated) it attempts to turn a policy statement that was previously declared to be "nonbinding" into rules without the Commmission's normal rulemaking process, it will be arbitrary and capricious and a violation of due process -- and will justly be seen by the courts in this way. But in the meantime, capital for broadband deployment will dry up due to the uncertainty, and innovation and competition could well be extinguished. Because Commissioner Michael Copps has stated his intent to continue this pattern of arbitrary and capricious behavior, and will likely do so if the Democratic party gains more power in the fall election, we must encourage Comcast to fight the FCC's ruling. Given the recent decision in CBS v. Comcast, it is almost an open-and-shut case.

The statutory policy ays that the market for broadband services should be "unfettered by Federal and State regulation." Powell's policy statement (though it is nonbinding) would regulate ISPs' terms of service and thus contradicts the statute.

Comcast should give a big bonus to the lawyer who wrote that document. It's the best they've ever published -- clear, concise, backed up by good citations and references, and free of the "attitude" that was present in some of the others. Will the FCC (particularly Commissioner Adelstein, who is surely the "swing" vote) listen? We can only hope. A ruling against Comcast would harm every broadband provider, but especially the smaller ones and the ones that are breaking new ground by covering previously unserved areas.

Actually, the lawyers from Comcast have completely refuted Harold Feld's twisted and tenuous legal arguments. See

http://tinyurl.com/6y83yn

Comcast has also published a truly excellent filing exploding -- once again -- the falsehoods which Free Press has promugated about its network management practices. That one's at

http://tinyurl.com/695arh

and is probably the best thing it's written to date. (It's a shame that Comcast is finally waking up and making good filings only at the last minute.)

P.S. -- Did the "wardrobe malfunction team" specify that they would NOT rip off their clothes? Yes, I know that for many viewers this was a bug, but for most of us -- who have seen human bodies before and are not shocked by them -- it was just mildly amusing to see them act out the lyrics.

In that case, we're in violent agreement. ;-)

By the way, you are absolutely right that Free Press "flooded the FCC with junk comments." The spam makes it extremely difficult to find the entries in the record which are not carbon copies created by Free Press' "astroturf" page.

What's more, I caught the names of a couple of local folks in the record and asked them why they'd signed on. They all said things like, "We can't let Comcast shut down the Internet!" and "Comcast is censoring the Internet!" Of course, Comcast is doing neither, and when I explained what was really happening -- and that the regulation Free Press is advocating would put me and other rural ISPs out of business -- they were sorry they'd signed on.

Sandvine might have the capability to work to spec for a very large order, but as I understand it this was their stock product.

...Oh, and they certainly didn't know that there would be an "astroturf uproar" about a half-second glimpse of a breast (covered by the equivalent of a pastie).

CBS knew that Timberlake and Jackson were going to perform a suggestive dance. They just didn't know the details.

Come to think of it, the "independent contractor" point also applies to Comcast. Comcast used an appliance manufactured by Sandvine. Is Comcast liable if the FCC does not like the way the appliances were programmed by Sandvine?

Lessig isn't a Svengali who controls Free Press through Tim Wu. Lessig himself is listed as being on the Free Press Board of Directors. (See their Web site.) Nor does he control Kevin Martin, who certainly has the ability to think for himself.

Chairman Martin is obviously weighing pressure from Congresscritters (who, in a recent hearing, badgered him to admit that he needed legislative "assistance" to deal with Comcast's "evil" behavior), the opinions of his staff (staffers in DC have tremendous influence), and the opinions of his fellow Commissioners as well as his own ideas.

We can hope, at least, that Chairman Martin will not be influenced by inside-the-Beltway lobbyists, such as Free Press (which, according to its own Forms 990, spent more than $700,000 in 2007 alone on its various Internet agendas. (This includes their "Save the Internet" misinformation and astroturf campaign. I've spoken to quite a few people who used Free Press' "form letter machine" to send boilerplate comments to the FCC, and so far not one of them has known what Free Press' "network neutrality" agenda actually entails. They just responded to the group's warnings of unspecified "evil," assuming that since Comcast is a big corporation, it must be in the wrong.)

Since Free Press has convinced a few credulous lawmakers, and/or their staffers, that ISPs are acting in "evil" ways and that something must be done, it is the responsibility of the FCC as an expert agency to expose the misinformation and set the record straight. This is the best thing that Chairman Martin can do at this juncture.

Richard, thank you for citing my letter above. Ironically, I have already drafted a list of principles that could serve as the starting point for a set of rules such as the one you propose above -- and which include all of the points you've mentioned. See http://www.brettglass.com/principles.pdf for the document.

Unfortunately, P2P can never be as efficient as a simple, direct download -- which in turn can never be one millionth as efficient as a broadcast medium such as the airwaves. There is only one thing it's good at: hiding the source of pirated content. Which is why it was invented....

Not only is "deep packet inspection" a "scary" name -- it is a misleading one. Packets on the Internet are one-dimensional; they have no "depth." And one does not need to "dig deeper" to see any part of the packet; it's all of a piece. While the alarmists who -- for various selfish reasons -- claim that packets are like letters in envelopes, in fact they are more like postcards. The addressing information (which all routers must see) and the header information (which must be altered at each hop the packet takes) is no more visible than the payload, or data. Any device that can see one can see the rest.

It's ironic, too, that Google would be let off the hook when it not only scans packets but parses your e-mail looking for keywords that will be used to select advertising. If anything is invasive, this practice is; checking the packets to see if they are VoIP and prioritizing them appropriately is nothing by comparison.

I'm just hoping that Chairman Martin has the moxie to stand up to the moneied inside-the-Beltway lobbyists (such as Free Press, whose agenda would hurt the public interest) and do what's best for his actual constituency: the citizens of the United States. Do they need to be protected against anticompetitive actions by the telcos, cable companies, and backbone providers? Absolutely. In the absence of such activity, do they need the Internet to be micromanaged? Absolutely not. The only lynching here should be of the bogus lobbyists and their astroturfers.

By the way, one of the most disingenuous labels I've seen yet is the DCIA's characterization of P2P as "distributed computing." P2P nodes do no computing except a small amount to figure out how to redistribute data VERBATIM, with no processing whatsoever! And perhaps they invest a bit to see just how thoroughly they can saturate the pipes and how effectively they can rob bandwidth from more important uses.

Richard: Actually, it pays to "warehouse" it briefly even when it goes to a few people. When we send e-mail, for example, an upstream server "warehouses" the data long enough to distribute the copies to the individual recipients. It also protects against spam. (We all know what "any to any" connectivity did to the medium of e-mail until we got sensible and insisted that users transmit their mail through servers. If we hadn't done that, e-mail would already be completely useless.)

Scott: The fact is that a server across the country is almost certain to be "closer," network-wise, to someone on a different ISP in Texas than you are. And if you are only sending a few copies of something to a relative (Interesting how often P2Pers claim that this is what they're doing!), the impact of one file traveling a few extra miles is negligible compared to the impact of P2P. In fact, without the congestion caused by P2P, it'll get through a lot faster locally.

As for the location of the "middle": it consists of major Internet hubs, peering points, co-location centers, and backbone facilities. The Palo Alto Internet Exchange, located in an unassuming former telephone building on Ramona Street in downtown Palo Alto, California, is probably the most important of these.

Alas, you cannot remove scarcity so long as you have an infinite (or nearly so) scarcity-creating mechanism: P2P. So long as content is free (even if it's free because it's pirated), people will download as much of it as they can. (Why not? There's zero marginal cost.) What's more, even if someone has his or her fill of free content, that person's computer will continue to saturate the pipes by sending it to others.If there's no penalty for doing that, more and more people will do it until any pipe is saturated. We have seen this in Japan, where 100 Mbps FTTH has not created a dent in resource exhaustion due to P2P.

In short, the problem is not any inherent scarcity but rather an artificially created one -- created by a mechanism that will always outpace the expansion of facilities.

To be fair to Chairman Martin, we do not know yet what his proposed order said, or what modifications the other Commissioners have suggested. Just because Free Press, under its alias "Save the Internet", writes, "FCC hammers Comcast," this does not necessarily mean that is it what the FCC will really do. I certainly hope it doesn't, because even a lighthanded swat at a huge corporation like Comcast could be a huge blow to smaller and independent ISPs, depending upon the wording of the ruling. If the FCC is truly committed to rural broadband deployment and consumer choice, it wouldn't want to harm them. (It has already nearly destroyed about half by denying them any opportunity to gain access to licensed spectrum.)

It would be very foolish of the FCC to turn Michael Powell's raw and naive policy idea about allowing users to run the "applications of their choice" into a de facto rule without going through a public rule making process that could refine the language. Think about it: an "application" (a computer program) encodes behavior. And anyone at all can write one. So, insisting that anyone be able to run an application means that anyone can behave any way that he or she wants to -- no matter how destructively -- on the Internet. So, this requirement essentially means that no network provider can have an enforceable Acceptable Use Policy or Terms of Service. This is a recipe for disaster....

Any content that originates at the edge can (and should be) sent to the middle for widespread distribution. It costs far too much, and involves too much latency and other overhead, to send it from the edge repeatedly.

Richard, I do not think that the telcos -- which are [your company's] largest customers -- really care whether Google is the king of search or not. Yes, they could conceivably have been Google's competitors, but they've decided to sit that dance out. Nor do they really want their consumers to be using large amounts of bandwidth even if it IS low priority, because it still costs. And because, if history is any guide, many users won't accept the idea that the applications are low priority, will get impatient with them (because they want absolutely EVERYTHING to be instant), and want them to be high priority.

In any event, the bottom line is that shifting servers to the edge of the network is always a bad idea. It's not any more or less "democratic," because you can always feed the raw data to a server from the edge. But it doesn't make sense to distribute from the edges.