Archive for the ‘Net Neutrality’ Category
As noted earlier, Librarything is a handy place to post books and an example of new media working together with, rather than competing with, old media. Which is why I am rather frustrated that wordpress is doing some kind of censoring of Librarything widgets in the borders of blogs hosted on wordpress.com. Why do they do that?
Chris Castle has a long rant about Comcast’s blocking the Bit Torrent protocol, or to be more precise he has a long rant about the many who are criticizing Comcast; it seems he is a little upset that many have objections to Comcast’s actions, and that a consensus exists that committing fraud in the name of some secret agenda might actually be *wrong.* Corporate misbehavior is doing much to further the cause of net neutrality; one prominent commentator has changed his mind and come out in favor of some form of net neutrality, as pointed out over at Freedom to Tinker.
Chris never mentions that Comcast lied to its own customers in its FAQS and thereby committed fraud. They also interfered with their subscriber’s freedom of association. Those are minor sins, or perhaps even virtues, in Chris’s book. First, he starts out with some generalizations, and is so mad he gets his words all mixed up, which was my clue that this was really some kind of hate speech, not rational argument:
My general thesis there is that at a high level of abstraction (a) there are two essentially classes of traffic on the Internet, one legal and one illegal, and (b) if an ISP is not going to have the spine to shut off illegal file bartering on its network, the least they could do is make it very, very unpleasant for the illegal file bartering and substantially illegal social networking systems to operate.
Here we have an insatiable demand for simplicity: there can apparently be only two categories of anything, and the idea of a nuance like ‘legal file sharing’ or ‘immoral disruption of networking protocols’ can’t even begin to enter into the debate.
The use of an adverb as a adjective is unique, though: “there are two essentially classes” beats even some of W’s hilarious mis-speaks.
Then, there is the sweeping accusation that social networking systems are “substantially illegal” which he never explains. But he doesn’t have to: this is anti-net neutrality hate speech, and he gets his thoughts as right as his grammar, and his logic as twisted as his emotions.
But this speech has plenty of antecedents, particularly over at IP Central, which seems to be about the only place that actually likes Chris Castle’s writing. He goes on:
Here we have Comcast’s own statement regarding Bit Torrent:
And here we have observation by Ernesto over at Torrentfreak:
Comcast Throttles BitTorrent Traffic, Seeding Impossible
Written by Ernesto on August 17, 2007
Over the past weeks more and more Comcast users started to notice that their BitTorrent transfers were cut off. Most users report a significant decrease in download speeds, and even worse, they are unable to seed their downloads. A nightmare for people who want to keep up a positive ratio at private trackers and for the speed of BitTorrent transfers in general.
Now there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth about this all over the place. Some think that what Comcast did was wrong, but don’t think that the solution is to legislate net neutrality. Others, and I would say this seems to be the majority opinion, seem to think net neutrality case has been strengthened here. (I am pretty much in that camp) Ed Felten seems to agree, to a point, but because he thinks actually enacting net neutrality into would be very difficult, he doesn’t advocate that.
There are even a few folks who think what Comcast is doing is perfectly OK, although those people don’t explain why Comcast lied about it, or try to justify their continued evasiveness on this issue. Market forces seem to me to be part of the answer, but due to the very limited choices, many can not vote with their pocket books. The market is not functioning, as there are just one or two suppliers almost everywhere. And Comcast is doing what it can to prevent markets from working: concealing information, information that it’s customers would use to make informed decisions about their purchase of internet services.
I am not a big fan of knee jerk government intervention, so I wonder if there isn’t a middle ground, between enacting net neutrality, as difficult as that is, and doing nothing, as distasteful as that is.
The headline says it all, I think. Comcast did what they did in secret, denied it when confronted, and furthermore tried to cover it up when it was exposed. Why did they do it in secret, and deny it when they were confronted? Because they knew it was wrong. It really is that simple.
But we can’t ignore those, who, like Ed Felten uncovered the truth about what Comcast was doing, and further publicized it so quickly. Another data point in how wrong folks like Andrew Keen are, perhaps?
Once again, someone at TLF has defined a market success so narrowly, that by his very definition, it is impossible ever to discuss an example of a market failure. Here we have Jim Harper, discussing the recent supression by Comcast of Bit torrent traffic:
But I expect that we’ll soon learn more about the situation, and the conclusions to be drawn from it will be less obvious. There might be legitimate security reasons for what Comcast has done. We’ll see. We should expect full disclosure from Comcast.
My take: If Comcast is “shaping” traffic inconsistent with their terms of service, for non-network-security reasons such as copyright protection or surreptitious usage control, they shouldn’t be doing that.More important is the meta-point: Independent testers found what they believe to be an impropriety in Comcast’s provision of broadband. They called it out, and interested parties among advocacy organizations and the media swarmed all over it. Comcast has to answer the charge, whether meritorious or not.
These are market processes working their will, and the outcome will be reached in short order-
By this very low standard, it is impossible for there ever to be anything disclosed that is an example of a market failure and that would therefore require government intervention because if it is discovered and therefore discussed, Jim would just say something like:
“My meta-point remains: Independent testing revealed alleged wrongful behavior by Comcast and an array of forces are requiring them to account for it. This is being done through operation of the market, without government intervention.”
However, realize that this is just yet another example of a large corporation stifling public discussion to further its business plan. The internet is the new town square, and to permit toll booths and road blocks and secret protocols to intervene is unacceptable. Comcast has, despite the gnashing of teeth of the libertarians, convincingly made the argument for network neutrality legislation that no one else had as yet made so eloquently.
The secret throttling of bandwidth is restraint of freedom of speech; many use Bit torrent to disseminate minority political speech that would otherwise be less accessible. Further, it cannot be ignored that the distribution of linux and FOSS to dismantle the centralized power structures of large corporations is itself an act with a political dimension. So, any attempt to dismantle or disrupt Bit torrent traffic is a de facto act of political repression.
If anyone wasn’t convinced of the need for net neutrality legislation, a story by Declan McCullagh should dispel any objections they might have. It seems that Comcast has been interfering with Bit-Torrent traffic of its subscribers. What’s more it knew that to do so was wrong, and therefore denied it when asked about it.
The standard reposte from the anti-net neutrality camp is that we shouldn’t regulate when the markets will take care of situations such as this. If we had a vibrant market, full of competitors, that probably would be true. But we don’t–the market for high speed internet is a monopoly or a duopoly in many markets, so normal competitive mechanism will not function. For example, a recent article in St. Louis Post Dispatch indicated that, excluding satellite internet access, the best areas in St. Louis had two providers (AT&T and Charter), many had only one (Charter), and quite a few had no high speed access. I think it’s fair to exclude the satellite service because it’s a very different technology, and the price doesn’t make it really compete with AT&T and Comcast.
So if you care about being able to distribute Linux via Bit-torrent, or to distribute information that wouldn’t otherwise have an outlet, press your legislator to enact net neutrality legislation…
Comcast really does block BitTorrent traffic after all
For a few months Comcast has been the subject of scattered reports that say it throttles BitTorrent traffic.
TorrentFreak said in August that Comcast was surreptitiously interfering with file transfers by posing as one party and then, essentially, hanging up the phone. But when we contacted Comcast at the time, it flatly denied doing it.
Thanks to tests reported Friday by the Associated Press, however, it’s clear that Comcast is actively interfering with peer-to-peer networks even if relatively small files are being transferred.
The tests involved transferring a copy of the King James Bible through the BitTorrent network on Time Warner Cable, Cablevison, AT&T and two Comcast connections (in Philadelphia, Boston and San Francisco). Only the Comcast-connected computers were affected.
This is significant. The Gutenberg version of the King James Bible is only 4.24MB, which is relatively tiny and indicates that Comcast was singling out even small files.
Thought for the day: “A threat to freedom anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” – MLK
Amazingly, as the examples of case after case after case of ISP’s instituting content-based suppression of expression (or plainly said: Censorship) pile up, certain bloggers (mainly ‘libertarian’) continue to deny that this is talking place at all. Over at TLF James Gattuso makes an incredible assertion:
Net neutrality regulation has often been described as a “solution without a problem.” While supporters produce hypothetical concerns like little chocolate doughnuts, real-life examples of abuse have been virtually impossible to find. [emphasis added by e_f] That probably explains the excitement in the pro-regulation camp over an incident last week involving the unlikely combination of AT&T and Pearl Jam.
James, to find something, you do actually have to—look!
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