People are surprised to learn this?
In the end, it turns out it’s all about the emails.The blogger goes on to point out that almost all of the recent fearmongering, which has been about telephone calls, is just plain wrong. Duh! Half the fearmongers don’t understand what they’re talking about (e.g., Continue reading— Spying Fight about Emails, Not Phone Calls, DOJ Reveals, By Ryan Singel ThreatLevel, Wired, March 04, 2008 | 4:47:36 PMCategories: NSA
What a reputation:
So that’s that. Register your domain name through a U.S. company and your business goes kaput if the U.S. Treasury Department decides it doesn’t like you. It doesn’t matter if you’re based in Spain, your servers are in the Bahamas, your customers are mostly European, and you’ve broken no laws. No warning. Just kaput.This blogger bases his opinion on a NYTimes story: Continue reading— Just Kaput, Kevin Drum, Political Animal, 4 March 2008
As I’ve
been predicting since October:
“We have requested information from the company via subpoena,” Jeffrey Lerner, a spokesman for Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, said Tuesday.So far it’s just a subpoena. We’ll see if it turns into a full-fledged lawsuit. And maybe Comcast could start cooperating with its own customers….Comcast said it was co-operating with the AG’s office.
— New York subpoenas Comcast on traffic shaping, Associated Press, February 26, 2008 at 4:08 PM EST
-jsq
PS: Why did the New York Times pick up this story only a day after the Canadian Globe and Mail?
Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Chip Pickering (R-MS) have
introduced the
Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008,
which will amend Title I of the Communications Act of 1934 to say
Internet freedom, commerce, innovation, participation, and speech
are the policy of the United States.
It’s interesting what this bill does not say.
It doesn’t specify any regulations, so that those who oppose net neutrality
don’t have a leg to stand on when they say net neutrality is all about
regulation.
It doesn’t say “net neutrality”: it says “freedom”, “marketplace”, “innovation”,
and other positive benefits.
(I think I’ll take a cue from Commissioner Copps and start referring
to Internet freedom.)
It doesn’t say “consumers” except a few times, including once where that word
is immediately qualified by
(i) access, use, send, receive, or offer lawful content, applications, or services over broadband networks, including the Internet;Let’s see, if “consumers” can send their own content, applications, and service, they’re not really consumers in the traditional sense, now are they?
This is all very nice, in that Markey and Pickering apparently get it about what Internet freedom is about. However, why does this bill have no teeth, unlike Markey’s bill of last year or the Snowe-Durgan bill before that? Continue reading
Prof. Jean Camp points out that:
This is ironically exactly the mechanism used by the Great Firewall of China. When China does it, we call it “censorship”.She points to a paper that details that the Great Firewall of China uses exactly the same forged TCP Reset method that Comcast uses, and how to work around such damage: Continue reading— Re: [IP] Comcast FCC filing shows gap between hype, bandwidth, Jean Camp, Interesting People, 14 Feb 2008
Aswin Navin by David Shankbone |
Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s subcommittee on telecommunications and the Internet, plans to introduce a bill today calling for an Internet policy that would prohibit network operators from unreasonably interfering with consumers’ right to access and use content over broadband networks. The bill also calls for the FCC to hold eight meetings around the nation to assess whether there is enough competition among network providers and whether consumers’ rights are being upheld.Markey gets it. Too bad the FCC doesn’t.“Our goal is to ensure that the next generation of Internet innovators will have the same opportunity, the same unfettered access to Internet content, services and applications that fostered the developers of Yahoo, Netscape and Google,” Markey said in a written statement yesterday.
— Comcast Defends Role As Internet Traffic Cop By Cecilia Kang, Washington Post Staff Writer, Wednesday, February 13, 2008; Page D01
Meanwhile, part of Comcast’s defense is: Continue reading
Well, no. But at least the RIAA is against mandatory filtering by ISPs:
The RIAA does not support this approach in the US, opting instead to back the tradeoffs of the DMCA. That law allows ISPs a “safe harbor” for the content passing through their networks so long as they respond to takedown notices and legal requests in a timely fashion.This puts RIAA on the same side as Verizon, leaving AT&T out there alone. Well, except for much of the U.S. government.— RIAA chief: We don’t see a need for mandatory ISP filtering, By Nate Anderson, ars technica, Published: January 30, 2008 – 11:00PM CT
-jsq
Verizon talks sense:
We see substantial increases in the volume of traffic. Generally we see that as a good thing. We have more customers paying for more services we provide.He’s specifically responding to requests from Hollywood to police copyright. Tauke lists at least three good reasons not to:—Tom Tauke, executive vice president for public affairs, Verizon, quoted in Verizon Rejects Hollywood’s Call to Aid Piracy Fight, By Saul Hansell, Bits, New York Times, February 5, 2008, 3:56 pm
Anything we do has to balance the need of copyright protection with the desire of customers for privacy.
There is, nonetheless, a downside. Continue reading
Shades of NSF:
EDUCAUSE, the association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology, today proposed bringing the federal government, state governments, and the private sector together as part of a new approach to making high-speed Internet services available across the country.Back in the 1980s, in the time of standalone dialup Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes), the National Science Foundation (NSF) deployed a nationwide backbone network called NSFNet that eventually ran at the blazing fast for the times speed of 1.55Mbps. NSF also promoted development of NSFNet regional networks, many of which eventually figured in the commercialization of Internet that took off in 1991 when former dialup network UUNET started selling Internet connectivity and former personnel of an NSFNet regional formed PSINet and also started selling Internet connectivity.The group, whose membership includes information technology officials from more than 2,200 colleges, universities, and other educational organizations, said that a new “universal broadband fund” would be necessary so that “Big Broadband” — services of 100 mbps — could be made widely available.
— EDUCAUSE Proposes New Approach to Broadband Development, Wendy Wigen, Peter B. Deblois, EDUCAUSE, 29 Jan 2008
Nowadays, when the fastest most people can get as so-called broadband is 1-3Mbps DSL from telcos or maybe 3-5Mbps from cablecos, maybe it’s time to do it again. Is this a plan that would work? Continue reading
A few days ago I remarked that
potential loss of liability protection
probably wouldn’t stop the telcos from filtering all Internet traffic
because they’d get immunity, possibly in the FISA legislation currently
being debated in the Senate.
A few days later, the New Yorker revealed that
the White House indeed has a plan for that:
“The real question is what to do about industry,” McConnell told me. “Ninety-five per cent of this is a private-sector problem.” He claimed that cyber-theft accounted for as much as a hundred billion dollars in annual losses to the American economy. “The real problem is the perpetrator who doesn’t care about stealing—he just wants to destroy.” The plan will propose restrictions that are certain to be unpopular. In order for cyberspace to be policed, Internet activity will have to be closely monitored. Ed Giorgio, who is working with McConnell on the plan, said that would mean giving government the authority to examine the content of any e-mail, file transfer, or Web search. “Google has records that could help in a cyber-investigation,” he said. Giorgio warned me, “We have a saying in this business: ‘Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.’ ”Bruce Schneier has already demolished the “privacy vs. security” canard: it’s really liberty vs. control.— The Spymaster, by Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker, 21 January 2008
It figures that it would be Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell pushing monitoring the whole Internet, since he’s one of the key figures behind retroactive telecom immunity for illegal warrantless wiretapping. That was a bad idea, and this is also a bad idea.
But it’s also why AT&T may have good reason to believe there’d be no liability for filtering the entire Internet.
-jsq