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
Apparently this WSJ opinion writer couldn’t actually argue with
Ed Markey’s net neutrality bill, so he made up a straw man:
Imagine a town that has all sorts of gasoline pipelines running by it but only one gas pump. Rationing is inevitable. So are price controls.What’s especially amusing about this strawman is that it’s what the duopoly is planning as they do away with net neutrality, except it’s not first responders or governments that will get favored bandwidth: it’s Hollywood. Meanwhile, Markey’s bill doesn’t say any of that. It doesn’t include any regulation at all.Everyone gets equal amounts, except of course first responders like police and ambulances, which should get all the gas they want. And, well, so should the mayor. And if you can make a good business case that you work 60 miles away, you can file paperwork and perhaps pull some strings for more gas. How about those kids hot-rodding around town who can’t drive 55? They get last dibs, and maybe we can sneak in some gas thinner to slow down their engines and not waste gas.
— Internet Wrecking Ball, By Andy Kessler, Wall Street Journal, February 25, 2008; Page A15
Kessler invokes Orwell:
This is the essence of the Ed Markey’s (D., Mass.) Orwellian-named Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008, which would foist network neutrality on the wild and woolly Internet.Kessler maybe wasn’t around in the earlier days of the Internet, or he would know that net neutrality is what we used to have, until it got chipped away starting in about the year 2000, as the FCC failed to enforce the Unbundled Network Elements (UNE) of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and reclassified cable modem access as an information service in August 2002, wireline broadband in August 2005, and wireless broadband in March 2007. The FCC stripped common carriage status from Internet provision, something never done before in the U.S. So what Markey’s bill is actually trying to do is to preserve the freedom the Internet used to have before the present administration and the duopoly systematically tried to do away with it. That’s the opposite of Orwellian: that’s the plain truth.
If Kessler did know Internet history, or had been around when we were making it, he would know not to write things like this: Continue reading
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
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
Andrew Sayer from Kensington, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, publishes
a self-explanatory picture.
Here’s another rendering of what we’ll get if we don’t have net neutrality. And here’s a writeup. Oh, and here’s here’s what you will look like.
-jsq
In Canada, an ISP has even gotten up to blocking striking employees’ website:
During the Telus strike in 2005, the corporation blocked access to a website run by striking Telus employees called “Voices for Change” (and at least 766 other websites). Those familiar with network-control issues in Canada also accuse Rogers and Bell of limiting peer-to-peer (P2P) applications, which people use to share audio, video and other digital data with one another. So, here we have ISPs blocking or at least limiting the use of what is likely the most innovative, creative and participatory use of the Internet. In response to customer concerns, Bell recently admitted that they “are now using Internet Traffic Management to restrict accounts that are using a large portion of bandwidth during peak hours. Some of the applications that are included are the following: BitTorrent, Gnutella, LimeWire, Kazaa….”The rest sounds very familiar: Continue reading— The Fight for the Open Internet, Steve Anderson, Canadian Dimension magazine, January/February 2008 issue
by Diana Walker |
Chances are that as you read this article, it is passing over part of AT&T’s network. That matters, because last week AT&T announced that it is seriously considering plans to examine all the traffic it carries for potential violations of U.S. intellectual property laws. The prospect of AT&T, already accused of spying on our telephone calls, now scanning every e-mail and download for outlawed content is way too totalitarian for my tastes. But the bizarre twist is that the proposal is such a bad idea that it would be not just a disservice to the public but probably a disaster for AT&T itself. If I were a shareholder, I’d want to know one thing: Has AT&T, after 122 years in business, simply lost its mind?Come now; what did you think they were up to? Continue readingNo one knows exactly what AT&T is proposing to build. But if the company means what it says, we’re looking at the beginnings of a private police state. That may sound like hyperbole, but what else do you call a system designed to monitor millions of people’s Internet consumption? That’s not just Orwellian; that’s Orwell.
— Has AT&T Lost Its Mind?A baffling proposal to filter the Internet. By Tim Wu, Slate, Posted Wednesday, Jan. 16, 2008, at 10:15 AM ET