Kyle Brady: Blog » ISPs

Do Not Allow A Distraction From Net Neutrality [OpEd]

Kyle Brady — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 07:05:23 +0000

It was inevitable, and rather predictable, that the FCC would announce interest in Net Neutrality regulation, with Congress scheduled to be close behind, since copyright law is being used as an offensive weapon towards ISPs and their customers, ISPs feel they can throttle user’s connections at will, many network managers have strange ideas about their equipment, and the same ISPs tend to disconnect users they consider troublesome as a matter of normal practice. All of these issues, and a few more, make up the core of Net Neutrality, which remains a fundamental digital freedoms and rights issue that must be addressed in the near-term for continued modern growth.

However, all of this has been said before.

What has not been said before is that while the upcoming fight was known to be difficult, thanks to the obvious self-interest of the ISPs and deep-pocketed interest groups like the RIAA, it will now be considerably harder – the political willpower that should be interested in the rights of the American people is demonstrably weaker than the nation previously believed. The “healthcare debate” may be almost over, but the last six months has proven that this specific American flavor of democracy is highly partisan, filled with misleading propaganda, easily influenced, and often irrational or childish. The issue of Net Neutrality will be no different.

In fact, Republican Senators have already moved to protect their campaign financiers before any official action or legislation has even been proposed. It should come as no surprise that elected officials hell-bent on preventing regulation of any sort and downsizing government, while contributing to Big Government themselves, would take such action. What is surprising is that members of the minority party would take a stand on what amounts to merely a speech by another official, even as their current partisan behavior lands them in further trouble with the nation-at-large.

Assuming for a moment that these Senators actually understand the issues surrounding Net Neutrality, and were not simply reacting to the idea of increased regulation by a Federal agency, it presents a worrisome reality: no matter the issue, its public support, or the need for legislation, the Republican Party is going to automatically object to any and all actions by President Obama, his Administration, and any Democratic politician. On the issue of Net Neutrality, it is very clear that regulation is not only necessary and practical, but would serve as a formal recognition of the fundamental digital rights that American citizens hold – the only parties that contest such a regulatory need are those would actually be regulated. And yet, just as in the issue of healthcare reform, it is being fought against for vague and highly suspect reasons that do not echo the beliefs of the People.

The FCC, along with President Obama and the intelligent portions of Congress, must not allow the issue of Net Neutrality to degrade in the manner in which healthcare reform did – this would result in unnecessary compromises and extended debate, both of which are entirely unacceptable in this issue of digital rights and freedoms for American citizens. Besides undermining the Obama Administration by sandbagging the issues with all their might, while destroying their own party from the inside, Republicans absolutely cannot be allowed to hijack American politics for their own selfish and childish goals.

The needs of the American People must come before those of self-serving, partisan Congressmen who cannot fully comprehend most of the issues on which they legislate, and Net Neutrality is too important to fall prey to such political machinations. Digital rights and freedoms must be officially recognized by the Federal Government in order to move intelligently forward as a connected nation – to ignore, write off, or otherwise sidestep addressing this issue would be nothing short of Unconstitutional.

A phrase with which the Republican Party should now be intimately familiar.

The Increasing Problem of Knee-Jerk Copyright Reactions [OpEd]

Kyle Brady — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 07:05:04 +0000

Copyright has been a sensitive issue for the last decade, but the actions taken by both governments and corporations are increasingly worrisome for their willingness to use extreme measures that are typically nothing more than knee-jerk reactions, rather than taking well-reasoned measures, that result in the inconvenience, at best, of citizens from all backgrounds, while the future of rich media is threatened. The arenas in which consumer rights, freedoms, and enjoyment are being threatened are many, but include DVD purchases/rentals, Internet usage, digital books/e-books, and music.

The so-called “piracy” of music via the Internet, specifically filesharing protocols/programs, have seen the ire of the recording industry, via the RIAA, for the entire span of the last decade, and arguably initiated the current war of copyright escalation. Regardless of the legality, or individual opinions, on the claim of Fair Use Doctrine by many pirates, the fact remains that access and distribution methods cannot be subjugated for purposes of copyright defense – no matter how much profit the corporations or individuals in question believe they are losing because of it.

This applies mostly to the Internet, as filesharing is now done via the global network. And while organizations, governments [1] [2] [3], and corporations believe that the Internet can simply be filtered, controlled, or managed to prevent actions of presumed wrongdoing, this cannot be. It’s not that this cannot be implemented on a technical level, because it can and is, but rather that the ethics of taking such actions are ethically questionable – how come CD-R’s continue to exist when they can, and are, used for purposes of piracy? What makes the Internet any different?

The technology exists to prevent certain types of traffic over connections, but this assumes that these methodologies are wrong or illegal in the first place, when many legal uses of peer-to-peer networks exist. Subjugating the populace to the benefit of corporations or profiteers is simply unacceptable, especially when throttling connections results in limited freedoms, as it so often does, yet the ignorance of this issue in many courts worldwide continues at an appalling rate.

DVDs are not exempt from the copyright overzealotry either: Redbox, a popular DVD-on-demand rental kiosk service, is now being sued by multiple movie studios to stop the rental of studio releases. The reasoning is essentially the same as that of Internet filtering and litigation, having a basis in profits rather than legality or common sense. Studios have a long history of controlling how their movies are released to the public, with specific timetables for theaters, airplanes, video-on-demand television, home movies, and cable television, but had been slowly adapting to modern times, until recently, due to deals with Netflix, faster DVD releases, and other “new media” distribution methods.

The idea of copyright holders being paid for every single usage of their property is not new, especially to movie studios, and they seem intent on continuing this pattern of behavior, to the detriment of consumers. Redbox is flourishing as customers discover the convenience, just as Netflix has all but decimated traditional video-rental competition, but these are methods which the studios cannot exert absolute control over, and are therefore dangerous entities from their perspective. The difference, however, between filesharing and the Redbox/Netflix issue is clear: interaction with these services is unquestionably legal and cannot be interpreted otherwise – especially since the companies purchase licenses to distribute the content. Yet the persecution continues, as does the war on customer satisfaction.

The fact that this war has bled over into other arenas is not surprising, but that Amazon.com has become embroiled in it is. Amazon has a strong history of forcing publishers, distributors, and studios to do what they want, such as their DRM-free MP3 music store, and yet their Kindle product is heavily DRM’d. Even worse, the digital version of 1984 was recently removed from the devices of customers that had purchased it, because the publisher decided an electronic version of the book was simply no longer interesting, forcing Amazon to “fix” the “problem”. The problem here is potentially worse than that of Internet filtering or DVD distribution restrictions: legally purchased property was later taken from customers without reason or explanation, thanks to its digital nature and the control strings attached. Not only is this ethically wrong, but how is this not theft? If a carpet retailer came in the middle of the night and removed the carpet from a customer’s house without permission, regardless of reason, this would be considered highly illegal – Amazon’s 1984 actions are no different.

There is a disturbing trend buried just below the surface of these actions, and it ironically gives credence to George Orwell’s vision of the future: the freedoms and rights of citizens are being subjugated for higher corporate profits and the benefit of murky interest groups. Even worse, these actions occur with troubling regularity and without any attempt to solve the problem before litigation arises. In the case of filesharing, legal options appear to have stemmed the tide of media piracy (music in the UK, music in the US, and television/movies in the US), but the legal persecution of individuals has done nothing but tarnish the industry’s reputation.

If legal alternatives to piracy can be successful, they should be given the time and ability to be so – not forcibly shut down, or heavily handicapped, due to corporate greed and a supreme loathing for new distribution or business models. This is true not just for music, but movies, television, radio, and digital books as well. Most of the digital markets, or new physical distribution methods in the case of movies, are too young to have reached a level of profitability and success that would placate the publishers and studios, so they need to be allowed time to develop and discover their full potential - which is currently in jeopardy. Individual-label (or studio) entities for digital distribution will never be successful, if only because of the level of inconvenience, so the hope, for both consumers and producers, lies in companies like Redbox, Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon.

Piracy is not the problem, but rather a symptom of a broken system – going after the biggest supporters, and purchasers, of content is not going to make their love for the system any greater. Neither is removing their self-created solutions, like The Pirate Bay, and disconnecting these individuals from the Internet is only going to further enrage them. It is in the best interest of movie studios, record labels, book publishers, and other media companies to look to peaceable solutions to the current problems, rather than wielding governments or courts as a weapon.

Customers worldwide will appreciate the effort, and those that enjoy freedom will breathe a sigh of relief.

Incorrect Base Assumptions About Network Management [OpEd]

Kyle Brady — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 07:05:20 +0000

IEEE recently ran a lengthy article in the latest (July 2009) issue of Spectrum, their major monthly publication, called “A Radical New Router” – essentially describing and promoting a smarter network router to better manage traffic. Overall, an interesting piece that could prove highly useful in the industry, but throughout, the author and inventor of the technology, Dr. Lawrence G. Roberts, makes references to the so-called need to filter, augment, and otherwise monitor certain kinds of traffic – specifically, peer-to-peer (P2P) content. This base assumption from which he operates over many sequences of logic is incorrect, despite producing good insights into the current state, and possible future, of the modern global network. Not to mention having participated in its invention.

Whenever the subject of bandwidth usage and availability comes up in any public forum, P2P traffic is inevitably blamed with “hogging” bandwidth, “clogging pipes”, and other such euphemisms that imply wrongdoing and questionable use. The reality, no matter what the telecommunications or cable companies say, is that bandwidth is not disappearing into the ether due to the massive usage of protocols like BitTorrent. These myths and halftruths are perpetuated by internet service providers (ISPs) because they can produce a better bottom-line by spending less on equipment and infrastructure to support their userbase - as well as the copyfight-abuse organizations like the RIAA and MPAA because, when taking the longview, they have the same goals: reducing P2P traffic by any means necessary in order to potentially achieve higher profit margins.

Consider, for a moment, the issue most often cited for “traffic shaping”, the practice of filtering a users traffic based on the type and source: legality of content. While there is an abundance of content with questionable copyright origins based on the current interpretations of the DMCA (in America), there is also a sea of legal content being acquired by the same means: Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, and a number of other musical artists have experimented with a freely available online distribution method, in addition to countless young movie producers that are only interested in their content being available and seen.

How can network monitoring practices differentiate between “legal” and “illegal” P2P traffic? Filtering by content source, such as a band’s official website vs. IsoHunt, is impractical – the content available via the official source is likely licensed for free distribution and sharing by other means. Filtering by traffic size, as in number of bytes transferred, is a gray area at best – setting an arbitrary size for acceptable P2P traffic, or any type of traffic, creates artificial pricing levels, not to mention potentially endorsing the acquisition of questionably sourced content. There is really only one option left, and it is what most ISPs choose in such cases: filter by traffic type.

Examples abound of ISPs delivering the speeds expected, or close to expected, for common traffic like web-browsing, email, and IM conversations, but getting heavily choked to lower levels (sometimes resembling dialup speeds) when a Torrent file is active – regardless of legality, content, or source. When the ISP will even admit to doing so, which is rare, they tend to blame their need for such filtering based on total bandwidth availability - “5% of the users in some networks [consume] 75% of the bandwidth”, to quote Roberts’ article. While it is hard for the ISPs to support such claims with hard evidence, this is improbable at best – how can a user consume that much bandwidth when they are prevented from doing so in the first place?

Yes, the internet, and networks of all types, are seeing explosive growth. And, yes, it will present some challenging problems in the coming years. But the true bandwidth capacity of the current infrastructure, which is constantly being expanded and optimized, is not anywhere close to being “full” – let alone full because of P2P traffic. The tech community likes to think that “the cloud” is the future of computing, meaning accessing remote rich applications via a web browser, and this means an increase in network traffic, purely by default – this is already being seen thanks to Facebook, Google, and countless others. Include Voice-over-Internet-Protocol applications like Skype, instant messaging, videoconferencing, remote desktop access, and numerous other now-standard types of network traffic, and the reason for the massive increase in bandwidth use becomes clear. P2P traffic is a part of it, but is by no means the singular culprit.

But if P2P isn’t inherently illegal or “bad”, can it be a large part of the future? It has been used to distribute video games, distribution of multimedia content from a United States government agency, and as a means to alleviate server stress for video playback for a major news outlet. These examples are merely the world-at-large testing the waters for this relatively new type of traffic, and the future may contain exponentially more – assuming the network connections don’t arbitrarily prevent users from connecting to such rich experiences. In the days of Usenet and bulletin board services, who could have predicted a common, open, and mostly free global network? If the network administrators of the time had decided to prevent an evolution of protocols, merely on the basis of profit, the modern Internet would not exist.

This is not to say that prioritizing network traffic, as the majority of the Spectrum article addresses, is not valuable. Packaging data streams such as video and audio together for processing and transmission could have substantial benefits on network stresses and overall activity patterns – evolving from “dumb” to “smart” routers is a necessary step in expanding the capacity, functionality, and ability of the Internet. However, there is a considerable difference between “prioritizing” and “filtering” – prioritizing means temporary delays that the end-user will never notice, on the scale of milliseconds, while filtering is restricting or preventing entirely the transmission of data.

Such Old World assumptions about the proper use of the Internet need to be discarded in order to allow it to continue the evolution into a more complex and useful tool – this is the basis of Net Neutrality, an area which the United States Federal Government is finally getting involved in. Lawrence G. Roberts, the IEEE, and hardware developers the world over would do well to take note: network management may be difficult at times, but the answer will not be found in restricting the freedoms of users. Many Internet users know this, the Federal Government appears to be slowly awakening to a similar realization, and it is time network operators joined the rest of the world in acknowledging what amounts to a Rights and Freedoms issue for the modern, digital age.

--- --- ---

Update (7/9/2009 10:50am PST): Quoted in a Net Neutrality piece by p2pnet.

Update (7/9/2009 4:14pm PST): I exchanged emails with Dr. Roberts himself regarding this, and the direct communication seems to help clarify - heavy editing may have been a culprit for some of the confusion on P2P traffic. A position of "fair and equal traffic" is much better than "regulate the unwanted traffic" - apparently Dr. Roberts and I are in agreement on this topic. Here's his clarification, unedited and printed with permission:

Perhaps the IEEE article was not sufficiently clear due to significant editing. However, I have never claimed P2P file sharing was bad. However, any multi-flow application is likely to consume far more than its fair share of the capacity an ISP allocates to a DSLAM or cable channel (often about 1000 subscribers). What most people don't understand is that the capacity for those 1000 subscribers is shared and not equal to 1000 times the peak capacity advertised. Often the ISP is at fault for misleading advertising but no ISP allocates much more than the statistical peak usage created by 1000 normal users. Unfortunately, IP networks today, using TCP, provide about equal capacity per flow, not per subscriber. Thus a multi-flow application using 100 flows will consume 100 times the capacity available to the normal user who is using one flow. Thus, if even 1% of the users are using certain P2P applications that open many flows, they will consume 60%-90% of the shared capacity of the DSLAM or cable channel. This reduces the capacity available to the other 99% of normal users to a small fraction of what they paid for. That is the problem. What I am recommending is for the network to adjust the sharing process such that when congestion occurs, capacity is allocated so that it is "equal capacity for equal pay", not equal capacity per flow. This means the multi-flow user gets their fair share in peak hours without hurting their neighbors, and in off hours get all they can use.

P2P happens to be the current main multi-flow application. However, cloud computing appears to be the next big multi-flow application and there will be others. My goal is to keep the Internet working smoothly and this requires it be fair, even under overload. Equal capacity for equal pay accomplishes this where today there is serious un-fairness. It is also important that this be accomplished not by picking on any specific application (like P2P) as DPI devices do, but by fixing the basic sharing process. P2P is not bad, and as you say no-one can tell if the file is legal or illegal. But any multi-flow application can produce unfairness due to the current structure of the network and it is this un-fairness that is the problem.

Larry

Update (7/9/2009 6:15pm PST): I only just noticed (sorry Cory!), but I was mentioned on BoingBoing for this.