The More You Know (And Shooting Star)

Quite a bit has happened this week. The world is fixated on the growing Japanese nuclear problem, but one thing I keep wondering about is that since Japan is the acknowledged leader in robotic technology, why haven’t we been seeing more robotic technology not only in the nuclear problem but also search and rescue from the earthquake and tsunami?  I’m sure the technology is being used in some way, but there is nothing newsworthy.  Odd.

Speaking of the earthquake, Only 6 hours later and we had a full blown article with citations about the earthquake and tsunami including facts about the quake as well as international responses.  That is what the internet is really all about.  Also, the tsunami warning system took only 12 minutes after the 8.9 magnitude quake hit Sendai on Friday for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to alert emergency workers in California, Oregon, Washington and Alaska that a potentially catastrophic tsunami was heading their way. Considering the waves were moving at approximately 500 miles per hour, that is money and lives saved. BTW, some want to gut the funding for this, because saving lives obviously it isn’t that important.

Senator Al Franken was at SXSW in Austin to tell everyone there the obvious:  If Net Neutrality rules were deleted, then the terrorists corporations have won.  Franken, who has his own problems with the FCC’s regulations, accused conservatives of hijacking the Internet debate. “They’ll tell you that putting rules in place to preserve Net neutrality as it exists today amounts to a government takeover of the Internet, a talking point deserves a place alongside death panels and Obama’s a Muslim.”  Not long after that AT&T announced they were going to cap download limits.  Journalists still have yet to see the connection.

Speaking of journalist not doing their jobs, Anonymous released the long awaited bank of America documents.  Since all the TV journalists were standing amongst the rubble in Sendai to show that they were “on top of the news”, this was easily forgotten. Granted, the back door dealings that brought the world economy to its knees isn’t as sexy a shot as standing next to a tanker dry docked by nature a mile from the beach but shouldn’t someone be talking about it?

Finally in some good news, Microsoft and the government felled the giant spam farm Rustock, lessening spam worldwide by about 40 percent.  A lawsuit by Microsoft that was unsealed at the company’s request late today triggered several coordinated raids last Wednesday that took down Rustock, a botnet that infected millions of computers with malicious code in order to turn them into a massive spam-sending network. So you can thank Microsoft for less spam about fake watches and fake viagra in your mailbox today.  Makes up for the fact that this week they killed off the Zune player.

Reach Out And Cap Someone

Oh, AT&T.  The company that gave us Ernestine Tomlin’s famous line “We don’t care, we don’t have to.  We’re the Phone Company” is at it again.  If you stream over Netflix, expect to be pissed off, because this really applies to you.  If this goes forward without a huge fight from consumers, expect every other telecommunication an cable company out there to follow suit. 

According to DSL Reports, AT&T will be sending out notices this week informing their customers that starting in May, the company will be implementing a new 150GB monthly usage cap for all DSL customers and a new 250 GB cap on all U-Verse users.  This is how it will work: only users who exceed the new usage cap three times — across the life of your account, not per month — will be forced to pay these new per byte overages. Overages will be $10 for every 50GB over the 150 GB or 250GB limit they travel. 

The company says the caps will only affect about 2 percent of their DSL customers, asserting that the average customer uses about 18 GB each month . A statement AT&T provided to GigaOm also noted that “importantly, we are not reducing the speeds, terminating service or limiting available data like some others in the industry.”

No, nothing like that.  By the way, the average High-definition movie is around 3GB.  So if you watch one HD movie per evening, you’re taking up over half of your allotment per month.  If you have a family, that could start to add up.  Quickly.

Keep in mind that AT&T is an investor in bandwidth-intensive services like OnLive’s HD game streaming platform. And of course included in that bandwidth cap are all those advertisements that people slog through in order to get what they need over the net.  But the predominant question that DSL Reports asks is the one we know the answer to:

…does AT&T scale these caps and overages to accommodate for the dropping cost of bandwidth and hardware moving forward, or will they bend to inevitable investor pressure and continually tighten the metered billing noose?

If you don’t know, ask Ernestine Tomlin.  She’ll be more than happy to answer your question.

Netflix Fires a Neutrality Shot Across The Bow

Netflix posted better than expected growth Wednesday, adding 3 million users to top off at 20 million subscribers.  That’s good for them.  But what got the most attention was what the company had to say about that little inconsequential thing called “Net Neutrality”

An independent negative issue for Netflix and other Internet video providers would be a move by wired ISPs to shift consumers to pay-per-gigabyte models instead of the current unlimited-up-to-a-large-cap approach.  We hope this doesn’t happen, and will do what we can to promote the unlimited-up-to-a large-cap model.  Wired ISPs have large fixed costs of building and maintaining their last mile network of residential cable and fiber.  The ISPs’ costs, however, to deliver a marginal gigabyte, which is about an hour of viewing, from one of our regional interchange points over their last mile wired network to the consumer is less than a penny, and falling, so there is no reason that pay-per-gigabyte is economically necessary. Moreover, at $1 per gigabyte over wired networks, it would be grossly overpriced.  (Emphasis mine)

What does that mean?  ISPs introducing tiered data plans could be overcharging subscribers by up to 100 percent.  

Netflix also takes issue with the way that some ISPs treat traffic coming into their network. While Netflix didn’t come out and say “Comcast is playing you”, they came awful close without mentioning the company by name:

Delivering Internet video in scale creates costs for both Netflix and for ISPs. We think the cost sharing between Internet video suppliers and ISPs should be that we have to haul the bits to the various regional front-doors that the ISPs operate, and that they then carry the bits the last mile to the consumer who has requested them, with each side paying its own costs. This open, regional, no- charges, interchange model is something for which we are advocating. Today, some ISPs charge us, or our CDN partners, to let in the bits their customers have requested from us, and we think this is inappropriate. As long as we pay for getting the bits to the regional interchanges of the ISP’s choosing, we don’t think they should be able to use their exclusive control of their residential customers to force us to pay them to let in the data their customers’ desire. Their customers already pay them to deliver the bits on their network, and requiring us to pay even though we deliver the bits to their network is an inappropriate reflection of their last mile exclusive control of their residential customers.

Netflix also says that tomorrow, it will publish a blog post identifying which ISPs deliver the best, most consistent high-speed Internet access for streaming Netflix. The highest performing ISP, Netflix says already, is Charter.  One wonders where others will fall. 

Net Neutrality – Put Up (Your App) or Shut Up

A few weeks ago, the FCC established Net Neutrality Guidelines.  While landlines were affected, wireless (read the more lucrative business) was left unscathed. 

But don’t think that the fight is over.  Far from it.  And so, the FCC is looking for help.  From us.  Wednesday, the FCC announced a competition for apps that will check if mobile carriers are blocking online video sites, slowing down VOIP services that compete with them or are monkeying around with the sites a user is trying to visit.  This certainly beats spending millions of governmental dollars on such a thing, and allows those of us in the community who can do this to do this. 

The Open Internet Challenge is asking for submissions from two groups: developers, who can create apps that measure Internet openness, and researchers, who may want to submit academic papers analyzing ways to measure and police Internet openness.  As FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski in a statement:

“This challenge is about using the open Internet to protect the open Internet. Our goal is to foster user-developed applications that shine light on any practice that might be inconsistent with the free and open Internet. Empowering consumers with information about their own connections will promote a vibrant, innovative, world-leading broadband ecosystem.”

The winners, chosen by a public vote and a select panel at the FCC, will receive a free trip to the FCC’s headquarters in Washington D.C.. They will present their work to the Commission and receive an FCC Chairman’s reception. The winning apps and papers will also be published on the FCC’s website.  An airline ticket dinner with the FCC Chairman and a hotel room for a couple of nights.  Pretty inexpensive way to do this. 

While empowering consumers with improved tools to better understand the connections they’re buying is perfectly fine, those tools won’t mean much if the FCC doesn’t enforce infractions.  But that is another story for another time.  In the mean time, you have until June 1, 2011 to submit your ideas.  Have fun.

Don’t Be Evil*

*As long as it doesn’t affect the bottom line. 

While, the headline is Google’s motto, the asterisk is something that people are thinking should be tagged on, like sports writers want to do to A-Rod’s home run record.  About what, you may ask.  Well, that depends on who you talk to.  Yesterday, The New York Times published a story that had Google talking to Verizon about handling Internet traffic.  According to the story, the "compromise" would restrict Verizon from selectively slowing Internet content over its wires but could apply slowdowns to mobile phones. 

The backlash was swift.  Om Malik at GigaOm headlined his take "Did Net Neutrality Just Get Knifed in The Back?"  Jeff Jarvis at Buzz Machine though, hit the nail on the head:

"The report that Google is making a devil’s pact with Verizon for tiered internet service is disturbing because I wonder whether people inside Google are still asking that vital question: “Is this evil?” I wonder whether Google is still Google. "

Then today came the official Google Tweet. 

"@NYTimes is wrong.  We’ve not had any convos with VZN about paying for carriage of our traffic.  We remain committed to an open internet". 

Verizon’s spokesmodel stated that the Times’ story "fundamentally misunderstands our purpose".  Of course they never really go into detail then as to exactly what that purpose is, but, hey, everything is fluid right now.  Trust us, no funny business here.

That’s nice.  Of course, having the government negotiating behind closed door with the telcos and Google does not inspire confidence that any decision will be in the public’s best interest.  That is where the problem really lies.  Since this is a decision that affects everyone who uses the net, it should be imperative that the talks be opened up, just to see what is being talked about.  That way, leaks like this aren’t "misunderstandings", but a matter of public record.   A record that is, how can I put it, open and free for all to see. 

Anyway, the two companies have become kind of cozy lately, as Verizon is selling Droid-centric phones like crazy.  No matter what both sides may say publicly, there have been “convos” about a number of things.  To think that Internet traffic  is not among them is to live in Fantasyland.  So when both companies come out and say that they support an "open internet", with "minimal interference from the government", one wonders how the lawyers in Mountain View are trying to redefine the word "evil".  From my perspective, it’s looking more like it involves a bottle of Astroglide.

WordPress Tags: Google, Verizon, Net Neutrality, Law, Lying, Bend Over

Now Playing: Blue Öyster Cult – Secret Treaties – Career of Evil

Who Saw This One Coming?

Ah yes, the unicorn called Net Neutrality.  Plenty has been written about it, people have spoke about it, and the moment someone starts to do something about it…

Yeah, you know what happens.

Now for those of you who do not know what it is I’m writing about, Net Neutrality is based on a simple thoughts.  From Wikipedia:

A neutral broadband network is one that is free of restrictions on content, sites, or platforms, or on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, and on the modes of communication allowed, as well as one where communication is not unreasonably degraded by other communication streams.

That’s a mouthful, so let me break it down.  Let’s say I’m a user of Time Warner’s Roadrunner cable system.  I want to communicate with someone who uses a Comcast system.  Net neutrality says we should be able to communicate, play games, pass home videos back and forth without having to worry that Comcast will slow down or even block my access because I’m using Time Warner or vice versa.  This would also apply to me wanting to visit certain websites that may hold views that Time Warner opposes (hello freedom of speech issues).

Now of course, there are some who say that the telecommunications companies would never do such a thing, while we have watched telcoms intentionally slow down peer to peer transmissions (Comcast), while others have instituted a cell-phone style billing system of overages, free-to-telecom "value added" services, and anti-competitive tying (known as "bundling") and pay by the gigabyte service.  All in the name of transmission “quality”

So onto this stage comes the current FCC chairman, Julius Genachowski giving a speech in which he outlined the FCC’s plan to enforce Net neutrality.

From Genachowski’s speech: "Broadband providers cannot discriminate against particular Internet content or applications, nor can they disfavor an Internet service just because it competes with a similar service offered by that broadband provider. The Internet must continue to allow users to decide what content and applications succeed."  That bit seems to have been directed at Apple and ATT.

And within twenty four hours, six Republican senators  introduced an amendment that would block the Federal Communications Commission from implementing its recently announced Net Neutrality policy.  A response within twenty four hours, from Republican Senators, no less.  As my Grandmother was fond of saying “must have touched a nerve.”  

It would seem almost farcical, but it is reality.  After all, ATT is based in Kay Bailey Hutchison’s home state of Texas.  Did I mention she’s running for governor as well?  Co-sponsors are Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS), Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) Sen. John Ensign (R-NV), Sen. John Thune (R-SD) and Sen. David Vitter (R-LA).  All one can say is that they haven’t met a Democratic action they didn’t hate, so it really is no surprise that they would sign on because it is all politics for these show ponies.  The part of Genachowski’s plan that ISPs are most opposed to, according to PCWorld , is that it would apply to mobile carriers as well — cell phones, Blackberries and the like. Bandwidth for wireless is not infinite, and some carriers have argued that they need to shape some traffic on their networks in order to make sure there is space available for everyone.

But by the way things look, the only shape the telcos want to see are the shape of dollar bills.  So pull up a seat, and get ready to Tweet because this is going to be a fight.  Oh yeah, and you might want to make sure your voice is heard like a wingnut at a town hall healthcare meeting. 

Now Playing: Counting Crows – Recovering the Satellites – Angels Of The Silences

WordPress Tags: Internet, Net Neutrality, freedom, telecommunications corporations