In today’s New York Times, Stephen Labaton reports on the continuing controversy over the FCC’s impending Broadcast Flag rules. In the midst of a back-and-forth about the rules, Labaton writes this:
An F.C.C. official said, for instance, that the broadcast flag could contain software code that was recognized by computer routers in a way that the program would self-destruct after passing through three routers while being e-mailed by a user.
Somebody is really confused here about how the Internet works. Maybe it’s the reporter, or maybe it’s the FCC source, or maybe (God forbid) both.
If this statement bears any connection to reality, it’s cause for serious worry. I can’t think of any way of translating the statement into a technically coherent form that doesn’t involve the FCC redesigning the basic workings of the Internet.
UPDATE (8:55 PM): Seth Schoen has solved the mystery; see his comment. The mystery sentence looks like a very confused attempt to explain the fact that DTCP-over-IP sets the Time-To-Live field on its IP packets equal to three.
FCC Comments on Regulating Internet Explained
As noted yesterday (FCC to Regulate Whole Internet?), there was an extremely disturbing quote from an FCC official in the New York Times: An F.C.C. official said, for instance, that the broadcast flag could contain software code that was recognized…
FCC to Regulate Whole Internet?
I wrote about this earlier today (FCC to Regulate Routers – Critics of Broadcast Flag Get Mainstream Press) but it bears emphasis and should be very worrisome if true, as Ed Felten notes on Freedom to Tinker (Broadcast Flag Confusion)….
This is probably supposed to be a reference to the
decision by the DTLA to allow DTCP over IP. One
of the things that DTLA licensees are supposed to
do when sending DTCP over IP is to set the IP TTL
to 3, in the name of preventing DTCP data from
being sent more than 3 hops over the Internet.
(Obviously, this is very easy to get around using
VPNs and the like.)
Presumably the connection between this and the
broadcast flag got garbled somewhere along the
chain. If the FCC adopts a rule permitting ATSC
receivers to output to DTCP, the manufacturers
can, under the DTLA license, then output these
broadcasts over TCP/IP networks provided they set the
TTL to 3. That doesn’t mean that the broadcast
flag itself is doing this (it’s government
regulation, not the flag!) or that the messages
are really “self-destructing” (they’re just
expiring using the normal IP TTL decrement
mechanism).
The DTCP copy-control state people have proposed
for use with the broadcast flag (“marked content”)
is called “Copy Freely”. Of course, this doesn’t
really mean “Copy Freely”. It means, in effect,
copy freely by means of a local physical connection
to other DTLA-approved devices. (The new DTLA rule
about IP provides a new alternative the local
physical connection — it can now be an IP network
with up to 3 intermediate routers, as long as the
sink device at the other end is still DTLA-approved.)
At ARDG last week, this line of reasoning was very
much in evidence. The theory is that you can use
a combination of laws and technology to allow
relatively unrestricted copying between devices
connected to one another by cables (“at home”)
while strictly prohibiting those devices to publish
things “to the public” over a network.
The Internet may have destroyed distance, but a lot
of engineers are now fervently attempting to re-invent
it!
Oops, “people” should be “demodulators from broadcast to playback”.
It sounds like what was meant is:
The broadcast flag contains a hops-to-live (HTL) feature that allows the work to be copied only N generations (each time the work is copied, the HTL of the copy is decremented until no copying is permitted). This way, email copies could only go through three people.