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Comcast's Disappointing Defense

February 18, 2008 by

Last week, Comcast offered a defense in the FCC proceeding challenging the technical limitations it had placed on BitTorrent traffic in its network. (Back in October, I wrote twice about Comcast’s actions.)

The key battle line is whether Comcast is just managing its network reasonably in the face of routine network congestion, as it claims, or whether it is singling out certain kinds of traffic for unnecessary discrimination, as its critics claim. The FCC process has generated lots of verbiage, which I can’t hope to discuss, or even summarize, in this post.

I do want to call out one aspect of Comcast’s filing: the flimsiness of its technical argument.

Here’s one example (p. 14-15).

As Congresswoman Mary Bono Mack recently explained:

The service providers are watching more and more of their network monopolized by P2P bandwidth hogs who command a disproportionate amount of their network resources. . . . You might be asking yourself, why don’t the broadband service providers invest more into their networks and add more capacity? For the record, broadband service providers are investing in their networks, but simply adding more bandwidth does not solve [the P2P problem]. The reason for this is P2P applications are designed to consume as much bandwidth as is available, thus more capacity only results in more consumption.

(emphasis in original). The flaws in this argument start with the fact that the italicized segment is wrong. P2P protocols don’t aim to use more bandwidth rather than less. They’re not sparing with bandwidth, but they don’t use it for no reason, and there does come a point where they don’t want any more.

But even leaving aside the merits of the argument, what’s most remarkable here is that Comcast’s technical description of BitTorrent cites as evidence not a textbook, nor a standards document, nor a paper from the research literature, nor a paper by the designer of BitTorrent, nor a document from the BitTorrent company, nor the statement of any expert, but a speech by a member of Congress. Congressmembers know many things, but they’re not exactly the first group you would turn to for information about how network protocols work.

This is not the only odd source that Comcast cites. Later (p. 28) they claim that the forged TCP Reset packets that they send shouldn’t be called “forged”. For this proposition they cite some guy named George Ou who blogs at ZDNet. They give no reason why we should believe Mr. Ou on this point. My point isn’t to attack Mr. Ou, who for all I know might actually have some relevant expertise. My point is that if this is the most authoritative citation Comcast can find, then their argument doesn’t look very solid. (And, indeed, it seems pretty uncontroversial to call these particular packets “forged”, given that they mislead the recipient about (1) which IP address sent the packet, and (2) why the packet was sent.)

Comcast is a big company with plenty of resources. It’s a bit depressing that they would file arguments like this with the FCC, an agency smart enough to tell the difference. Is this really the standard of technical argumentation in FCC proceedings?

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Could Use-Based Broadband Pricing Help the Net Neutrality Debate?

January 17, 2008 by

Yesterday, thanks to a leaked memo, it came to light that Time Warner Cable intends to try out use-based broadband pricing on a few of its customers. It looks like the plan is for several tiers of use, with the heaviest users possibly paying overage charges on a per-byte basis. In confirming its plans to Reuters, Time Warner pointed out that its heaviest-using five percent of customers generate the majority of data traffic on the network, but still pay as though they were typical users. Under the new proposal, pricing would be based on the total amount of data transferred, rather than the peak throughput on a connection.

If the current, flattened pricing is based on what the connection is worth to a typical customer, who makes only limited use of the connection, then the heaviest five percent of users (let’s call them super-users as shorthand) are reaping a surplus. Bandwidth use might be highly elastic with respect to price, but I think it is also true that the super users do reap a great deal more benefit from their broadband connections than other users do – think of those who pioneer video consumption online, for example.

What happens when network operators fail to see this surplus? They have marginally less incentive to build out the network and drive down the unit cost of data transfer. If the pricing model changed so that network providers’ revenue remained the same in total but was based directly on how much the network is used, then the price would go down for the lightest users and up for the heaviest. If a tiered structure left prices the same for most users and raised them on the heaviest, operators’ total revenue would go up. In either case, networks would have an incentive to encourage innovative, high-bandwidth uses of their networks – regardless of what kind of use that is.

Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge has come out in favor of Time Warner’s move on these and other grounds. It’s important to acknowledge that network operators still have familiar, monopolistic reasons to intervene against traffic that competes with phone service or cable. But under the current pricing structure, they’ve had a relatively strong argument to discriminate in favor of the traffic they can monetize, and against the traffic they can’t. By allowing them to monetize all traffic, a shift to use based pricing would weaken one of the most persuasive reasons network operators have to oppose net neutrality.

Filed Under: Broadband Tagged With: , , ,

Obama's Digital Policy

December 28, 2007 by

The Iowa caucuses, less than a week away, will kick off the briefest and most intense series of presidential primaries in recent history. That makes it a good time to check in on what the candidates are saying about digital technologies. Between now and February 5th (the 23-state tsunami of primaries that may well resolve the major party nominations), we’ll be taking a look.

First up: Barack Obama. A quick glance at the sites of other candidates suggests that Obama is an outlier – none of the other major players has gone into anywhere near the level of detail that he has in their official campaign output. That may mean we’ll be tempted to spend a disproportionate amount of time talking about him – but if so, I guess that’s the benefit he reaps by paying attention. Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch tech primary provides the best summary I’ve found, compiled from other sources, of candidates’ positions on tech issues, and we may find ourselves relying on that over the next few weeks.

For Obama, we have a detailed “Technology and Innovation” white paper. It spans a topical area that Europeans often refer to as ICTs – information and communications technologies. That means basically anything digital, plus the analog ambit of the FCC (media concentration, universal service and so on). Along the way, other areas get passing mention – immigration of high tech workers, trade policy, energy efficiency.

Net neutrality may be the most talked about tech policy issue in Washington – it has generated a huge amount of constituent mail, perhaps as many as 600,000 constituent letters. Obama is clear on this: He says requiring ISPs to provide “accurate and honest information about service plans” that may violate neutrality is “not enough.” He wants a rule to stop network operators from charging “fees to privilege the content or applications of some web sites and Internet applications over others.” I think that full transparency about non-neutral Internet service may indeed be enough, an idea I first got from a comment on this blog, but in any case it’s nice to have a clear statement of view.

Where free speech collides with child protection, Obama faces the structural challenge, common to Democrats, of simultaneously appeasing both the entertainment industry and concerned moms. Predictably, he ends up engaging in a little wishful thinking:

On the Internet, Obama will require that parents have the option of receiving parental controls software that not only blocks objectionable Internet content but also prevents children from revealing personal information through their home computer.

The idealized version of such software, in which unwanted communications are stopped while desirable ones remain unfettered, is typically quite far from what the technology can actually provide. The software faces a design tradeoff between being too broad, in which case desirable use is stopped, and too narrow, in which case undesirable online activity is permitted. That might be why Internet filtering software, despite being available commercially, isn’t already ubiquitous. Given that parents can already buy it, Obama’s aim to “require that parents have the option of receiving” such software sounds like a proposal for the software to be subsidized or publicly funded; I doubt that would make it better.

On privacy, the Obama platform again reflects a structural problem. Voters seem eager for a President who will have greater concern for statutory law than the current incumbent does. But some of the secret and possibly illegal reductions of privacy that have gone on at the NSA and elsewhere may actually (in the judgment of those privy to the relevant secrets) be indispensable. So Obama, like many others, favors “updating surveillance laws.” He’ll follow the law, in other words, but first he wants it modified so that it can be followed without unduly tying his hands. That’s very likely the most reasonable kind of view a presidential candidate could have, but it doesn’t tell us how much privacy citizens will enjoy if he gets his way. The real question, unanswered in this platform, is exactly which updates Obama would favor. He himself is probably reserving judgment until, briefed by the intelligence community, he can competently decide what updates are needed.

My favorite part of the document, by far, is the section on government transparency. (I’d be remiss were I not to shamelessly plug the panel on exactly this topic at CITP’s upcoming January workshop.) The web is enabling amazing new levels, and even new kinds, of sunlight to accompany the exercise of public power. If you haven’t experienced MAPlight, which pairs campaign contribution data with legislators’ votes, then you should spend the next five minutes watching this video. Josh Tauberer, who launched Govtrack.us, has pointed out that one major impediment to making these tools even better is the reluctance of government bodies to adopt convenient formats for the data they publish. A plain text page (typical fare on existing government sites like THOMAS) meets the letter of the law, but an open format with rich metadata would see the same information put to more and better use.

Obama’s stated position is to make data available “online in universally accessible formats,” a clear nod in this direction. He also calls for live video feeds of government proceedings. One more radical proposal, camoflaged among these others, is

…pilot programs to open up government decision-making and involve the public in the work of agencies, not simply by soliciting opinions, but by tapping into the vast and distributed expertise of the American citizenry to help government make more informed decisions.

I’m not sure what that means, but it sounds exciting. If I wanted to start using wikis to make serious public policy decisions – and needed to make the idea sound simple and easy – that’s roughly how I might put it.

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Verizon Violates Net Neutrality with DNS Deviations

November 12, 2007 by

While many of us were discussing Comcast’s partial blocking of BitTorrent Traffic, and debating its implications for the net neutrality debate, a more clear-cut neutrality violation was apparently taking place on Verizon’s network – a redirection of Verizon customers’ failed DNS lookups, to drive traffic to Verizon’s own search engine.

Here’s the background. Suppose you’re browsing the web and you mistype an address – say you type “fredom-to-tinker”. Your browser will try to use DNS, the system that maps textual machine names to numeric IP addresses, to translate the name you typed into an address it can actually connect to across the Net. DNS will return an error, saying that the requested name doesn’t exist. Your browser (if it’s a recent version of IE or Firefox) will respond by doing a search for the text you typed, using your default search engine.

What Verizon did is to change how DNS works (for their residential subscribers) so that when a customer’s computer looks up a DNS name that doesn’t exist, rather than returning the name-doesn’t-exist error DNS says that the (non-existent) name maps to Verizon’s search site. This causes the browser to go to the Verizon search site, which shows the user search results (and ads) related to what they typed.

(This is the same trick used by VeriSign’s ill-fated SiteFinder service a few years ago.)

This is a clear violation of net neutrality: Verizon is interfering with the behavior of the DNS protocol, in order to drive traffic to its own search site. And unlike the Comcast scenario which might possibly have been justifiable as legitimate network management, in this case Verizon cannot claim to be helping its network run more smoothly.

Verizon’s actions have two effects. The obvious effect is to drive traffic from the search engines users chose to Verizon’s own search engine. That harms users (by overriding their choices) and harms browser vendors (by degrading their users’ experiences).

The less obvious effect is to break some other applications. DNS lookups that have nothing to do with browsing will still be redirected, because the DNS infrastructure has no way of knowing which requests relate to browsing and which don’t. So if some other application does a DNS lookup and the result should be a not-found error, Verizon will cause the result to point to a Verizon server instead. If a non-browser program expects to see not-found errors sometimes and has a strategy for dealing with them, it won’t be able to carry out that strategy because it won’t see the errors it should be seeing. This will even cause browsers to misbehave in some circumstances.

The effects of Verizon’s neutrality violation can be summarized simply: they interfer with a standard technical protocol; they cause harm on the whole, in part by breaking unrelated services; and they do this in order to override consumer choice by shifting traffic from consumer-chosen services to Verizon’s own services. This is pretty much the definition of a net neutrality violation.

This example contradicts at least two of the standard arguments against net neutrality regulation. First, it shows that violations do happen, and they do cause harm. Second, it shows that at least sometimes it’s easy to tell a harmful violation apart from legitimate network management.

But it doesn’t defeat all of the arguments against net neutrality regulation. Even though violations do occur, and do cause harm, it might turn out that the regulatory cure is worse than the disease.

Filed Under: Broadband Tagged With: , ,

Comcast Podcast

November 7, 2007 by

Recently I took part in a Technology Liberation Front podcast about the Comcast controversy, with Adam Thierer, Jerry Brito, Richard Bennett, and James L. Gattuso. There’s now a (slightly edited) transcript online.

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