Anoter brick in the IG debate...
An interestsing article i just got through Cyber-Society mailing list:
US: Tollbooths on the Internet Highway
by Editorial, The New York Times
February 20th, 2006
When you use the Internet today, your browser glides from one Web site to another, accessing all destinations with equal ease. That could change dramatically, however, if Internet service providers are allowed to tilt the playing field, giving preference to sites that pay them extra and penalizing those that don't.
Continue reading...
US: Tollbooths on the Internet Highway
by Editorial, The New York Times
February 20th, 2006
When you use the Internet today, your browser glides from one Web site to another, accessing all destinations with equal ease. That could change dramatically, however, if Internet service providers are allowed to tilt the playing field, giving preference to sites that pay them extra and penalizing those that don't.
Continue reading...
On another note, here is a link to an article which Leonichka sent me today:
The Credible Threat.
Dr. Michel Geist
Feb. 28/06
...Starting tomorrow, China's Ministry of Information Industry plans to begin offering four country-code domains. In addition to the dot-cn country code domain, three new Chinese character domains are on the way: dot-China, dot-net, and dot-com. As the People's Daily Online notes this "means Internet users don't have to surf the Web via the servers under the management of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) of the United States." In other words, the Chinese Internet becomes a reality tomorrow...
5 comments:
I've seen the first one doing the rounds, and though it sounds scary, I didn't see any real-life moves that make it seems like it would become a reality any time soon. And if something has once been free, won't people want it to always be free?? Where a service doesn't meet the existing expectations of the user wouldn't it be rejected immediately.
And then you mention a perfect article to continue thinking about this: competing Internets! (Now that one did make me turn) Even if the initial aim is simply to assist the Chinese to control information on the web(s) and to increase their dominance of "Internet management" the real outcomes for the rest of us would be that "Internet management" is slowly and gently taken out of the single hands of ICANN regardless of anything discussed at WSIS and ICANN's objections! The other real outcome would hopefully be that the Internet does not succumb to what was warned in the first article, so even though Michael refers to it as a "threat" in the end it could be a really good/sustainable/democratic thing.
Watching this space...
I didn't see any real-life moves that make it seems like it would become a reality any time soon. And if something has once been free, won't people want it to always be free?? Where a service doesn't meet the existing expectations of the user wouldn't it be rejected immediately.
Sorry for a slow response. :) Anyway, that's simply incorrect. Consumers' interests are quite frequently violated by industry deep-pockets, either by means of legislation or litigation.
Take the latest DRM developments for example. Or, even better, the multizone DVD-drives.
To me DRM wrappers and region-specific DVDs are a completely different case. For the typical consumer, DVDs have always been region specific (even though in Australia it's been ruled anticompetitive to enforce players to block other region DVDs according to the Trade Practices act). And DRM is basically a way to stop people stealing something that - in most cases - has never been free!
Of course "consumers' interests are quite frequently violated by industry deep-pockets," and I agree that consumer backlash wouldn't be enough to stop networks charging different amounts for certain "flavours" of bytes. As the nature of the technology use changes, the laws against anti-competition and for "universal access obligations" would need to be updated to ensure consumers still have equal access to the Internet.
Imagine if some node in Europe decides to start slowing certain traffic and increase the speed of traffic that their sponsors are paying to have delivered... It's analogous to being a domain that allows spam to be sent from it and it would be blacklisted. Packets start avoiding that node and taking a different route, so why should the sponsor keep paying?
Frankly, I did not intend to argue about the DRM issues. I'm a bit on a shaky ground here, and you sound very confident. :) Besides, being a linux person and a devoted Slashdot reader for years, I'm strongly biased towards anarchist psychos like RMS. However, when I read about things like Sony rootkit issue or Palladium, I come to believe that DRM tools are just too powerful to be trusted into hands of MS/Sony/Intel/whatever. It's not some abstract paranoia -- more than once I had to DeCSS the (legally) rented DVD just in order to play it on my linux box.
Back to our internet issue. There is a huge difference between spam filtering and slowing down the traffic. Consider two types of a traffic: a transport (level of TCP/UDP and downwards) and a content (internet protocols, such as mail/web, with the notable exception of DNS, which clearly belongs to the transport type).
Messing with a content is perfectly kosher. Using your example, filtering spam is harmless by definition, whatever the scale is. I'm too lazy to look for the details now, but I vaguely recall that Comcast stopped relaying all mail originating from China during one of the botnet attacks last year. On the other hand, if something like that would be done to a transport level, the consequences would be catastrophic and, even worse, unpredictable :) -- see how much damage was caused by the seemingly harmless Verisign/SiteFinder issue.
I have no clue how technical you are, so the following might sound trivial. I'm not too sure about the details myself. :) TCP implements some sort of heuristical algorithm to determine the optimal size of a chunk of a data to send. It gradually increases the size until the overall performance stops growing. If it detects the serious performance degradation, it falls back to half of the last chunk size and starts all over. Now think what happens if you slow down some of the packets that traverse your network. All the TCP streams that traverse your network simply operate at half of the maximal performance. If it is done on the network that is large enough, it would even impact the overall internet performance. I don't insist that this is exactly what will happen. My point is that nobody can know that.
I think you are right! It could happen.
At the same time, at a more philosophical level I have a (perhaps childish) belief that politics and perhaps some anti-slowing technology (to automatically reroute data to avoid problematic nodes) will arise to counter its effect. Too many companies have such a vested interest in keeping the internet running as fast and smooth as possible for as many people as possible.
Regardless, the effects it could have are interesting to predict, especially in terms of fair access in nations already getting a raw deal.
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