More DPI (or what Marketplace? djf)

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Brett Glass [brett () lariat net]
Sent: Sunday, July 20, 2008 2:59 PM
To: David Farber; ip
Cc: dan () gillmor com
Subject: Re: [IP] More DPI (or what Marketplace? djf)

At 05:11 PM 7/19/2008, Dan Gillmor wrote:

> The first two of those offer many different competitors. The last
> offers, at most, two competitors in the vast majority of places.

Alas, this is a common misconception which has been promulgated by
many people (e.g. Susan Crawford and the lobbying group Free Press)
in support of regulation of the Internet.

In fact, there are somewhere between 4,000 and 8,000 independent
ISPs in the United States offering competitive DSL and/or wireless
broadband service. (This is more than 80, on average, per state --
and some serve multiple states and/or overlap with multiple
competitors.) Even in our small city of Laramie, Wyoming -- with a
population of 28,000 -- our wireless broadband provider now has
three competitors.

> They come from regulated, monopoly industries where they could not have
> pulled this kind of crap before; imagine, as someone else has noted,
> if phone companies declared it their right to listen in on
> conversations in order to sell products (or anything else).

Our ISP is very protective of users' privacy and only monitors traffic
for the purposes of maintaining quality of service, detecting abuse,
detecting and repairing malfunctions, or complying with lawful requests
from courts and government agencies. And we only alter or block traffic
to prevent abuse (e.g. spam), enforce our terms of service, or provide
Web acceleration (which can be turned off upon request). Should someone
be unhappy with the policies of a cable company or telephone company,
he or she should consider our services or those of an ISP like us. We
are nearly ubiquitous.

> This is not a fair game. It's a rigged one, with a "marketplace" that
> is so uneven in power that the customer is helpless.

While Congress and the FCC have done nearly everything they possibly
could to prevent companies like ours from remaining as competitors,
we persevere nonetheless. Alas, ill-considered "blanket" laws or
regulations prohibiting what we do would not only impact competition
but perhaps destroy it altogether, leaving a complete cable/telco
duopoly. Most of the proposed restrictions on "deep packet inspection"
(a misnomer, because an IP packet is one-dimensional and has no
"depth" at all) would do exactly this.

--Brett Glass, LARIAT (307)761-2895




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