Tech heavyweights explain how to destroy the Internet

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>

Tech heavyweights explain how to destroy the Internet
By Thomas C Greene in Washington
Posted: 01/04/2004 at 23:09 GMT
<http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/22/36744.html>

A group of tech celebs gathered on Capitol Hill this week to brief
Congressional aides on how Congress and the Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) can, and probably will, make a complete mess of the
Internet in about a year's time.

At issue are likely revisions to the 1996 Telecommunications Act and FCC
regulations, which, thus far, have managed to do scant violence to the Net.
Unfortunately, changes now being contemplated, urged by telecomms and media
behemoths and their lobbyists, may soon alter that happy state of affairs.
Broadband users are particularly at risk, because they enjoy little of the
consumer choice available to dialup users. One can connect to a phone line
and reach any of hundreds of dialup ISPs. Broadband users have no such
luxury.

The deregulation scam

FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, who fought FCC Chairman Michael Powell's
effort to ease regulations preventing the colonization of America's airwaves
and print media by a handful of cartels, understands the crucial difference
between deregulation and freedom.

"Entrenched interests are already jockeying to constrain the openness that
has been the Internet's defining hallmark, and they are lobbying the FCC to
aid and abet them," Copps declared.

"They claim all they are advocating is a deregulated environment where the
market can reign supreme. But in reality, they are seeking government help
to allow a few companies to turn the Internet from a place of completion and
innovation, into an oligopoly. Power over the Internet would then reside
with the network owners, who could use choke-point power to constrain
consumer choices, limit sources of news and information and entertainment,
undermine competitors, and quash disruptive new technologies."

The Internet must remain device and technology neutral, and open, Copps
warned. To illustrate, he pointed out that 35 years ago the phone company
restricted the devices that could be attached and confined them to its own
kit, using the excuse of ensuring quality of service. And then the FCC
created a right of attachment, allowing consumers to hook up any device to
the network so long as it caused no harm, and spawned dramatic growth in
scores of industries. A similar regulation is needed for broadband Internet
access, he hinted.

Regulate the layer, not the Net

Stanford University Law Professor Larry Lessig picked up this thread by
speaking about the importance of keeping the Net technology-neutral and
dumb, uninterested in what it happens to transport, and letting applications
and devices at the ends develop the real smarts.

Internet patriarch Vint Cerf then struggled to explain the network structure
in language understandable by non-technical folks, with mixed success. He
tried to show how the network is layered, and warned against regulation of
the whole when a particular layer or protocol is all one needs to deal with.

"The United States divides a lot of telecommunications services into
different classes depending on not only the application, but also the
underlying transport medium," Cerf explained. "So, voice over wire and voice
over wireless, we regulate them differently. We regulate audio and video
broadcast differently than [voice], and we regulate the cable television
industry differently from the broadcast industry."

The Net "destroys that whole model because it can carry anything, including
voice and video, over Internet packets; and Internet packets don't care what
the transmission medium is. So this [current regulatory] model is in
conflict with the fundamental architecture of the Internet.

"Since policy often has a direct effect on players, we need to know which
layer in the architecture we want the policy to influence," he said.

Bad faith

The best speech came from University of Virginia Law School Associate
Professor Tim Wu, who cited actual examples of industry abuse worth
regulating against. He recalled broadband providers such as AT&T, that
initially banned such devices as Wi-Fi routers, the use of which it called
theft of service, even threatening subscribers with jail time for using
them. Others have responded by refusing to offer tech support but offering
their own Wi-Fi gear at additional cost.

He mentioned as well that broadband providers, Comcast in particular, have
restricted or banned the use of virtual private networks (VPNs). The idea
here is to charge the customer as a business user, rather than a home user,
and extort extra money. Servers and VoIP have also been banned in places, to
protect other services that the provider offers. ®


Thomas C Greene is the author of Computer Security for the Home and Small
Office, a complete guide to online anonymity, system hardening, encryption,
and data hygiene for Windows and Linux, available now at discount in the
USA, and the UK.

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