All Things Digital

In the future, “heavy users” of Comcast’s broadband service may face not just a periodic slowing–sorry, deprioritizing–of their service, but a capping of that service as well. Broadband Reports brings word today that Comcast plans to implement a 250GB broadband cap come October. “The intent appears to be to go after the people who consistently download far more than the typical user, without hurting those who may have a really big month infrequently,” a source familiar with the plan told BroadBand Reports. Indeed it does. Certainly, 250GB is quite a bit higher than the 5-40 GB caps being considered by some other providers. Still, it’s not exactly the “unlimited” service Comcast has sometimes touted in its marketing materials.

So what happens should one hit Comcast’s cap or exceed it? Comcast (CMCSA) says first-time transgressions will be addressed with an “excessive use” call from Comcast’s Customer Security Assurance group. But hit the cap twice in six months and you’ll be looking for a new ISP. “If a customer surpasses 250 GBs and is one of the top users of the service for a second time within a six-month time frame, his or her service will be subject to termination for one year,” Comcast explains in its Excessive Use FAQ. “After the one-year period expires, the customer may resume service by subscribing to a service plan appropriate to his or her needs.”

Assuming he or she is still willing to give Comcast his or her business.

To Comcast, throttling or degrading the performance of file-sharing services is a necessary traffic-management technique. To the Federal Communications Commission it’s a violation of the agency’s network-neutrality principles. On Friday, three of the FCC’s five commissioners voted in favor of punishing Comcast for that violation. “I continue to believe that is imperative that all consumers have unfettered access to the Internet,” FCC chairman Kevin Martin said in a statement. “I am pleased that a majority has agreed that the Commission both has the authority to and, in fact, will stop broadband service providers when they block or interfere with subscribers’ access.”

And just how does the FCC propose to do this?

By asking Comcast to change its ways.

Rather than sanctioning the company, the FCC will require Comcast (CMCSA) to stop interfering with Internet traffic on its network, explain to the Commission how it has blocked such traffic in the past and publicly disclose how it plans to manage its network in the future. “We would tell Comcast that they have to stop engaging in that practice,” Martin said earlier this month. “They have to disclose to the commission where they are engaging in that practice.”

The proposal will be put to a final vote Aug. 1. If it’s approved it could set a precedent that will undoubtedly inspire other Internet service providers to rethink their “traffic management” practices as Comcast has.

The Internet filtering agreements New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo inked with Verizon (VZ), Sprint (S) and Time Warner Cable (TWX) today, while certainly groundbreaking, pale a bit in comparison to the ones announced in France.

There, Internet service providers, and we’re talking all of them, have agreed to block access not just to sites and newsgroups alleged to contain child pornography, but to those alleged to feature materials promoting terrorism or racial hatred as well.

“We can no longer tolerate the sexual exploitation of children in the form of child pornography,” Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said in a speech today. “We have come to an agreement: access to child pornography sites will be blocked in France. Other democracies have done it. France could wait no longer.” And then, pledging her support for the “fundamental liberty that is Internet access,” she added: “This is not a question of creating a Big Brother on the Internet.”

Well, not yet anyway.

John Gilmore once famously claimed that “the Internet interprets censorship as failure and routes around it.” If he’s right, there’s no reason to worry that an agreement by three of the nation’s largest Internet service providers to block access to newsgroups and Web sites that traffic in child pornography might have other frightening consequences. If not, well …

Prodded into action by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, Verizon (VZ), Sprint (S) and Time Warner Cable (TWX) have agreed to block Web sites identified by Cuomo as ones that disseminate child pornography. They’ve also agreed to restrict access nationwide to most, and in the case of Time Warner Cable all, of Usenet’s discussion groups, most of which are not repositories of illegal material. To repeat, Time Warner will now block all of USENET.

“It’s going to make a significant difference,” Cuomo said of the agreement. “It’s like the issue of drugs. You can attack the users or the suppliers. This is turning off the faucet. Does it solve the problem? No. But is it a major step forward? Yes. And it’s ongoing. No one is saying you’re supposed to be the policemen on the Internet, but there has to be a paradigm where you cooperate with law enforcement, or if you have notice of a potentially criminal act, we deem you responsible to an extent. This literally threatens our children, and there can be no higher priority than keeping our children safe.”

Of course. A noble effort, this curtailing of access to child pornography. It would just be unfortunate if it became the first step in widespread Internet censorship.

If Bono is U2’s geopolitical pragmatist, the band’s manager Paul McGuinness is its neo-Luddite.

At the Music Matters confab in Hong Kong, McGuinness slagged broadband Internet service providers, accusing them of aiding and abetting music piracy while CD sales and royalty payments to musicians plunge. “The recorded music industry is in a crisis, and there is crucial help available but not being provided by companies who should be providing that help–not just because it is morally right, but because it is in their commercial interest,” said McGuinness, adding that Internet service providers have been “turning their heads” away from the music industry’s troubles. “One way or another, ISPs and mobile operators are the business partners of the future for the recorded-music business. But they are going to have to share the money in a way that reflects what music is doing for their business. The music business once had to bear the accusation that it was full of dinosaurs who looked back to an old business model rather than embracing a new one,” McGuinness said. “Today, though, it is the music business that is charting the way to the future. If there are dinosaurs around today, I think they are the Internet free-thinkers of the past who believe that copyright is the great obstacle to progress, that the distributors of content should enjoy profits without responsibilities and that the creators and producers of music should simply subordinate their rights to the rights of everyone else.”

By Internet free-thinkers, McGuinness presumably means those crazy longhairs in Silicon Valley whom he accused of destroying the recorded music industry in another keynote address back in January. “Embedded deep down in the brilliance of those entrepreneurial, hippy values seems to be a disregard for the true value of music,” he said at the time. “I suggest we shift the focus of moral pressure away from the individual P2P file thief and on to the multibillion dollar industries that benefit from these countless tiny crimes: the ISPs [internet service providers] the telcos [telecom companies], the device-makers. … We must shame them into wanting to help us. Their snouts have been at our trough feeding free for too long.”

Out of the car, longhair …

Comcast is apparently too busy drafting its “P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities” to bother attending the daylong hearing into its dubious “network management” practices. An odd decision for a company so intent on “clarifying” the practices ISPs should use to manage P2P applications running on their networks. But according to a company spokesperson, Comcast (CMCSA) “felt the issues specific to us were well covered at the first hearing, and the focus of this event should be broader than any individual company’s issues.”

Broader issues? Like reasonable network-management practices? The responsibility to deliver traffic fairly? Service disclosures? The sort of issues that might figure prominently in a “P2P Bill of Rights?”

Guess not.

Anyway, Comcast has already scrapped its policy of deliberately slowing some traffic flowing over BitTorrent and other P2P networks, so there’s really no need for Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin to bust its chops anymore. As Mitch Bowling, Comcast’s senior vice president and general manger of its Internet service, told the New York Times, Comcast’s new policy is to slow traffic based on usage pattern, not application. “[Our new technique] will be based purely on individual consumption by consumers,” Bowling said. “Anything in addition to that is outside the scope of what our network management goal is.”

So the company plans to throttle traffic to the customers that use the most bandwidth. Hmmm. I wonder who those might be? The folks who use the Internet for email and Web browsing or those who use it for downloading digital media?

It’s quite a road-to-Damascus conversion Comcast (CMCSA) is having these days, isn’t it?

Back in February the cable company claimed it was perfectly reasonable for it to throttle or degrade the performance of peer-to-peer file-sharing services on its broadband network. But when Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin suggested the agency was mulling action against it, Comcast had a moment of clarity. In March, it said it would work with BitTorrent to develop P2P-friendly network capacity-management techniques. And today it announced plans for an industry-wide effort to create a “P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.”

The document–which is to be created with the help of other Internet service providers, P2P companies and content providers–would specify how ISPs should manage P2P applications running on their networks and how consumers should use them. Said Tony Werner, Comcast Cable’s Chief Technology Officer, “By having this framework in place, we will help P2P companies, ISPs and content owners find common ground to support consumers who want to use P2P applications to deliver legal content.”

And by announcing its plans to create this framework right before the FCC hearing on its P2P-throttling techniques to be held at Stanford (in Palo Alto, Calif.) Thursday, Comcast is hoping the agency won’t take action against it for violating its Net neutrality rules.

It’s a Comcastic day for BitTorrent. This morning the cable provider, under fire for degrading the performance of the peer-to-peer file-sharing service on its broadband network, announced plans to develop better ways to manage peer-to-peer traffic. To that end, Comcast (CMCSA) will work with BitTorrent to develop a network capacity-management technique that is protocol agnostic.

Said Tony Werner, Comcast’s chief technology officer, “This new architecture would enable many new and emerging applications and will be based upon an open, nondiscriminatory framework that could interface with or support multiple technologies. We believe that P2P technology has matured as an enabler for legal content distribution, so we need to have an architecture that can support it with techniques that work over all networks.”

Of course you do. You just didn’t realize it until FCC Chairman Kevin Martin pointed it out, right?

Anyway, like most such corporately altruistic pledges, this one has the potential to do more good than bad–or more bad than good. “… We must recognize that these are two commercial entities whose goals are, in the end, to make sure that their networks and technologies are as profitable as possible,” writes Public Knowledge’s Jef Pearlman. “One can conceive of a world where an ISP and an application developer band together to make a proprietary system in which sanctioned application data gets preferred treatment, the ISP gets greater control of the application running on your computer, and both companies are happy in the exact situation we want to prevent. Time will tell what this partnership actually means.”

The concept is simple: The music industry forms a collecting society, which then offers file-sharing music fans the opportunity to ‘get legit’ in exchange for a reasonable regular payment, say $5 per month. So long as they pay, the fans are free to keep doing what they are going to do anyway–share the music they love using whatever software they like on whatever computer platform they prefer–without fear of lawsuits. The money collected gets divided among rights-holders based on the popularity of their music. In exchange, file-sharing music fans will be free to download whatever they like, using whatever software works best for them. The more people share, the more money goes to rights-holders. The more competition in applications, the more rapid the innovation and improvement. The more freedom to fans to publish what they care about, the deeper the catalog.”

–Excerpt from “A Better Way Forward: Voluntary Collective Licensing of Music File Sharing,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, April, 2004

Turns out that the Electronic Frontier Foundation was simply ahead of its time when it suggested that the recording industry adopt a voluntary collective-licensing model for music. Because the record labels are finally warming to the idea.

During tomorrow’s South by Southwest “Mobility, Ubiquity and Monetizing Music” panel, Jim Griffin, managing director of OneHouse–a digital entertainment consultancy that works with three of the four major labels–will argue the case for a file-sharing surcharge.

Like the “File-sharing Monetization” proposal recently pitched by the Songwriters Association of Canada and the EFF plan that the industry dismissed back in 2004, Griffin’s proposal would have Internet Service Providers add a flat-rate fee to their monthly charges to underwrite the cost of unlimited music downloads. The resulting funds would be divvied up among songwriters, performers, publishers and music labels.

“It’s monetizing the anarchy,” says Peter Jenner, head of the International Music Manager’s Forum, who will join Griffin on the panel. “The labels are beginning to like the idea of an access-to-music charge, because they’re increasingly aware that their current model is broken.”

If Fouad Mourtada spends the next three years in prison for creating a fake profile of a Moroccan prince on Facebook, it won’t have been the social-networking site that put him there. Facebook insists it didn’t help the Moroccan government identify the 26-year-old engineer as the author of crown prince Moulay Rachid’s fake Facebook page. Facebook spokeswoman Brandee Barker said in a statement that the company shares information with law enforcement and other government agencies only “when it has a good-faith belief it is legally obligated to do so.” But with regard to the bogus profile that led to Mourtada’s arrest, “Facebook has shared no such information with the Moroccan authorities,” she said.

So if not Facebook, then who? Advocacy group Reporters Without Borders suspects Mourtada’s ISP, Maroc Telecom. “Did the police get his computer’s IP address? And if so, how? We have asked the ISP, Maroc Telecom, in which the French company Vivendi is a shareholder, to provide us with the relevant information.”

Less than 5% of Pakistan’s citizens have Internet access, but those who do must have nasty tempers. Fearing that a reportedly anti-Islamic YouTube video would incite civil unrest, the Pakistani government ordered the country’s Internet service providers to block access to the video site, inadvertently triggering a two-hour long, global outage of YouTube yesterday.

Seems Pakistan Telecom blocked YouTube by hijacking its IP address and directing it to a so-called “black hole.” But when it sent that address out to the country’s Internet providers, it accidentally passed it on PCCW, one of Asia’s leading ISPs, as well. And PCCW propagated it to the rest of the world, and YouTube went down.

“It is exactly like the ‘game of telephone’ that kids play,” one network engineer explained: “For example, Pakistan Telecom says ‘I am responsible for 1.2.3.4 (some IP address)’ and then they tell PCCW. PCCW tells Verizon Business and NTT and others. NTT tells us, and so when my customers ask ‘Where is YouTube,’ we’re just answering based on what we’ve heard. … But all we know is that we heard it from NTT, who heard it from PCCW, who heard it from Pakistan Telecom. If Pakistan Telecom was lying (or made a mistake), we’d have no way to verify it.”

Apparently the transitive trust system on global routing is based can’t be trusted. “Whether accidental or not, the black-holing of YouTube by Pakistan Telecom demonstrates a serious weakness in the ‘longest prefix wins’ rule: There is no concept of trust contained in it,” Tomas Byrnes wrote in a message to the North American Network Operators Group mailing list. “Trust, whether implicit or explicit, is inherent in all human interactions, yet expressing it in cyberspace has continued to be troublesome. In routing decisions, once you are beyond a connected (either directly or multi-hop) peer, it becomes much more difficult.”