Comments on ‘Net Neutrality’

I sent the below to some friends when asked to join a letter advocating “Network neutrality”:

I am generally opposed to any federal or state regulation of what internet service providers can do vis a vis routing and BGP, packet prioritization etc. I do think that telcos should continue to function as common carriers, and that all commercial ISP’s should be required to reveal their packet prioritization and bandwidth clamping as part of consumer protection regulation, rather than being allowed to use the “up to 1.5 megabytes per second fast” kind of formulation in advertising.

There is no capital-I “Internet”. And there has not been since the NSF backbone shut down April 30, 1995. There is merely a loose association of networks who have agreed to share traffic over RFC-documented protocols. Each of the networks is entirely autonomous and self-governing.

It is the autonomous, voluntary, and self-governing aspects of the internet which are most important to preserve, not “net neutrality”. Internet freedom means that we allow other people to do things on their network which we personally don’t like (and may not allow on our network).

“We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code”

–Dave Clark, “An Input/Output Architecture for Virtual Memory Computer Systems”, Ph.D. dissertation, Project MAC Technical Report 117, January 1974

Networks belong to the people who own them. There is no reason that I, as a person who owns a network, should have to pay for additional bandwidth charges to say, backhaul traffic for AT&T or Google over my network if they are not clients of mine, or that I should route their packets over my net at all if I don’t want to. Nor should I have to give a non-subscriber equal priority on my network as say, medical imaging facilities for a customer.

“Net neutrality” is a shibboleth; I think we should avoid using the term and talk instead about “common carrier” status for the telcos and large ISP’s and voice carriers.

Links to previous stuff I have posted on my blog regarding “net neutrality”: http://scanlyze.wordpress.com/?s=net+neutrality

I am posting the above comment also to my blog, http://scanlyze.wordpress.com/

–HH.

Autonomous System (wikipedia)

Copyright © 2009 Henry Edward Hardy

Riese: A Girl and her Wolf

Riese: A Girl and her Wolf

Riese and Fenrir

I recently ran across a new web-only action/adventure production called Riese. The eponymous main character, played by Christine Chatelain, is fleeing from a tyrannical regime in the steampunk kingdom of Elysia. I like the Mad Max look of the costumes and the Dr. Horrible like semi-pro abandon with which the series is being edited and shot. The general premise, good kingdom overtaken by evil cult; heir(ess) on the run… is as old as the stories of Theseus and Oedipus. The show has an appealing during/post apocalypse sense which puts one in mind of A Boy and His Dog, Mad Max, especially the third installment, Beyond Thunderdome, V for Vendetta, Children of Men, The Handmaid’s Tale and many others. However it is a nice place from which to explore good versus evil, individual versus society and such tropes. The heroine has at least one supernatural seeming ability: to keep her eyeliner and eyeshadow lipstick and foundation pristine and unsmeared despite being pursued through the woods while wearing goggles and bleeding from a side wound and then engaging in a rather clumsy knife fight with several Mad-Maxian attackers.

I am generally happy with people taking their vision directly to web rather than letting it be ground up and homogenized by the “entertainment” industry.

Whether it be “Star Trek Phase II”, Star Wars Revelations, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, lonelygirl15, or the semi-professional docu-humor of Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock, such efforts can be good even if writing/acting/scripting/editing are not all that they could be because they are fun and true and come from the heart.

So bon chance to Riese. Here’s hoping it is not too horrible.

Copyright © 2009 Henry Edward Hardy

Characteristics of internet organizations and corporations

We reject: kings, presidents and voting.
We believe in: rough consensus and running code.

David Clark
Former Chair of the IAB, forerunner of IETF, 1992

Characteristics of internet organizations and corporations include:

• Very flat organizational structure
• Lack of respect for traditional models of organization (nation-states,
  for-profit corporations)
• “Can-do” attitude
• Social mission
• Community
• Respect for internet traditions
• Computer-mediated communications
• Innovation
• Meritocracy

Examples of Internet-related organizations:

• Sendmail Consortium Administers a widely used internet mail server program called Sendmail. Partnered with for-profit Sendmail Inc., see Sendmail Inc. corporate fact sheet.
• Open Source Initiative A 501(c)3 tax exempt corp. Certifies open-source software.
• Internet Engineering Task Force Principle engineering and standards-making body, under the auspices of
• ISOC, the Internet Society ISOC sponsors the published internet standards, the RFC’s
  (Requests for Comments).
• ARIN, American Registry for Internet Numbers
  

  Applying the principles of stewardship, ARIN, a nonprofit corporation, allocates Internet Protocol resources; develops consensus-based policies; and facilitates the advancement of the Internet through information and educational outreach.

  ARIN assigns internet numbers to the US and parts of the rest of the world. Other Regional Internet Registries include AfriNIC, http://www.afrinic.net/, APNIC, http://www.apnic.net/, LACNIC, http://www.lacnic.net/, and RIPE NCC, http://www.ripe.net/

• Mozilla Foundation

We are helping make the Internet a place… where you and your neighbours build the world you want. that generates not only economic value, but also civic and social value. that is optimized for multiple languages and locales. that is trustworthy and has minimal risk for users.

The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that sponsors the Mozilla project and devotes its resources to promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the Internet. We do this by supporting the community of Mozilla contributors and by assisting others who are building technologies that benefit users around the world.

Sponsors of Firefox, Thunderbird and many other projects.

Partnered with Mozilla Corporation, a for-profit subsidiary.

• ICANN, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a not for profit Corporation which superrvises the Domain Name System under the auspices of US Department of Commerce
• IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority,
  

  The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is responsible for the global coordination of the DNS Root, IP addressing, and other Internet protocol resources.

  IANA is now operated by ICANN.

• DARPA, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,
  

  The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is the central research and development organization for the Department of Defense (DoD). It manages and directs selected basic and applied research and development projects for DoD, and pursues research and technology where risk and payoff are both very high and where success may provide dramatic advances for traditional military roles and missions.

  DARPA funded the Arpanet, forerunner of the Internet, and gave rise to much of the Internet’s risk-taking and out-of-the-box-thinking culture. Specializes in technologies leading to “disruptive change”.

The Global Internet is arguably larger than any corporation or nation in history, yet it has a very flat and dispersed implicate order. And it does work, most of the time.

Copyright © 2008 Henry Edward Hardy

See also:
Comcast versus the Net

Comcast versus the Net

The following is written in response to: Comcast: We’re Delaying, Not Blocking, BitTorrent Traffic on the Bits blog at nytimes.com.

The allegation made against Comcast by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and reported by the Associated Press is that Comcast have allegedly been inserting forged reset (RST) packets into the datastream. This is not analogous to delaying a call. It is more analogous to the company disconnecting a call in mid-sentence because they have been listening in and classifying the type of conversation and don’t like what is being discussed or think it is likely a waste of time.

This is unethical if it is being done and also goes against the Internet technical documents, the RFC’s. Further there are several potential legal issues including potential violations of the:

* Electronic Communications Privacy Act 18 USC § 2510.

* General Prohibition Against Traces and Traps 18 USC § 3121.

* The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1030.

* The Cable TV Privacy Act of 1984, 47 U.S.C. § 551.

* State statutes such as Michigan statue Fraudulent Access to Computers, Computer Systems, and Computer Networks, MCL 795.791.

Whatever Comcast routing and Quality of Service provisions are in effect should be fully spelled out and transparent to regulators, internet technical experts and the general public so that citizens can make an informed choice about whether they want their internet unsurveilled, uncensored and uninterrupted… or whether they want Internet which is “Comcastic”.

See Comcastic?!? Not So Much…
Comcast and BitTorrent; a Complicated Relationship
Technorati posts tagged comcast bittorrent

See also An Open Letter to Rich Sheridan regarding the proposed insertion of spam by the Wireless Washtenaw Project
Seven Questions on ‘Net Neutrality’ for Ann Arbor City Councilman Ron Suarez

Copyright © 2007 Henry Edward Hardy

An Open Letter to Rich Sheridan regarding the proposed insertion of spam by the Wireless Washtenaw Project

The following was written in response to the pricing plan for Wireless Washtenaw.

Rich Sheridan has served on the steering committee of the Wireless Washtenaw Project for some time. Rich is someone for whom I have done work in the past and I am surprised by his poor judgment and lack of knowledge of the issues in this particular instance.

An Open Letter to Rich Sheridan regarding the proposed insertion of spam by the Wireless Washtenaw Project:

Rich,

Thanks for the interesting conversation today regarding Wireless Washtenaw. You told me, “The Internet was built by business”. When I disagreed and asked you if you had ever heard of Prof. Jon Postel, you finally (after asking the third time) admitted you had not heard of him. Here’s a link to the wikipedia article on Prof. Jon Postel.

Here’s Jon Postel’s tribute page from the Information Sciences Institute at USC.

When Jon died, he received the some of the most moving tributes from around the world that I have seen for any person, recent or historical. Many of the founders of the Internet are among the eulogists recorded at the Internet Society pages about Jon.

The Internet did not come about through the profit motive. Not at all. The Net is possibly the single most complex and valuable piece of engineering ever accomplished by humans, and it came about through the efforts of selfless individuals working for the betterment of all mankind. People like JCR Licklider, Bob Kahn, Larry Roberts, Steve Crocker, Vint Cerf, and Dr. Postel are the people we should be seeking to emulate personally and professionally.

To take the surplus value in the Net created by all these selfless patriots and try to monetize it in the way that 20/20 is doing through the public face of the Wireless Washtenaw project, is not a good thing. Having third parties who just happen to own one of the dozen or so routers between sender and receiver insert into the datastream their own or third-party ads degrades the Net for both sender and receiver, and breaks the unwritten compact whereby anyone with an upstream router on the Net passes along third-party traffic in a manner similar to a common carrier, without intercepting or interfering by, for instance, adding spam advertising content to that communication. This principle is sometimes referred to as “Net Neutrality”.

There are also legal issues revolving around this approach to funding Wireless Washtenaw regarding the Electronic Communications Privacy Act 18 USC § 2510.

Also pertinent is the General Prohibition Against Traces and Traps 18 USC § 3121.

I also think this deliberate insertion of spam into the network may fall afoul of the Michigan statue Fraudulent Access to Computers, Computer Systems, and Computer Networks, MCL 795.791 et passim.

What you all are talking about doing with this Wireless Washtenaw “free” service is filling the web browsers of people using the free, public service with third-party spam. Adding banner ads to a content provider’s web page without their consent or inserting interstitial ads between content provider and subscriber is leveraging the intellectual property of that content provider without their permission. This is analogous to sneaking into the Washtenaw News warehouse on S. Industrial and slipping additional advertising into the Sunday Times inserts without their permission. This Wireless Washtenaw “free” service with spam added is not a public service at all, but a fundamental attack on the integrity, security and utility of the Net itself.

sincerely,

Henry Edward Hardy

see also: Seven Questions on ‘Net Neutrality’ for Ann Arbor City Councilman Ron Suarez

Copyright © 2007 Henry Edward Hardy