Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) wants to double charge for the internet

Many ordinary internet users are unaware: there’s a war being fought by the net savvy for everyone’s right to get to the internet. Net Neutrality centers on the argument that:

Everyone pays for their own Internet connection.Google is paying lots of money for lots of bandwidth for its Internet connection. Individual subscribers are paying, relatively speaking, lots of money for their residential Internet connection. When individual pay $40 a month for their broadband connection, part of what they are paying for is their ISP’s backbone connection. When Google pays lots of money for its connection, it is paying lots of money for its ISP’s backbone connection. All of these networks come together in the Internet backbone, interconnect, and exchange traffic. It is paid for.

Legal precedent states that your ISP is a Common Carrier. This means that they are not responsible for policing what kind of packets they deliver to your house, nor do they have any right to go poking around in the packets delivered to you. So, if you want to read the political views of an ousted dissonant your ISP is not responsible for enforcing that rule. Their role is to get the information from one place to another, with neither interest nor responsibility for the content.

Common carriers are carriers of goods, people, and information such as trains, planes, buses, and telephone companies. They can not discriminate with regard to what they carry or where they carry it.

Moving up to ever more Value Added Services

From a business standpoint, your ISP doesn’t want to provide just the roads. It wants to sell Ice Creams and to transport Diamonds. More than that, it wants to levy a toll on anyone that uses its roads for such value added services. They want their fingers in every pie.

Your ISP controls what you see, and how good (what sites load, how slow vs. fast, how smooth vs. choppy) it is:

The Internet in the [middle] is distributed. As one moves to the residential edge of the network, the network becomes less distributed. At the edge, there may be only one available route [from the ISP to you].

As consumers, we are all vulnerable to the might and power in the market of corporates. If we need a service, and only one company provides it, we have no option but to pay their asking price. To quote U.S. v. Microsoft:

Microsoft enjoys so much power in the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems that if it wished to exercise this power solely in terms of price, it could charge a price for Windows substantially above that which could be charged in a competitive market.

Want another firm so powerful as Microsoft squashing other firms? To quote http://www.cybertelecom.org/ci/neutral.htm :

If you review the literature of the proponents of Network Neutrality, there is rough consensus as to policy - network neutrality is about preventing a network with market power from discriminating - acknowledging the important role a network plays as a carrier of information.

From 1990 to a bit after 2000, no one ISP had sufficient market power to deviate from this precedent. As the ISP market became competitive, neutrality was provided by the discipline of competition. At the height of the ISP market, the average American had a choice of 10+ ISPs […] and there were over 7000 ISPs in the United States […]. Strong competition meant strong incentives to provide fully functioning Internet access.

They could not demand that the customer pay extra for applications or services they did not want; they could not block access to competitive applications or services. Customers in the competitive ISP market would simply change providers.

Power in the ISP Market

Translated to Canada, this means the big Internet Service Providers (read: Rogers/Bell) have so many customers that they can levy an charge on businesses providing services over the internet (read: Google, Accenture, Freshbooks or your child).

But, not only CAN they, they DO. For example: Rogers interfere with traffic:

For the past 18 months, Rogers traffic shaping has been an open secret. While Rogers at first denied the practice, it effectively acknowledged it in late 2005, arguing that peer-to-peer file sharing was using a disproportionate percentage of network resources and that the traffic shaping was needed to maintain the functionality of core services such as email and web browsing.

In response to the implementation of traffic shaping, many file sharing applications now employ encryption to make it difficult to detect the contents of data packets. This has led to a technical “cat and mouse” game, with Rogers now believed to be one of the only ISPs in the world to simply degrade encrypted traffic.

Discrimination:

Networks have discriminated against what equipment can be attached to networks, what applications can be used over a network, whether calls go to one competitor or to another, and even whether subscribers can criticize the network service provider. Examples of discrimination include:

• Blocking VoIP competitors like Vonage and Skype.
• Blocking access to websites that criticize the service provider
• Contractually bar subscribers in the AUP from criticizing the service provider.
• Prohibit virtual private networks
• Prohibit attaching servers.
• Limit the amount of streaming media that can be viewed.
• Prohibit Wifi networks in your home.
• Prohibit P2P applications. [YouTube / Skype / BitTorrent ]
• Refuse to let certain content, including competitor’s advertisements, over their networks.

And now, who is trying to silence the public?

In Canada, at Net Neutrality.ca, over 2351 signatures from the public were collected protesting against ISP. Last night we discovered that Net Neutrality.ca had been taken down because of “Legal Concerns”:

What does this mean for democracy? Who knows what this means? Too early to say.

What you can do

Up until today I had resisted the urge to write, although I had signed the petition. With this post, this has changed.

Last night I ordered TekSavvy, a DRY DSL replacement for Rogers Cable Internet. Yes, the Bell Sympatico adverts showing me choppy YouTube videos struck home but all the reviews I’ve read show I have no reason to trust Bell any more than I did Rogers.

For more, see http://www.willpate.org/2007/03/26/3-easy-ways-to-support-net-neutrality-in-canada/ http://ambermac.typepad.com/ambermac/2007/03/the_net_neutral.html

For your reference, after the jump, text that used to live on Net Neutrality.ca,

Net Neutrality Canada

Net Neutrality in Canada is the principle that consumers should be in control of what content, services and applications they use on the public Internet.

It’s a simple concept that has wide-ranging implications on how the Internet operates.

“When I invented the Web, I didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission. Now, hundreds of millions of people are using it freely. I am worried that that is going end” - Sir Tim Berners Lee.

It is our belief that the Internet is more than just the physical infrastructure over which it operates. It is a vibrant marketplace and an entirely new format for free expression, even a political landscape and a tool for free organization. Some ISPs in Canada however, are overstepping their role and cannot separate their participation in this network from their component ownership and commercial interests.

In order to protect the Internet from these increasingly invasive corporate interests, we are asking that the government define the rules for which ISPs may participate on the Internet and mandate the application and content neutrality of Internet access providers.

By protecting Net Neutrality, we guarantee that pro-union sites do not get blocked, that ISPs do not charge anti-competitive ‘preference’ fees and that independent media can compete based on content, not pocketbook, with the largest of publishers.

It’s time for the Canadian government to stand up and protect the future of the Canadian Internet.

Posted by Kevin McArthur

Mr. Speaker, once again, the Minister of Industry is siding with telecommunications giants against consumers and is refusing to apply the principle of net neutrality, which guarantees identical upload or download speeds for anonymous blogs and big business websites alike. Real competition for sure.

Can the minister make a commitment, here in this House, not to make any decisions that would favour big businesses at the expense of consumers, thus ensuring that the Internet remains a democratic tool?

- Paul Crête, MP

While the definition of net neutrality is open to some debate, at the core is the commitment to ensuring that Internet service providers treat all content and applications equally with no privileges, degrading of service or prioritization based on the content’s source, ownership or destination.

- Michael Geist

Beware of the phonies

There are a lot of what is called “astroturf” groups advocated concerning Net Neutrality - well, let’s be honest, advocating against Net Neutrality. These groups look like they represent the views of the public when in fact they represent the views of incumbent communications monopoly or duopoly broadband service providers such as AT&T, Verizon, or Comcast. The Consumers Union released in March 2006 entitled Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing: Telecom Industry Front Groups and Astroturf identifying some of these organizations. But of course, many of these organizations simply change their name and their website - and it looks like yet another organization has entered the fray.

http://www.cybertelecom.org/ci/neutral.htm#adv

Finally Some other random snippets from http://www.cybertelecom.org/ci/neutral.htm:

Opponents of network neutrality argue that if they cannot discriminate, bandwidth hogs will use up all available bandwidth, cause a burdensome cost on the network provider, and thereby eliminate the incentive of the networks to build. They point to YouTube and Peer-to-Peer users as causing network congestion.

Proponents of network neutrality argue that this is a false scare tactic. As noted above, different service level agreements is the norm. Traditionally, Internet access at dial up speed was sold at one rate; DSL speed was sold at another rate; and a T1 Internet connection was sold at another rate. This is not an argument that everyone should pay the same rate.

The Internet in the backbone is distributed. As one moves to the residential edge of the network, the network becomes less distributed. At the edge, there may be only one available route; if that route fails, the failure is fatal. Traffic cannot be rerouted. Where there is only one route, the network is not distributed, and this crucial Internet characteristic is lost.

If a network service discriminates in the backbone, this would be treated as a “failure” and would simply be routed around. If a network service discriminates at the edge (non-neutral behavior), this “failure” is fatal and cannot be routed around.

Market Solutions:

In the event of discriminatory treatment by a carrier, the individual users of the network could take the following counter measures:

• Switch ISPs assuming that there is competition
• Individuals could create an alternative bit path
• • Community networks, municipal networks (e.g. open access net), broadband resale
• Non Technical:
• • Bring consumer pressure on carrier
  • Lie on application to get different level service
• Technical
• • Virtual Private Networks
  • Source Destination Address Filtering
• Learning to Live with Discrimination
• • Take advantage of applications that are not vulnerable to discrimination
  • Buffering or Download as opposed to real time
  • Distributed caches
  • Compression

[Lehr] According to Prof. Lehr, an “arms race has costs also, so some rules may help discipline.” Carriers have the ability to mitigate the effectiveness of individual’s actions. Individuals ability to take advantage of these options may be limited by their technical expertise.

For the last point, if you are technical and reading this, do someone a favour and help them get off Monopoly providers. It’s not until their Profit and Loss statement shows a hit that they’ll really listen.

Technorati : Canada, Net Neutrality

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 21st, 2007 at 10:33 am and is filed under Canadian Competitiveness, Government Deregulation, MBA, Organizational Transparency. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.