[Ecommerce] Open Democracy on net neutrality

[Judit Rius Sanjuan]

The battle for net neutrality
Becky Hogge
9 - 5 - 2006

Source: http://www.opendemocracy.net/media/neutrality_3519.jsp

A proposed new law in the United States reflects the desire of cable and
telecommunications companies to turn the internet=92s information-flows
into a market. It shall not pass, says Becky Hogge.

I'm afraid I can't help it. Whenever I hear about the highly influential
Save the Internet campaign, the broad coalition fighting its case for
"network neutrality" against the United States's mega telcos in Congress
this week, I'm reminded of one of the emails I came across during
research for my column on hoaxes last month. Here's how it begins: "It's
that time again! As many of you know, each year the Internet must be
shut down for 24 hours in order to allow us to clean it. The cleaning
process, which eliminates dead email and inactive ftp, www and gopher
sites, allows for a better-working and faster Internet=85"

Yeah, right (as the sulky teenager said to the physics teacher). We all
know the internet is a network of ends, of servers and terminals
connected to one another, pumping pornography and disinformation from
many to many across stupid wires. If anybody's going to switch it off,
it will be us, although what kind of super-telepathic lemming moment
that would be doesn't bear thinking about. Perhaps when we're invaded by
mind-controlling aliens.

Once upon a time, when the humble pioneers of cyberspace started work on
the early internet, they were designing a network whose future use was
not yet defined. Confident that the possibilities of this network
outreached their imaginations, early developers made the net deeply
flexible. Their principle was "end-to-end": a basic tenet that assured
the bottom-up, user-driven innovation of the internet for decades to come.

In simple terms, end-to-end locates all the intelligence in the machines
at the edges or ends of the network, keeping the wires which connect
them neutral, or "dumb", unable to discriminate against the data which
flows through them beyond a simple policy of "first come, first served".
Innovation comes from the edge =96 from individual computers running novel
programs. The wires need no modification to run new applications =96
machines at the edge translate their wishes into the lingua franca of
the net. The wires simply chug the data along in packets of 1's and 0's.
This is network neutrality.

 From email to the World Wide Web to eBay, new applications have
mushroomed on the net simply because all it took to innovate was a
computer and a connection. Providers of news services and commercial
applications had no need to factor in strategic players in the
distribution network. The wires were dumb: they could not hinder, they
could not censor. Network neutrality dramatically lowered the cost of
innovation, both in terms of structural legwork and in terms of risk.
Innovation flourished.

Across enemy lines

But there was a silent, unwilling partner in this fairytale. During the
1970s and 1980s, as AT&T in the US and then BT in the United Kingdom
were broken up by their respective governments, the monopolies were
forced to allow competitive use of "their" telecommunications
infrastructure. Newly-formed internet service providers (ISPs) rushed in
to connect modems to this network of dumb copper wires, offering homes
and businesses dial-up connection for the first time. The telcos let
them get on with it, unmoved by this user-led curiosity called internet.

That soon changed. As early as 1999, Cisco Systems, who manufacture the
routers which propel data around the net, produced a white paper
entitled Controlling Your Network: a Must for Cable Operators. In it
they advocate what some have dubbed a "walled garden" internet, where
the "first come, first served" approach of data transmission is replaced
by "policy-based" routing.

Cheered on by the Federal Communications Commission, US telcos and
cablecos have been in deep conversation with American lawmakers ever
since (usually in courts of law, but occasionally, one imagines, on
luxury yachts in the Caribbean), deciding whether they should be allowed
to control information that runs through their network in a cleverer way
than first come, first served. They want to run the wires like a market,
selling faster speeds to those who can pay and creaming off some profit
in the process.

The Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act of 2006
(which sounds so much like doublespeak, it makes me want to dance) is
the latest manifestation of this desire, and it's got everyone from Gun
Owners of America to MoveOn.org fairly riled. Just like our hoax email,
the COPE act promises a "better-working, faster internet", especially
with regards to spam emails, but its many critics claim measures to
safeguard network neutrality are weak at best.

So how might an internet without network neutrality look? Suppose that,
in this environment, you went online to book a safari holiday. Your
homepage, the page that appears first when you click on to the net, is
sponsored by your ISP. Let's call them coyote.net. Helpfully, coyote.net
lists a number of services available to you =96 books, music, news, views,
theatre and holidays, the latter proclaiming "the best deals on the
Web". You dutifully click through.

coyote.net/holidays is run by ACME Travel Co, a brand you recognise. It
offers some great-sounding safaris, although you're not convinced they
represent the last word in value, and a couple sound more like colonial
game-hunts. You recall an article in last weekend's newspaper about a
firm specialising in eco-safaris =96 you find the article and type the web
address in the box at the top of the screen. Then something funny happens.
Your computer slows down to the kind of speed you thought you'd never
have to suffer again the first day you subscribed to broadband. Empty
boxes appear on your screen where pictures should be, with red crosses
and tantalising titles like "Elephant at sunset". The line at the bottom
of the screen reads "receiving data" for several minutes, and your
patience wears thin.

What are you thinking as you hit the back button and return to ACME?
That the eco-website is unprofessionally put together? Slow to load and
unprepared for the kind of traffic produced by a tiny plug in a
broadsheet supplement? That eco-tourism is all very well, but if they
don't have the goods to back it up, then why bother in the first place?

In fact, your independent eco-website is crossing enemy lines. Machines
plugged in to the net along the wires your site is crossing have spotted
it, and are choking the data to honour coyote.net's financial agreement
with ACME Travel Co. You are just one of the millions of users
unwittingly keeping archaic ACME at the top of its field, while
disadvantaged innovators struggle to compete. Even if you did wise up to
the wires' (ahem) wily antics, chances are you couldn't do a thing about it=
.

The COPE act (also known as the Barton bill) is expected to go to a full
House of Representatives vote this week. After an amendment to protect
net neutrality gained considerable ground in a House Energy and Commerce
Committee vote last month, campaigners are quietly positive that their
grassroots lobbying will defeat COPE in its current form. Let's hope
they're right. And let's hope representatives have been using the
internet recently, so they might have an inkling of what they are about
to save.

Tim Berners-Lee, designer of the World Wide Web, writes in his blog on
network neutrality: "The Internet is increasingly becoming the dominant
medium binding us. The neutral communications medium is essential to our
society. It is the basis of a fair competitive market economy. It is the
basis of democracy, by which a community should decide what to do. It is
the basis of science, by which humankind should decide what is true. Let
us protect the neutrality of the net."

Becky Hogge is openDemocracy's Technology Director and Technology
Commissioning Editor. Also by Becky Hogge in openDemocracy, a selection
from her "Virtual reality" column and other articles:
"The Great Firewall of China" (May 2005)
"Why the WSIS? Democracy and cyberspace" (November 2005)
"Global voices: blogging the world" (December 2005)
"Some grown-up questions for Google" (February 2006)
"Internet freedom comes of age" (February 2006)
"Payday for the free internet" (March 2006)
"Internet Hoaxes hit politics" (April 2006)
"Microsoft: closed windows and hidden vistas" (April 2006)

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--
Judit Rius Sanjuan
judit.rius at cptech.org
www.cptech.org

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