Rhetoric about unrestricted access needs to be toned down
Stanford law professor Larry Lessig, founder of Creative Commons and campaigner against political corruption, made a powerful PowerPoint presentation (see video) at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) one-day hearing on net neutrality at Stanford last Thursday, 17 April.
Lessig set out his stall more briefly in a San Francisco Chronicle Open Forum editorial.
Lessig made a strong case for the FCC to rule that internet architecture should remain open, neutral, and as uncomplicated as the electricity distribution grid. An electrical grid that could discriminate against unapproved devices was theoretically possible, he said, but could not possibly be justified.
The hearing could not get past the ‘thin end of the wedge’ issue of Comcast having throttled BitTorrent traffic by using fake reset packets. A spokesperson for the Christian Coalition of America pointed out that the Chinese government uses the same technique to censor the internet.
One of the FCC commissioners warned against regulation that would prevent ISPs from blocking child pornography. The president of the Songwriters Guild of America called for discrimination against unauthorized music sharing. The president of the Independent Film & Television Alliance replied with a plea for non-discrimination, ‘so that the internet does not become the closed bastion that television has become.’
Elephant in the living room
George Ou, a former network engineer, told the hearing that network traffic management has long been integral to intranets and the internet. Billions must be spent to increase capacity, and a flat access charge subsidises high volume content providers and users. The unstated but obvious conclusion was that absolute net neutrality, as discussed at the forum, did not and could not exist.
As far as we know, nobody has refuted the ‘tragedy of the commons’ thesis formulated by Garrett Hardin in 1968, which states that equal access and unrestricted demand for a finite resource dooms the resource through over-exploitation.
Nothing is free
Revenue-enhancement by ISPs has its dangers. Security researcher Dan Kaminsky revealed in a Wired interview that the American ISP Earthlink had substituted the IP address of British advertising partner Barefruit for the standard non-existent domain response to a mistyped entry.
If a user entered a nonexistent subdomain of a real website, Earthlink/Barefruit ads appeared in the browser under a title bar suggesting it was the official site. Those subdomains were only as secure as Barefruit's servers, which Kaminsky found negligently vulnerable to malicious Javascript attack.
The security breach was quickly patched after the issue was reported to Earthlink, but Kaminsky said he had seen similar behaviour from other major ISPs. ‘I can’t secure the web as long as ISPs are injecting other content into web pages,’ he complained.
Kaminsky said the incident shows the risks of allowing ISPs to violate net neutrality, which would confine them to providing ‘dumb pipes.’ Perhaps; but wouldn’t a contractual undertaking to return a non-existent domain response to a mistaken entry suffice?
