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Posts from the ‘political windbaggery’ Category

Jun 28

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Net Neutrality – The “Build Out” Argument

the-internet-a-series-of-tubes

[Update – Excellent executive summary via a friend I was just talking to on the phone who is not terribly interested/versed in technology: “I get it, it makes more sense to just throw more tubes on the pile than paying engineers to constantly crawl through each one trying to figure out what’s in there.”]

I’ll be going off to Ottawa at the end of next week to offer the CFTPA whatever help I can for their “Net Neutrality” presentation to the CRTC on the 8th (incidentally it’s nice to see that the CFTPA’s position on throttling and neutrality is actually getting some appreciative notice from sectors that, incorrectly, seem to automatically assume that content producers are “the enemy”).

One of the major arguments of the CFTPA’s initial filing to the CRTC is that if solving network congestion is truly the primary concern of ISP’s, increasing network capacity is the only way to do so without stifling consumer choice, competition, and tying an anchor to the creative sector. As I’ve said many times before – the moment that ISP’s get the green light to *evaluate* content (instead of just transporting it) you will make them the sole gatekeepers of how (and what) content will be transported to their end-users. Even if they didn’t misuse that power (and given that both Rogers and Bell have significant digital content-delivery interests – I’m not sure how they could, in good faith to their shareholders, not push the envelope as far as possible) content creators, distributors, and the public would never again know where they stand, and the viability of an entire future of independent content distribution would be lost (or at the very least imperilled).

Aside from that gigantic point, I’m becoming increasingly aware of an equally compelling argument that over-provisioning (increasing network capacity beyond immediate demand) is the more cost-effective solution to network capacity issues as well. David Isenberg has written a very nice post on the “cost” of Net Neutrality which does all of the heavy lifting for this line of thought – I’ll just update it with a couple of numbers for an example.

If we take the Sandvine Internet Traffic Trends Report from October at face value (and I’d point out that as a manufacturer of “traffic optimization” technology they have an extremely large dog in the hunt) up to 22% of current global Internet traffic is due to P2P applications (I’m ignoring their claim about “upstream” traffic – as the differentiation is a sticky wicket for a future day – especially when network traffic is so asynchronous. Given that upstream for end users (who are where Sandvines numbers come from) is usually ~1/5-1/20 that of downstream – a weighted *total* composition of P2P traffic would still be, at maximum, ~20-25%).

So let’s correlate the Sandvine report with CISCO’s 2008-2013 Networking Forecast – which projects that Global IP traffic will quintuple in the next five years. This gives us an interesting forecast.

Presuming that the ISP’s are truly concerned and that their networks are at capacity, with P2P traffic threatening to “tip the balance” as it were, QoS/throttling/deep packet inspection actually would have no impact at all on the eventual outcome. Even if QoS technology could reduce the impact of P2P on the network to ZERO – you would still have at least 300-400% of current demand in the next five years (or an amount equal to 12-16x the entire current amount of P2P traffic). So increasing network capacity is inevitable, regardless.

Now if we go back to David Isenberg’s post, and take into account his very clear arguments on why increasing capacity is actually cheaper than QoS approaches (the brush strokes is that the cost of engineer time to implement the latter (as well as inevitable error, adjustment, monitoring, upgrade) is constant – while additional capacity costs decrease with volume.

So even if you could make an argument that QoS is a more cost-effective approach than increasing capcity at this frozen minute in time – ISP’s are faced with the reality of having to increase capacity by as much as a factor of four to maintain current service levels anyway over the next five years. The question then becomes is it a more logical approach to mix the more-expensive QoS monitoring with the capacity that is going to be otherwise required – or just tack on some additional over-provisioning?

It’s outside of my area of expertise, but I’d be very curious for a projection of how QoS approach costs scale with throughput growth.

So if the effect of P2P traffic on the reality of the short-term Internet is, at best, nominal to the broader issue of global traffic growth (and the CISCO report has some great projections about the volume of video content set to start to use the ‘net as a transport mechanisim which dwarf the current impact of, say, BitTorrent) then what benefit does throttling give ISP’s? Well, other than a very expensive “foot in the door” for when the next “threat to network capacity” comes along. Say, iTunes. Or Skype.

Mar 13

Hey Film and Television Friends, Are You Affected By The New CTF Rulings?

Here’s a great form letter I got today that does a very good job of detailing exactly why the CTF announcement should have everyone working in film and television extremely nervous. I’m trying to find the original author for attribution, although since it’s a “pass it on”, I’m sure they won’t mind my re-post. I left the content as-is, but did some re-formatting. Full post is after the jump, along with my $0.02 at the end. Read more

Mar 11

CTF Snap Judgement

There was a big announcement by heritage minister James Moore this week about “streamlining the Canadian Television Fund and Canadian New Media Fund into a new “super-fund” in 2010.

I haven’t posted on it, as I haven’t had a lot of time to dig into the details, but my “snap judgement” is that the move is problematic (to say the least) on a number of fronts.

At it’s core, I think the concept of streamlining and consolodating Canada’s media and entertainment sector funding is not necesarrily a bad idea, but I think this move opens a number of really troubling areas:

1) The jury is out on how exactly the “smaller independant” board will be constituted, but it seems safe at this time that broadcasters will have a much larger voice in that board, which is almost entirely the opposite of what those lobbying for an “independant” board wanted, for obvious reasons.

2) Opening the fund up to broadcaster-owned producers is a really sticky wicket. I don’t mean this to be rude, or a muckraker, or impugn the excellent work done by many of my friends and co-workers – but the goal of a large segment of broadcaster owned production is to fill as many content hours as cheaply as possible. Developing programming from that goal is almost diametrically at odds with what the fund was created to do, which was foster high quality content with large economic impact, high visibility, and export potential. Just the increase in volume alone is troubling givin the vast oversubscription to the old CTF.

and the big one

3) From the article: “The fund will favour projects produced in high-definition and require applicants to design their projects across a minimum of two distribution platforms, including television.”

(Sigh)

I will get into this at length another day but the increase in popularity of “new media”, and the rise of “digital convergence” does not mean that you re-purpose material across several platforms. If we have learned anything about the changing media landscape in the past decade it’s that consumers consume different types of material in different ways across platforms. The material I watch on my iPod (and how and when I watch it) is not the same as the material I watch on my tv, nor in a movie theatre, nor on my computer. When you require producers to attempt to leverage their productions across multiple platforms, you are nearly guaranteeing that they will fail in one (and possibly both) of them. Requiring that applicants to a new media fund also be working their project in film or television, makes about as much sense as requiring applicants to a book publishing fund to have recorded a hit single, or applicants to an arts grant being able to run a 4-minute mile. Tying everything together does not foster excellence anywhere – it makes it more likely that projects will fail, and it mandates mediocrity (and underperformance) across the board.

Mar 5

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Enter, Julius Genachowski

julius genachowski

As has been presumed since January, Julius Genachowski, has been nominated to head the Federal Communications Commission in the US.

While Genachowski is considered by many a strong advocate of Network Neutrality (being the first FCC head to come from a former life in Sillicon Valey, as opposed to the usual broadcast executive route to the job) – some are asking questions why neutrality pledges haven’t been a bigger part of his appointment.

My pragmatic opinion is just the reality that there are a number of interests that the Obama administration must court, and if your biggest complaint to date about Genachowski is that he’s someone who clearly understands the issues, the importance of the issues, and has vocally supported the cause in the past… but is less vocal now that he’s been appointed to a high-level government position… that’s still a pretty good day in Washington.

[Edit – in a weird “snake eating it’s own tail” loop, Laura at Derivative Work (who referenced this post) has done a great overview of Mr. Genachowski’s background and previous work with her usual impeccable detail and thorough research. Highly recommended as a primer on the new FCC head. ]

Feb 27

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CRTC ‘Net Neutrality Hearings – All the Marbles

There are two major CRTC hearings in the works right now that the copyright/internet savvy should be looking to – and Denis McGrath does a nice job of explaining how they interrelate. The one going on right now, among other things, is looking at the viability of some type of governmental support for creating new media content (the same way it mandates support for radio, publishing, and other creative sectors). Users, generally speaking, are hostile to this thought – because they corrolate it with taxes on blank-media or higher internet fees (either of which could indeed be one possible outcome – but is kind of narrow-sited… CanCon regulations for radio and television don’t necessarily make *them* more expensive, those come out of the post-consumer/advertiser net profits of broadcasters, and can’t necessarily be passed on to end users).

The tricky issue (as Denis adroitly points out) is that these two groups (the ISP’s, vs the creative sector) are also going to butt heads in a few weeks time over net neutrality in Canada (the promised followup to the Bell BitTorrent throttling case, (you might recall at that time, I said not to riot in the streets… that the battle for “all the marbles” had not yet been fought).

As far as I’m concerned this is the battle for an epic amount of marbles.

As we know from similar cases in the USA, ISP’s and telco’s really want to be able to determine what goes through their networks and how. The moment, this precedent gets set – the door is open to a radically different internet, where the services of your ISP (including their own telecom, television, movie, video-on-demand, even websites) can be treated fundamentally different than everything else on the internet. How the ISP’s want to use their network is primary over how the users want to use the network. You are no longer paying for a service, you’re paying for whatever content the ISP’s chose to provide, on whatever terms they deem “necessary”.

It’s been pointed out elsewhere in the CRTC filings that Bell launched a new video-on-demand service around the same time they started throttling BitTorrent traffic. Is that because the volume of the traffic legitimately was overwhelming (interesting, since streaming video has, by some accounts, been the largest single source of total traffic over much of the internet since 2007)? Or was it because it was a competitor to Bell? Should YouTube be throttled? Should Bell implement similar policies against Skype, is it because of volume? Or is it because of competition to Bell’s traditional landline offerings? I’m not saying any of these are true (or even likely), but the point is that once that door is open you (the end user) will never know.

In all the clutter of the current CRTC new media hearings, the preliminary filing by the CFTPA (Canada’s producer’s association) has been mostly overlooked although Michael Geist got part of it:

while P2P applications are undeniably used for the distribution of unauthorized content (as are email, newsgroups and the web), they also are increasingly serving as the foundation for new business models that will enable independent producers to make full use of broadband as a delivery vehicle for Canadian audio-visual programming. Consequently, the CFTPA is concerned that discriminatory traffic throttling may inhibit the development of new applications that would facilitate the ability of independent producers and other content providers to better monetize their content.

Roll that around on your tongue for a minute. That’s Canada’s content producers association saying that while P2P piracy is bad, it’s not nearly as bad as what the control creators would give up if ISP’s are allowed to treat traffic in anything less than an absolutely neutral manner.

The Geist article above goes on to echo this sentiment from a litany of artist organizations (and, interestingly enough, the CBC… one of the few national broadcasters without a related national ISP unlike Bell and Rogers affiliated broadcasters).

But don’t overlook the whole second half of the CFTPA filing either. This is the half which goes on to ask some difficult questions of ISP’s – such as why (if network volume is such an issue) they continue to offer faster, and faster, connections – while actually delivering less and less in the way of actual service. Why the ISP’s advertise speed rates they can’t possibly achieve given their actual infrastructure. Why Canada is rapidly falling in the rankings of Broadband and wireless penitration, adoption, and cost against almost every other OECD country (out of the 30 OECD countries, Canada’s price per megabit of Internet service ranks a near dead-last 27th).

And again, these are the producers – the ones you would suspect would be the first in line to throw a big “down with BitTorrent” party. Heck, the filing goes out of it’s way to point out a number of Canadian shows who benefited from legal BitTorrent distribution – (and I’m not just pleased to see that because they referenced my own Dead End Days and Cerealized).

This filing (and dozens like it) can look past immediate self-interests to see that:

The CFTPA submits that requiring ISPs to adopt an agnostic approach to traffic
management is critical to ensuring that the Internet remains an open-access platform. Such
an approach encourages innovation in the design and development of new applications and
services and facilitates the delivery of Canadian content – including Canadian audio-visual
content – to Canadians.

In a lot of ways the CRTC hearings to date have some amount of “side-show” to them (not that they aren’t important), but this one is the main event. It will shape the way Canadians produce, distribute, and watch content for years to come – and if that’s not enough to make it worth your while to wade through the odd text-heavy report… then I don’t know what is… but don’t be surprised if you wake up one morning to find your marbles strangely absent.

  • Disclosure: I work with a member company of the CFTPA, and have also been involved with the working group behind this filing.

Feb 25

The Courts and Technology: Head Scratching Edition

illustation (c) Jacob Palme

It’s time for another quickie round-up of three court cases that are on my mind this week. What do they have in common? They’re all tech-related, and they’ve all got me scratching my head.

  • Ontario Judge rules that Canadians should have no expectation of privacy from law enforcement on-line. This ruling (among other things) asserts that law enforcement officers do not have to get a warrant to require an ISP to surrender logs of your on-line activities. The Ars article does a fine job of detailing the case, and also the slippery slope this entails – but as MGK points out this is almost certainly going to the Supreme Court. Christopher (who is as adept at blogging about law as he is with blogging about Rex the Wonder Dog) – lays out both pro and con arguments quite succinctly.

    Why is Brad scratching his head? There shouldn’t be an expectation of privacy on-line, I know IP addresses are inherently public… but a lot of things that we do don’t have the expectation of absolute secrecy, and I’m not comfortable with surrendering them to law enforcement without judicial oversight either.

  • The charges that have been finally brought in the Terry Childs case are as just as strange as the case itself. If you missed this bizarre story from the summer here is a very good recap. The nutshell version is that Mr. Childs was a network admin who refused to give up passwords to the network he maintained for the city of San Fransisco. So they put him in jail. There are undeniably quirks to everything involved with this case, so everyone will have their own graph point for Mr. Childs ranging somewhere on the spectrum between “eccentric” and “dangerous” – but it should still be setting a very troubling precedent for folks in the IT sector.

    Why is Brad scratching his head? As it now stands, the city has essentially put Terry behind bars for over six months, on five times the average bail for murder, and is now charging him (a certified CISCO network admin) with “having access to three modems”. Does that ring any alarm bells for anyone else?

  • As much as I try to stay away, the gong-show like atmosphere of the Pirate Bay trial keeps pulling me back in. Somewhere, out there in the multiverse, there is a nuanced – challenging – lawsuit going on. A lawsuit where informed parties are intellectually jousting on the legal ramifications of running BitTorrent “trackers” which contain no copyright infringing materials on their own, but are used extensively (and in some cases, exclusively) to facilitate copyright infringing action (consider them as to the digital age what “head shops” were to the 60s). Sadly we don’t get that trial. Instead we get a Swedish prosecution that kind of (but not quite) can use “IRL” correctly in a “RL” court proceeding, and then follow up that feat with todays show-stopper – presenting “expert witnesses” who have, at best, a “shaky” understanding of how the technology works – and use a handful of screenshots as “evidence”.

    Why is Brad scratching his head? Did Elliot Ness ever try to bring down Al Capone on the irrefutable witness of Tintin in America? Maybe this is actually a brilliant strategy in hiding.

    Hiding in disguise.

    Okay, it’s a big Swedish train-wreck… and I. cant. stop. watching.

Jan 21

A Historic Tuesday

I would be the one who is neither incredibly ripped, nor dressed in vague 17th century garb

During the contentious 2008 US election we were often bombarded with variants of a very basic Republican speaking point: You don’t actually buy the hype do you? For all the talk of change you don’t expect you will magically open your eyes into a mystical new wonderland should, against all odds, a black man named “Barack” get elected to the highest office in the land?

Oddly, I had assumed this was just the usual pundit pedantry – intentionally making shallow word-play out of the broader social and international importance of metaphorical “change”. Heck, I think I probably argued that the act of such an unlikely election, in and of itself, would encompass of more national “change” than, perhaps, the entirety of the previous several presidential terms.

Ironically, the promise wasn’t nearly as metaphorical as I’d thought:

1130h EST, January 20th 2009 – Barack Hussein Obama II was inaugurated at the 44th President of the United States of America.

1200h EST, January 20th 2009 – I find myself in Puebla, Mexico officiating a press conference between Captain Henry Morgan and the famous Mexican wrestler, El 1000 Por Ciento Guapo, Shocker.

Now that’s change you can believe in!
(en espanol, but here’s a mildly comprehensible auto- translation)

Jan 19

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Barack Obama and the case of the missing Nintendo DS(es).

ds-lite-obama

A completely captivating story about the president-elect and his first family on the eve of his historic inauguration.

Intrigue! Mistyque! Secret service agents “as big as boulders”! Missing Nintendo DS(es)! Leapfrog! Iraqi policy debate!

Not only is the story entirely charming, but anyone with kids (or who has spent any time with kids) tasked with hunting down missing items can relate… well played, sir.

“I saw that the office was really shaped like an oval!” via Kotaku
(Very cool custom DS-Lite by Shepard Fairey)