NetNeutrality
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Is Comcast blocking the Pirate Bay? (updated: it isn't just Comcast)
We've received numerous reports this morning from users indicating that good 'ol Comcast is at it again. Word on the web is that Comcast ISP subscribers are unable to access torrent site the Pirate Bay, a situation that we've been able to confirm internally. That said, we're not entirely sure it's Comcast's fault. Pings and DNS lookups seem to be resolved correctly, but users are unable to get to the site. Additionally, we're seeing reports that users on other ISPs and in other parts of the world are also having issues connecting, making us wonder if some other piece of rope further toward the topmast has come unraveled. What say you? Update: Comcast just got back to us reaffirming that it is not the cause of this issue. "We're not blocking PirateBay and reports online indicate users from several ISPs around the world are affected." As we originally mentioned we're seeing those reports too, and many of you in the poll below are showing this isn't necessarily a Comcast-specific thing. So the question remains: what kind of a thing is it? %Poll-63686% [Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
EU investigation to take a closer look at net neutrality
The EU has commissioned an investigation into how European ISPs handle traffic and manage their networks, in a move that could lead to new legislation on net neutrality. The investigation, to be conducted by the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC), will cover both mobile and fixed Internet providers, with particularly close attention paid to any barriers consumers may face when changing operators. BEREC will also consult with consumers and corporations to determine whether or not ISPs are being completely transparent about their traffic management practices, or advertised connection speeds. In a speech delivered yesterday, Neelie Kroes, the European Commission's Vice President for the Digital Agenda, admitted that some ISPs need to restrict some bandwidth-heavy services in order to protect their networks, but promised to publicly name and take action against any operators found to be stifling competition or consumer choice: "Mark my words: if measures to enhance competition are not enough to bring Internet providers to offer real consumer choice, I am ready to prohibit the blocking of lawful services or applications. It's not OK for Skype and other such services to be throttled. That is anti-competitive. It's not OK to rip off consumers on connection speeds." It's unlikely, however, that the EU will implement legislation as pointed as the net neutrality rules the FCC unveiled in the US, nor as expansive as the law that Chile introduced last summer. In a report issued yesterday, the EU affirmed that "operators should be allowed to determine their own business models and commercial arrangements" -- words that no doubt delighted many in Europe's ISP community. The results of BEREC's investigation are due to be published by the end of the year.
House of Representatives votes to block FCC's net neutrality rules
Well, it looks like Republicans in the House of Representatives weren't about to let this one slip past a possible government shutdown -- they just passed a measure that seeks to block the FCC's net neutrality rules by a largely party line vote of 240 to 179. That follows a House subcommittee vote last month but, as then, the bill still faces an uphill battle in the Senate and with the President, who's expected to veto any such legislation if it somehow got to his desk. Not surprisingly, the rhetoric from both sides is only increasing following this latest development, with Democrat Rep. Henry Waxman saying the Republican bill would "end the internet as we know it," while Republican Rep. Fred Upton argues that "the internet is not broken and this bill will assure that the FCC does not break it."
Verizon and MetroPCS objections to FCC net neutrality rules dismissed in case of premature litigation
The FCC wants to put new rules in place ensuring access to the web is, like justice, blind to where a person is coming from and indifferent to where on the web he is going to. Verizon's first reaction to these new directives was to publicly decry them as overreaching, and its second was to file a lawsuit, one that was swiftly echoed by MetroPCS. Only problem with their plans? The rules haven't yet been published in the Federal Register, which renders the legal challenges from the two eager mobile carriers "incurably" premature. Such was the determination of the US Court of Appeals, which refused to make a substantive ruling and just threw the cases out due to the technicality. Verizon isn't discouraged, however, and promises to bide its time until all the dominoes have fallen into place before launching another legal attack. Hey, whatever keeps those lawyers in their fancy suits.
Google gives Georgia Tech $1 million to build a benchmark for the open internet
You can benchmark the cycles of your CPU, power of your GPU, speed of your internet connection, and a myriad of other seemingly important things. However, there's one missing benchmark that could make all those seem rather frivolous: the openness of your connection. Google wants one and has just awarded Georgia Tech a $1 million grant over two years (with a possible $500k bonus for a third year) to come up with a benchmark capable of detecting just how neutral your net is. When ready, it'll look for any artificial throttling that's been set in place and will also check for evidence of digital censorship. No word on when an early version might see release, but hopefully it comes before we need to start paying extra for the ability to download non-ISP-approved content.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee signs up to verily protect UK net neutrality
Here in the US we're still looking for a knight in shining armor to protect our free and open internet, but in the UK they've found their guy. Now they just need some plate mail. It's Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee, the man who first proposed the World Wide Web to the World Wide World in 1989. He'll be working with the UK's Broadband Stakeholder Group to ensure that any traffic management policies that go into effect are done with transparency and within a set of defined best practices. That is to say: corporations will still have an opportunity to address threats to the overall health of their networks, but they'll need to do so in an open way. Communications Minister Ed Vaizey summarized it thusly: That agreement should be guided by three simple principles. The first is users should be able to access all legal content. Second, there should be no discrimination against content providers on the basis of commercial rivalry and finally traffic management policies should be clear and transparent. So, that's good news for those across the pond. Here in the US, well, we'll just keep braiding our hair and singing out the tower window as loudly as possible. Or maybe it's time to give Tim Wu a sword. [Photo credit: Paul Clarke]
House subcommittee votes to block FCC's net neutrality rules
They may face an uphill battle given the numbers in the Senate (not to mention a Democratic President), but it doesn't look like the House Republicans will be softening their opposition to the FCC's new net neutrality rules anytime soon. Following a full vote on an amendment to a spending bill in the House of Representatives last month (which just died in the Senate yesterday), the House Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology has now passed a new measure that, if it ultimately adopted, would completely overturn the FCC's new rules. The measure now heads to the Energy and Commerce Committee but, as before, it's unlikely that anything will change in the Senate even it ultimately passes in the full House -- that certainly won't stop opponents of the rules from trying, though.
House of Representatives votes to block net neutrality
The net neutrality debate was sadly destined to be swallowed up by left-right posturing once the FCC voted 3-2 to impose a compromise set of access rules on the ISP industry, and it appears the ensuing political theater is nearing its zenith: the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted yesterday to block funding for the FCC's proposed rules. We call it theater only because it's largely for show -- in order to take effect, the budget amendment would have to pass the Democratically-controlled Senate and be signed by the President, and neither of those things is likely to happen. What's more, the actual rules passed by the FCC have already been challenged in the courtroom by Verizon and MetroPCS, so it's not like the industry needs any additional help at the moment. Still, there's a part of us that's happy this issue is even being talked about at the highest levels, rather than being left to languish in administrative rulemaking hell like so many other FCC initiatives -- and we have a feeling we'll be talking about this for a long time to come.
Net neutrality expert Tim Wu named senior advisor to the FTC
The Federal Trade Commission just appointed outspoken anti-DRM advocate Ed Felten as its first Chief Technologist a few months ago, and it's now made another fairly bold move with the appointment of Tim Wu as a senior advisor. As any Engadget Show viewer is no doubt well aware, Wu is not only a noted net neutrality expert, he actually coined the term, and he's not exactly shy to make his opinions on the matter known. He won't strictly be dealing with net neutrality at the FTC, though -- Chairman Jon Leibowitz says that he will instead be "working on issues at the nexus of consumer protection, competition, law and technology." For his part, Wu will be taking a leave from his position at Columbia Law School to take on the new job (which he'll begin February 14th), and it seems like he'll also be a bit less outspoken on Twitter -- his most recent tweet noted that there would be "no more policy tweets" starting next week. Head on past the break to watch our full interview with Wu from last fall.
Verizon can now throttle top five percent of bandwidth hogs, downres multimedia transfers
Nice timing, Verizon. Just as thousands -- possibly zillions -- of smartphone users are pondering the switch to Big Red for Apple's iPhone 4, the carrier has slipped in two critical policy changes that are apparently effective immediately. Tucked within loads of fine print in a new PDF that surfaced on the company's site, there's this: "Verizon Wireless strives to provide customers the best experience when using our network, a shared resource among tens of millions of customers. To help achieve this, if you use an extraordinary amount of data and fall within the top 5 percent of Verizon Wireless data users we may reduce your data throughput speeds periodically for the remainder of your then current and immediately following billing cycle to ensure high quality network performance for other users at locations and times of peak demand. Our proactive management of the Verizon Wireless network is designed to ensure that the remaining 95 percent of data customers aren't negatively affected by the inordinate data consumption of just a few users." To our knowledge, this is the first time that VZW has taken a notable position on throttling, and the link to its stance on net neutrality (as it applies to wireless, anyway) is fairly obvious. What's most interesting to us is the five percent of data users figure; the top one or two percent isn't a huge amount, and there's a good chance that bandwidth abusers are up in that echelon. But we're guessing that quite a few business travelers will fall within this particular range, and given that VZW now holds the right to throttle data for your existing billing cycle and the next one... well, good luck gritting your teeth and lasting through that two-year contract. In related news, the company is also implementing optimization and transcoding technologies in its network, which is a politically correct way of explaining that it can downres any multimedia you try to send through Verizon's pipes. Head on past the break for the full quote.
Al Franken calls net neutrality the 'free speech issue of our time,' proposes stricter FCC regulations
We hate to see something we hold as dear to our hearts as the internet become so deeply mired in politics, but this whole net neutrality thing is serious business. The FCC released its full rules just before running home to sip some eggnog but still it didn't take long for companies like Verizon to register their discontent. Now senators Maria Cantwell and Al Franken are voicing their own dissent, saying that the FCC "does not do nearly enough to protect consumers" and that the pair's "Internet Freedom, Broadband Promotion, and Consumer Protection Act of 2011" will. Among other things it explicitly prevents the creation of "fast lanes" for premium content, keeping ISPs from charging extra for content they like or slowing down stuff they don't. The full details are in the PDF on the other end of the source link, and if you're wondering what happens next we have a dramatization embedded below.
Netflix passes 20 million subscribers; focuses on ISP disputes, HBO, Facebook in Q4 results
Netflix just released its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2010 and of no surprise to anyone who was paying attention last year it did quite well by passing 20 million subscribers, more than double its base at the start of 2009. However, per Biggie's Law mo money = mo problems, and it took the opportunity to respond, surprisingly sharply, to potential threats from its Hollywood content providers and the ISPs its Watch Instantly service streams over. News of note going into 2011? A huge focus on personalization including new integration with Facebook and a mention that Apple TV has already surpassed the iPad in viewing hours. It also showed off the one-click Netflix button on an unspecified (looks like Toshiba to us) remote and compared the "consternation" over its success to the rise of Fox as a broadcast network two decades ago. We'll hop on the earnings call in a few minutes for more details, check after the break for more of the details.
MetroPCS takes a cue from Verizon, appeals FCC's net neutrality code
It's not just Big Red taking issue with the FCC's final stance on net neutrality, which shouldn't come as much of a surprise -- landline and wireless operators tend to do a pretty good job harmonizing their opinions on regulatory issues, and net neutrality is about as big of a regulatory issue as you're going to get. Next up to drop the legal hammer is MetroPCS, filing this week with the Washington, D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals and saying that it wants to make sure "the concerns of competitive wireless carriers, like MetroPCS, are addressed." Interestingly, the company specifically calls out net neutrality complaints against its new 4G plans -- which stratify non-browser data usage as a separate category with its own bucket -- as one of the reasons it's filing the appeal; separately, the carrier says that it's going to formally respond to those complaints next month, so it's clearly not ready to back down and rethink its LTE strategy. It'll be interesting to see how this all plays out.
Verizon appeals FCC's net neutrality rules
Verizon's gone to the US Court of Appeals in Washington, DC today to officially take issue with the net neutrality policy that the FCC laid out in the waning moments of 2010, saying that it's "deeply concerned by the FCC's assertion of broad authority for sweeping new regulation of broadband networks and the Internet itself." The company's extremely brief press release on the matter doesn't detail where their issues lie, specifically, but they'd said back in December that they had concerns, so the move doesn't come as a terribly big surprise. If we had to guess, the no-blocking rules surrounding wireless networks are certainly high on that list of concerns -- Verizon and others have long said that wireless needs to be left largely out of the net neutrality debate -- but we won't know until we're able to dig into the court case. Follow the break for the press release.
The Lawbringer: Net neutrality and MMOs
Pop law abounds in The Lawbringer, your weekly dose of WoW, the law, video games and the MMO genre. Running parallel to the games we love and enjoy is a world full of rules, regulations, pitfalls and traps. How about you hang out with us as we discuss some of the more esoteric aspects of the games we love to play? Everyone is talking about net neutrality these days, on each end of the spectrum. Regulation will fix it! Regulation won't fix it! The end of times! To be honest, content companies and internet service providers alike would like nothing more that to make their margins wider, and nothing will stand in the way of profit. This week, I want to take a look at some of the potential issues and hypothetical situations that could come about as a result of an internet that lives under the watchful eye of a filter. Preferring some internet packets over another could one day be a huge problem for MMO creators, because so much of the business is dependent on your information getting from one place to another at a speedy clip. Yes, I am aware that ISPs already use deep packet inspection to make sure the internet works, period, but we're talking about a world where anything goes, where regulation lets internet service providers play their own game.
MetroPCS alleged to be violating net neutrality rules with new LTE plans
Well, it looks like the fine print in MetroPCS' new LTE pricing plans is causing more than just some confusion among MetroPCS customers -- as CNET reports, it's now also drawn the ire of several public interest groups, who allege that the carrier is violating the FCC's new net neutrality rules. For those not familiar with the new plans, they include a $40 plan for unlimited web browsing plus YouTube, and a $50 plan that adds 1GB of "additional data access" that covers things not considered to be "web browsing" by MetoPCS -- Netflix, Skype, etc. That, in effect, creates two different types of "data," and leaves MetroPCS as the only voice deciding what gets included in one plan and not the other. For its part, MetroPCS insists that its "new rate plans comply with the FCC's new rules on mobile open Internet," and that it is simply offering "increased consumer choice" by offering different rate plans.
BT 'Content Connect' lets ISPs charge content providers for high-speed video delivery
We haven't heard a ton of talk about net neutrality here at CES, but the issue has now cropped up in a fairly big way across the pond -- British Telecom's wholesale division has just rolled out a service it calls "Content Connect," which basically allows ISPs relying on BT's network to charge content providers like YouTube for high-speed delivery of video within the UK. That naturally means that anyone who doesn't pay will have to deal with slower video delivery, which would in a very real sense create a two-tier internet. For its part, BT insists that it "supports the concept of net neutrality," and it says that the new service will actually speed up download speeds even for those that don't pay up, as it would ease network congestion. All which, of course, echoes some of the core arguments we've been hearing for years now, and won't likely stop hearing anytime soon. [Thanks, Pete]
FCC releases full net neutrality rules
Here's a fine Christmas Eve present from Uncle Sam: the FCC has just released the full text of the net neutrality rules it passed earlier this week by a hotly-debated 3-2 vote. The rules are basically what we expected: the three basic rules require ISPs to be transparent about their network management practices, and further forbid them from blocking any lawful application or service or discriminating against different types of traffic. The biggest tweak comes in the language around paid prioritization, which would let some companies pay for selectively faster access to an ISP's customers -- the FCC is pretty clear that such arrangements will be heavily scrutinized and probably won't pass muster. And then, of course, there's wireless, which is subject only to the transparency and no-blocking rules; the FCC decided to take "measured steps" with mobile because it believes that is still too new and fluid. We'll have a full breakdown later today, but hit the source and check out the full rules yourself -- you're going to be hearing a lot about them over the next few weeks. [Thanks, Phil]
Net neutrality: Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile react
Amazingly, the FCC still hasn't released the full text of the net neutrality rules it passed by a contentious 3-2 vote yesterday, so we can't really say much about what's in them -- and while this sort of delay is typical of the Genachowski FCC, it hasn't stopped the carriers from issuing statements on the new rules. We've got to say, responses to the new rules range all over the map: Sprint commended the FCC, T-Mobile needs some time to look things over, AT&T called it a "fair middle ground" but railed about "radical voices" and "heavy-handed government regulation" (seriously) and Verizon -- well, Verizon issued what appears to be a veiled threat to sue everyone. That's pretty interesting, since it sure looks to us like the FCC all but rubber-stamped last summer's Google / Verizon neutrality proposal, but you never know what's happening behind closed doors -- and remember, Verizon's last major policy statement was a call to revamp the entire Telecommunications Act, so Big Red might have bigger plans in store. We've rounded up all the reactions below -- check 'em out.
Woz speaks up on net neutrality (video)
Steve Wozniak stepped up the plate earlier this week and spoke out on net neutrality. In both a written statement and a quick interview while at the recent FCC hearing on net neutrality, Woz singled out the telecommunication companies for their deceptive practices and monopolistic behaviors. Woz relates his own negative experience with local telecommunication companies in his attempt to bring internet to his house. He called on the FCC to do the right thing and enact net neutrality rules that are in the best interest of the people of this country. After the FCC issued its ruling, Woz praised the FCC for enacting some net neutrality rules to help keep the internet open, but criticized the government agency for not applying these standards to wireless broadband. Wireless broadband is the internet of the future and, sometimes, the only internet connection for those who live in outlying areas. This emerging network should be subject to the same rules and regulations as its wired counterpart. We embedded his 10-minute interview after the break and you can read his full written statement here. Thanks go to Josh Stearns for sending this in!
