That is what a 3 judge panel of the first District Court of Appeals just did in the case of Comast vs FCC. The Panel offered the ruling as memorandum, not binding, but telegraphing the Courts observations and if affirmed by the full bench sets the FCC on its ear. –

Federal appeals court gave notice Friday it likely would reject the Federal Communications Commission’s authority to sanction Comcast for throttling peer-to-peer applications.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit suggested as much during oral arguments with the FCC and Comcast. The Philadelphia-based cable concern is appealing the agency’s 2008 decision ordering it to stop hampering the peer-to-peer service BitTorrent as a traffic-management practice.

The order was in response to complaints Comcast was sending fake signals to users of BitTorrent, a bandwidth-heavy protocol often used to pirate copyright content.

“You have yet to identify a specific statute,” Judge Raymond Randolph told an FCC lawyer regarding the legal authority to ding Comcast.

To be sure, Friday’s reaction to the appellate court hearing made it increasingly clear the Obama administration’s FCC has been preparing for a defeat concerning net neutrality (.pdf), one of the largest issues surrounding internet freedom.

The upshot of this memo? —

* Net Neutrality as it has been proposed since Chairman Martin’s tenure may not survive in its current form if it survives at all.

* That the FCC may not even have the authority to regulate in this area as no controlling regulatory clause has been found by the court.

* That the 30% rule fostered by the FCC on the cable industry is willful and capricious. The panel summarily vacated that baseline without standing in current rule making by the FCC itself.

* Has political implications beyond the scope of this blog.

In many ways we are right back to 2004 in regards to carriers regard to traffic management, FCC’s role in this issue and the very nature of Net Neutrality.

Linky.
Full Finding here.

Yes ladies and gentlemen, our CongressCritters are at it again. This time placing speech on the Internet at risk. Their move this time is The Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act You can’t have a law without a victim these days you know –

Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both….

["Communication"] means the electronic transmission, between or among points specified by the user, of information of the user’s choosing, without change in the form or content of the information as sent and received; …

["Electronic means"] means any equipment dependent on electrical power to access an information service, including email, instant messaging, blogs, websites, telephones, and text messages.

This is crazy. It would be illegal to bully someone online but if you did it face to face at school that would be ok? That seems to be the outcome. What if I write a political blog that tries to coerce a Congressman to vote the way I want? Can I be sent to Federal Prison for that?

Read more here.

DirecTV is taking a baby step towards offering NFL programming via a broadband connection. Of course this puts them squarely at odds with most broadband providers. This could be the beginning of a war between ISP’’s and content providers. Increasingly, content providers are discovering an giant avenue for growth outside o pay TV’s walled garden. Broadband providers, however, operate these same walled gardens as a major profit center.

The new deal between DirecTV Group Inc. (NYSE: DTV) and the NFL for the NFL Sunday Ticket package highlights some interesting implications for network neutrality. Starting in 2012, the new deal allows DirecTV to market a broadband version of the package to non-DirecTV customers who can’t access their satellite signal for whatever reason. (As a side note: How in the world will that be enforced?) Conceivably, broadband customers can then purchase the package and have it delivered via the Internet, rather than satellite.

So here’s the rub, if I’m a telco TV (or cable) provider who competes with DirecTV, why should I be forced to carry their revenue-generating programming package via broadband? A commenter on my Telecompetitor blog compared this to CBS offering NBC programming on CBS for free, with the caveat “It’ll never happen.” OK, not an apples-to-apples comparison, but you get the point. (Light Reading)

Whether broadband providers like it or not, a la carte programming is coming via TVoIP. The smartest of them (if there are any) will recognize this and get into the game. New laws, regulations and more are irrelevant, content wants to be free to be shown with ads or sold to anyone anywhere.

While I’m on the subject of rules and regs. There’s only one way to insure net neutrality in a duopoly market. That is to require broadband providers to spin off any content businesses. Until that happens equal access for all content providers will never happen.

Nah I would never be that presumptuous. But it would be nice to think someone on his staff might be. But it is worthwhile to see that the Republicans got some spine and sent the DTV delay packing back to committee. So it looks like the digital cutover date of Feb 17 is still on.

Like we said in a previous post, it did not make sense to delay at this late date in the process. When some poor soul sees snow on the screen they will figure out that something is wrong. Right?? If they don’t, TV viewing is the least of their problems.!

Linky.

Comcast, the net provider that it seems everyone loves to hate is being quizzed by the FCC on their yet again mode of network management. This time it lies in the fact that Comcast sent a letter of compliance earlier last year only to be contradicted by their very own website on the matter. FCC letter here

Now Comcast has had a reputation for being contentious to the FCC and arrogant to their customers. So this is no surprise. However it does go to show the depths of stupidity swirling around that Corp. This whole issue would not have arisen had somebody in Public Affairs reviewed their website for contradictory statements to their regulatory positions. Would it be airbrushing? Sure. But damn. If you are going to steal or lie at least make a good faith effort.

Linky.

Well it is if you start reading some forums and web sites. Some are saying that VoIP traffic will be affected. Generally false. Others are saying that the efficiency of the internet will drop as a consequence. False. First the announcement off the Torrent website for the new UDP based client –

New alpha! The main change is that uTP (UDP torrenting) is added and enabled by default. It also has real-time transfer rate control and latency minimization.
This build will probably download slower than 1.8.1, particularly if the entire swarm is 1.8.1.

This whole thing has been a boil for about 2 years now between Torrent users and network ISP’s in their use of network capacity. We have had FCC endorsed round tables on the situation. Its finally come to head with Bell Canada impacting P2P traffic altogether. The result is that the Torrent developers have built a UDP based client to get around it. What the ISP’s don’t understand is that they are on the short end of the stick here from a technology perspective. The developers have the upper hand in any tech war. Example? Well how would ISP handle a Torrent client that did the following –

• Stored the existing client protocols table.
• Randomly remapped that table for its own purposes.
• Started a faux spread spectrum-like bounce across the breadth of the protocols table between the seeders and the receivers
• Upon competition restores the saved protocols table back to the system

Its not fool proof. But it is sufficiently involved that it fiscally escalates the costs on the ISP’s side that they just cry uncle. It is not a road we as a global society should go down. Its like restricting free speech.

The other trend I am seeing is the lack of understanding by many in the press on this issue. As a data transmission layer, UDP is MORE efficient than TCP. UDP institutes a full data stream with no framing checks. It just streams till EOF. But there is no checking for data integrity of the file. TCP on the other hand checks blocks of packets for receipt till the whole file sent. In some cases it adds up to 20% overhead to the transmission. So if you were doing a torrent you would WANT them using UDP.

The other falsehood is that VoIP traffic would be impacted. Hate to say it, probably not true. Two protocols dominate the VoIP world — SIP and SSCP. Well SIP uses TCP for build up and tear down of the connection and either TCP or UDP for the transport. The split being about 50/50. If its a problem, providers can switch to a pure TCP transport. SSCP uses TCP for build up and tear down of the connection and only UDP for the transport. But SSCP is generally associated with Cisco CallManager installs. So most of the UDP traffic is intrabuilding, like in call centers. The outbound traffic being wrapped in TCP or TCP-VPNd traffic, building to building.

The solution? How about some profit? The P2P client providers should cooperate with the ISP’s and provide a means to a) strip the traffic easily and b) forward store the traffic on end nodes like Akamai. The ISP’s cooperate by providing a premium data channel that P2P traffic can ride on. The users pay for the privilege. Profits are split by all concerned.

I prefer this solution over data caps.

Linky.

House speaker Nancy Pelosi playing the Nurse Ratched role in our One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest Congress has completely lost her own grip on reality. A report on Chicago Boyz has her creating new rules forcing any member of the house to obtain her prior approval before postign any opinion on a blog, message board, twitter, etc.  Not only does this fly in the face of member’s right to freedom of speech, it pretty much voids any credibility Ms Pelosi has as a good steward of “net neutrality”.

 This was first reported to me by Congressman John Culberson (R-Tx) and I asked for approval to cite him and for any media links to this story. He provided the following link of regulations proposed by the Chair of the Congressional Commission on Mailing Standards (PDF) Congressman Michael Capuano (D-Mass) that was sent to Rep. Robert Brady, Chairman of the House Committee for Administration. The net effect of the regs would be to make it practically impossible for members of Congress to use social media tools to discuss official business or share video of the same with the public while creating a partisan disparity in what little approved messages might be permitted. It would be a very considerable error to assume that the House leadership intends to let dissenting Democratic members post any more freely than Republicans. (Chicago Boyz)

Any layman will understand that the imposition of such a rule is unconstitutional.  From a broader perspective, this demonstrates how completely out of touch and power drunk the Congressional leadership is. I hope there are enough wise people left in California to retire the Speaker in the upcoming election.

Someone at Google thinks that Bell Canada’s network management practices are violating Canadian law. This and other recent “network watchdog” efforts by searchzilla are leading some to speculate that the company is planning greater involvement in content distribution.

“Bell claims its throttling of peer-to-peer applications is a reasonable form of network management. Google respectfully disagrees. Network management does not include Canadian carriers’ blocking or degrading lawful applications that consumers wish to use,” the company wrote in a 15-page submission to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, which was made public over the weekend.

“From consumer, competition and innovation perspectives, throttling applications that consumers choose is inconsistent with a content and application-neutral internet, and a violation of Canadian telecommunications law, which forbids unfair discrimination and undue or unreasonable preferences and requires that regulation be technologically and competitively neutral.” (CBC)

So much of the discussion has been focused on file sharing that one of the biggest and still growing problems confronted by every netizen and enterprise is Spam. The unsolicited commercial message continues to run rampant clogging the systems and dogging the productivity of those who have to moderate it. While the RIAA and MPAA aren’t losing fortunes here, the real cost of Spam to all enterprise dwarfs the real or imagined cost of piracy. Don’t think it’s a serious challenge? This blog routinely receives as many as 1000 spam posts daily pitching the usual collection male enhancement drugs, biz opps, investment advice and porn. Fortunately, we have tools that filter most Spam, but real time that could be used productively is lost to dealing messages that get past the filters every day.

Bloggers like us are not alone in losing to Spammers. Craigs List, the popular free online classifieds site, is fighting an uphill battle against the spammers. In some categories, they are losing the fight.

Spam on Craigslist has been a minor nuisance for years. Not any more. This year, the spammers started winning and are taking over Craigslist. Here’s how they did it. Craigslist tries to stop spamming by checking for duplicate submissions. They check for excessive posts from a single IP address. They require users to register with a valid E-mail address. They added a CAPTCHA to stop automated posting tools. And users can flag postings they recognize as spam.

Several commercial products are now available to overcome those little obstacles to bulk posting. A tool called CL Auto Posting Tool is one such product. It not only posts to Craigslist automatically, it has built-in strategies to overcome each Craigslist anti-spam mechanism.

Random text is added to each spam message to fool Craigslist’s duplicate message detector. IP proxy sites are used to post from a wide range of IP addresses. E-mail addresses for reply are Gmail accounts conveniently created by Jiffy Gmail Creator (”Who Else Wants to Create Unlimited Gmail Accounts in Seconds Flat Without Breaking a Sweat?”) An OCR system reads the obscured text in the CAPTCHA. Automatic monitoring detects when a posting has been flagged as spam and reposts it.

More on The forgotten net traffic problem: Spam

Tony Werner, Comcast CTO says that his company will begin to manage heavy users during peak hours rather that protocols in this video interview with Cable Digitial News.

Obviously, if implemented, this will make a few who are most likely paying for higher level service tiers very unhappy. While efforts to more equitably manage existing capacity are understandable, they should not be done at the expense of creating more capacity. With new bandwidth intensive content and services coming daily the common user will consume more bits than last years heavy user very soon. Expanding capacity would be Comcast’s only option if we had real competition.