Most of this weblog is a reposting of items from mailing
lists about a bill that would help Bell (incumbent) phone
companies maintain and expand their monopolies.

The one-line summary is: Call or fax your Representative in
the House and urge a vote against Tauzin-Dingell.

A slightly longer explanation has to refer to the 1996
Telecommunications Act. That act hammered out an extremely
fragile balance, saying to the local phone companies: give up your
monopoly on local service, and you can try out the tempting
new services like long-distance data.

The Bells have not fulfilled their side of the bargain; the
law did not really put much teeth in the injunction to allow
local competition. Now Tauzin-Dingell threatens to sweep
away most of the balancing provisions. The Bells will never
have to upgrade local lines–or will do so at their own
comfortable pace–and most of us will still be stuck at 56K.

(The following segment comes from Tom Horn,
tomhorn@cpros.com, on a mailing list. I haven’t gotten the URL to work, but you may have better luck.–Andy)

The Tauzin-Dingell bill is scheduled for a vote in the House this
Wednesday. If you haven’t spoken to your legislators yet regarding this,
now is most definately the time. The bill, if passed, will eliminate most
of the anti-competitive protections that the Telecommunications Act of
1996
put into place.

http://rs9.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d107:h.r.01542

Some points of interest are;

• (Sec. 3) Prohibits the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and each
  State from regulating the rates, charges, terms or conditions for, or
  entry
  into the provision of, any high speed data service, Internet backbone
  service, or Internet access service, or to regulate any network element to
  the extent it is used in the provision of any such service.
• (Sec. 3) Prohibits the FCC or any State from requiring an incumbent
  (established) local exchange carrier to provide unbundled access to any
  network elements used in the provision of any high speed data service.
• (Sec. 4) Prohibits either the FCC or a State from interpreting the
  line-sharing order to expand a local exchange carrier’s obligation to
  provide access to any network element for line-sharing.

This bill is tailor-made to hand over a complete monopoly on DSL to
ILECs. It is detrimental to ISPs and end-users by eliminating any
equal-access requirements for ISPs and reducing the DSL options for
end-users to one, whatever the ILEC decides to provide.

Get involved through the AISPA http://www.aispa.org/1031/ or some other
group, call your legislators, anything. This bill will have a great impact
on your ability to offer high-speed access. For your own sake, don’t sit
back and do nothing.

The horror that is HR 1542 (Tauzin-Dingell) is finally heading to the floor
the day after tomorrow for a vote. I did a briefing this morning for Hill
staffers along with Mark Cooper from the Consumer Federation of America,
explaining in detail why this bill targets the independent ISP for
elimination and will hurt consumers. I explained how being able to get
service from a local ISP is about so much more than just which number you
set your modem to dial, or in the case of DSL, where it is pointed.

In the past couple of weeks ISPs around the country have been emailing their
customers to urge them to contact their representatives and run their fax
machines dry with protest against this bill. Even though some members in
the House clearly believe that they can go ahead and vote for the bill, safe
in the knowledge that it won’t pass the Senate (something you can never know
with confidence) the fact remains that a favorable vote on the bill only
gives Michael Powell more confidence in his plan to rearrange the rules in
the Bells favor.

We’ve been fighting this awful bill for more than 2 years, but now the wolf
really is at the door. If there was ever a time to ask for your customers
support in this fight, the hour is now. Be sure to provide them with email
addresses and fax numbers - there’s no time for snail mail, and Congress
doesn’t receive snail mail any more anyway because of the anthrax problem.
If I can be of help looking up representatives and contact info, please
don’t hesitate to call or email me.

In the meantime, here’s a sample letter that a WAISP member wrote to his
customers and shared with other ISPs on the WAISP list, that you may find
useful. ISPs do have the power to stop this, but you have to act now.

Sue Ashdown
Executive Director
American ISP Association
http://www.americanisps.org
202-530-7947

The River Report - Urgent Legislative Update - February 2002

To The River Community:

Beyond sending out our monthly newsletter, we very rarely contact all of
our clients when an issue of great importance arises. Legislation is
currently under consideration in Washington D.C. that directly impacts you
and the future of the Internet as a whole. We believe it is of such vital
and urgent importance that we are asking for your attention and help in
letting your elected representatives know how you feel about this matter.

Chairman Michael Powell of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has
recently made some controversial statements about the future of DSL and the
Internet as a whole. Chairman Powell believes that the deployment of DSL
is somehow being held back by legal requirements requiring the incumbent
telephone companies (including Qwest and Verizon) to work cooperatively
with competitive telephone carriers (Focal, ELI, TWT, etc.) and Internet
Service Providers like The River.

Sharing Chairman Powell’s beliefs are Congressmen Billy Tauzin (R-LA) and
John Dingell (D-MI). You may have heard of the proposed “Tauzin-Dingell”
act, which is legislation designed by the big telephone companies to remove
a lot of the restrictions placed on them in 1996 when they were partially
deregulated. The Telecom Reform Act of 1996 was designed to gradually and
carefully deregulate the telecommunications industry, which has had a
government-mandated monopoly for decades in most markets. The idea was to
allow competition to develop and grow, to allow consumers to have a choice,
and to make sure that we did not face another deregulation debacle like the
energy crunch in California. The Tauzin-Dingell legislation, as well as
the proposed FCC ruling, would destroy key aspects of the 1996 Act and
would, in effect, kill or severely damage independent Internet Service
Providers and competitive local telephone operators.

The River is firmly in favor of deregulating telecommunications and other
industries, but like the authors of the Telecom Reform Act of 1996,
understands that when a decades-old, previously-regulated monopoly is to be
deregulated, the process needs to be incremental and gradual.

If there is one thing worse than a state-sponsored monopoly, it is a
formerly-state-sponsored monopoly with no regulatory oversight and no
competition. Qwest may be able to lock independent service companies like
The River out of the DSL market entirely under the proposed
legislation. When there is no competition, there is no incentive to
innovate, improve service, or reduce rates. When there is no competition,
consumers invariably lose.

As your Internet Service Provider, we are asking for your help in sending a
message to Washington D.C. saying clearly that you value your right to
choose your own ISP and DSL service provider. If the proposed FCC rules
and legislation pass, you will likely have little or no choice in Internet
Service Providers within a few short years, and may be stuck with your
cable company or your telephone company as your ISP. Examples of what this
scenario might look like are already surfacing — the massive failure of
Excite@Home, Comcast Cable logging web-surfing habits of customers for sale
to marketing companies, and Qwest’s recent partnership with MSN, which
conveniently strips former qwest.net customers of ownership of their own
home DSL lines!

We need you to take a moment and let your member of Congress know that the
Tauzin-Dingell proposal is dangerous to consumers, and it actually harms
competition, despite what the telcos would lead us to believe. Please call
your Congressional representatives, asking the Member of the House to vote
*NO* on the Tauzin/Dingell bill. Telephone numbers are listed below, for
your convenience. Time is of the essence, as the vote is set for February
27th — only a few short days from today!

Sincerely,

The Management of The River Internet Access Co.

What will happen to phone competition and data service?

Related link: http://www.fosdem.org

The physical setting at the Free University of Brussels at Solbosch in Brussels is gritty, but the technical content is top quality and Internet access is good here at the

Free and Open Source Software Developers’ Meeting. The conference was started last year and was planned as a small, local event but attracted several hundred people. This year it registered 1000 people yesterday and another 600 so far today.

Brussles is a logical place for a European conference. It is probably the most cosmopolitan city in the world, with a quarter of its populartion being foreigners who work for the European Union or numerous other organizations. Also because of this central location, train service is convenient to any place in Europe. It takes only a little longer to get here from London than to get from Boston to New York City.

As the keynote yesterday morning, Richard Stallman gave his standard defense of the morality of free software–but with a few new twists as always. The other big political issue is software patents, because the European Union is expected to support them in a statement to be released this coming Wednesday. Anger is high at the conference here, and programmers are talking of trying organized a political opposition to the change that they see has produced such disruption and waste of energy in the United States.

Technical talks include such topics as new tools for encryption (Vincent Rijmen came to talk about Rijndael, for instance), advances in the GNOME and KDE desktops (Miguel de Icaza is here, along with a couple other GNOME developers), the importance of secure programming, and (at the end of the day today) my own talk, which is billed as being about peer-to-peer but could be more accurately described as a list of suggestions for improving Internet-connected computers.

Recently there’s been a lot of buzz about promoting broadband. Six
years after the passage of the epochal Telecommunications Act, a lot
of people are suddenly agreeing that it has failed. Not that they say
it in so many words. But there’s no denying that all the
Telecommunications Act’s gifts to major corporations—the
deregulation, the removal of barriers to buy-outs and mergers that
have allowed a handful of companies to dominate U.S. media, the
blurring of boundaries between services—have not achieved their
stated main purpose, which was to spread high-speed service to all
Americans.

This concern has percolated upward to some chief advisors of the Bush
Administration. And thus the front page of the Wall Street Journal on
January 18 reveals that the administration is considering several
regulatory proposals, tax breaks, and even possible subsidies to
promote broadband. Democratic Senator Majority Leader Tom Daschle is
cited as being supportive. Not coincidentally, a January 15 article in
the Washington Post reports that “broadband is a new battle cry in
Washington.”

Meanwhile, a lobbying group named TechNet—counting leaders from
Cisco, Intel, and many other Silicon Valley firms—calls on
government to reduce regulation in the communications industries.
Indeed, reducing regulation may promote broadband in some case (as
when communities have gouged a company trying to use their rights of
way to string cables), while hurting it in others (when the regulation
has made incumbent companies provide facilities to competitors).

So business and government are looking to the next step. Well, I have
a suggestion for them: don’t try to push broadband on the public in
its current form. People need to trust it before they commit their
livelihood to it.

Pipes That Spring Too Many Leaks

The main problem faced by Internet service right now is not speed, but
reliability.

Anyone who is willing to pay for broadband is going to let a lot ride
on it. Broadband will be a lifeline for their job, their consulting,
or their company that’s as important as an air tube to an oxygen pump.
Broadband users will be running their business over the line and
expecting instant access to the Internet for last-minute tactical
shifts.

In case you haven’t guessed yet, I don’t believe that entertainment
will drive broadband adoption. That’s because broadband is expensive.
Wireless may reduce the costs of local access to a point of presence,
but wireless is not suitable for all for geographic and meteorological
conditions, and the costs of the long-distance link still have to be
paid. Gordon Cook, producer of the
COOK Report on Internet,
believes that data traffic will never support a telecom company that
is accustomed to previous revenues from voice traffic.

Reliability is the bane of current broadband. ADSL users, just as much
as dial-up users, complain about being disconnected without a
warning. Cable service is no match for plain old telephone service in
uptime, either.

The ultimate reliability lapse is the carrier that goes belly-up and
loses all the email and other material it stored for its customers.
Just such a scandal hit Excite@Home, the major cable Internet
provider, last year. Note that Excite@Home had contracts with some of
the largest service providers in the world—the major American
cable TV companies. These companies did nothing to rescue it, or its
customers. What users need is some kind of escrow or cache where
their data is buffered against a massive market failure.

Potential users are also frustrated when they find that their area is
not served by a high-bandwidth option—sometimes after contracting
with a cable or phone company for broadband.

Some of these problems may require extra provisioning, and therefore
still higher costs. A change in architecture is also called for. ADSL
and cable modems, both essentially hacks to lines that weren’t
designed for those services, just won’t cut the mustard in the long
run.

Computer programmers have an old saying that’s meant to restrain
unduly clever hackers who try to improve their programs’ performance
through coding short-cuts: “make it right before you make it fast.”
The same advice could be given to the telecom industry.

The current pursuit of quick profit through minimal upgrades is
failing. And while the string-and-masking-tape ingenuity of the early
Internet years—the years of mom-and-pop ISPs—was a great
start, the big vendors are still doing essentially the same things in
a very different era. A new approach is required, and probably new
companies to carry it through.

What Would Be Reliable?

If ADSL and cable modems are insufficient, we must either return to
tried-and-true technologies like optical fiber or push ahead into
brave new initiatives like packet radio (wireless Internet).

Our age is one of decentralization, and that may well work when it
comes to owning fiber. While optical fiber is what every major
corporation depends on, in Canada it is being democratized. A
consortium called
CANARIE
encourages schools, universities, and other institutions to form
private fiber networks.

In contrast to the E-Rate (universal service fund for schools and
libraries) in the U.S., Canadian institutions are pursuing a strategy
that lets them own fiber and ultimately control their own connections.
They are experimenting with keeping traffic off the Internet, instead
passing it from one participating node to another in a series of hops
resembling peer-to-peer networks like Gnutella.

In Canada, anyone can string their own wire; unlike competitive
organizations in the United States, they’re not at the mercy of the
governments or incumbent companies that own the poles and conduits.
(However, the Canadian government has recently removed caps on the
fees that can be charged for using these support structures. This may
increase the costs of stringing new fiber.)

Individual households may be able to join the democratic fiber
movement by forming co-ops. They could string a fiber from a telephone
company’s central office to the neighborhood, and pay for short loops
to each house or put up wireless antennae. A combination of fiber and
wireless may finally bring broadband to the bandwidth-starved masses.

But these initiatives have little to offer large telecom corporations,
and those corporations are less likely to hop on the bandwagon than to
toss nails in the road. We must avoid policies that reinforce the
control of the incumbent players.

In the United States, for instance, the E-Rate succeeded in bringing
Internet access—or improving current access—to thousands of schools
and libraries. But it did so through a Faustian bargain: almost all
contracts went to incumbent telephone companies, and the law required
institutions to rent service rather than build their own. They are now
in a situation of permanent dependency.

Subsidies and deregulatory proposals now being batted around in
Congress—often aimed at promoting broadband in rural areas—carry the
same danger. It is the current winners, the incumbent phone companies,
who would reap the benefits.

Make It Smart Too

While I agree with the policy analysts that widespread broadband would
spark a wealth of socially useful applications, I also think we can do
better with the network we have now.

Route control is getting more sophisticated, allowing routers to avoid
lines that are temporarily loaded down. Caching of many sorts has been
used for years to speed up Web access. Extending that concept, a
distributed filesystem (of which
OceanStore
is an intriguing, if heavyweight, example) could reduce bottlenecks on
other kinds of file sharing.

If courts had a clue that these sorts of filesystems are the part of
next stage in Internet infrastructure, they wouldn’t be busy closing
them down. But users bear some of the blame too. I can understand why
they’d start using the improved file systems to pass around familiar
content, but they ought to be showing more responsibility. It’s time
to take the next step and develop new content unencumbered by
copyright restrictions.

Quality of Service is a contentious subject among network engineers,
but it’s already available at some ISPs, who offer different options
for throughput (high transfer rates) or latency (quick response time).
Further technical and financial developments may allow users to get
more out of the current lines without having to buy new ones.

Unsolicited email, along with new generations of spam such as instant
messages and cell phone messages, is a tremendous burden on Internet
connections. Given the ease of spoofing addresses and of sending
email between any two countries, I can’t see any policy that
governments or ISPs can take that will stop spam. As the
MAPS
initiative shows, all such projects divide the Internet into a
legitimate segment and an illegitimate segment, which is a dangerous
precedent that could lead to censorship.

However, the burden spam places on the last hop from the ISP to the
user could be eased if they adopted IMAP, a mail protocol that lets
users view subject headers and delete mail before downloading. The
low-bandwidth Internet needs more such smart solutions across the
board.

Current Dangers

With all the hoopla over government support for broadband, it’s
natural to fear the hand of another hidden Enron. The proposals
reported in the Wall Street Journal, luckily, sound pretty
even-handed.

The Bush administration is trying to avoid taking a side in what they
call the “food fight” around Dingell-Tauzin, a bill that would upset
the balance between stimulus and free market in the Telecom Act.
Dingell-Tauzin would give the incumbent Bell companies free rein to
offer broadband without opening their networks to competitors.

But there are other ways to weaken the commitment to competition.

Two recent inquiries from the FCC suggest they might match the
Dingell-Tauzin relief for the incumbents on a smaller level. Unable
to overturn the regulations in the Telecom Act—indeed, Chairman
Powell affirms that “the Commission is duty-bound to continue our
implementation and enforcement of these provisions”—the FCC’s
strategy apparently is to nickel-and-dime them. They suggest picking
off certain lucrative markets where they would give the incumbents
free rein to expand and to raise prices without requiring further
commitment to competition.

Finally, despite the reluctance to anger large companies like AT&T and
support Dingell-Tauzin, the Bush Administration may aim their gun at
the same target by trying to deregulate future Bell investments in new
high-speed lines.

One bright point stood out in the Wall Street Journal article: the
Administration may free up spectrum for packet wireless. A recent FCC
endorsement of ultra-wideband (UWB) is also promising.

Big telecom and cable companies have lost the public’s trust on all
fronts: they offer neither the reliability one expects of established
firms (so far as broadband goes) nor the innovation that younger and
nimbler players would provide. A set of new policies that include
a release of wireless spectrum, a democratization of rules for
interconnecting with the phone network, and encouragement for
government institutions to build their own networks could provide the
impetus for making broadband the norm.

Is reliability more important than speed or throughput?

Related link: http://www.javalobby.org/clr.html

Why does Perl 6 need Parrot, if there’s already .NET? Can a common language runtime really be language-neutral? Thanks to Michael Schwern for finding this fascinating dissection of the development issues hiding in .NET, and potentially in other CLRs. Parrot developers, please take note!

Related link: http://www.internet2.edu/activities/html/p2pworkshop.html

Last week I visited a surprisingly chilly Phoenix, Arizona to deliver
a

keynote speech

at the workshop

Collaborative Computing in Higher Education: Peer-to-Peer and
Beyond.
I no longer think that P2P requires its own distinctive research, but
I still find that people trying to meet the needs of P2P
infrastructure and applications are doing some of the most interesting
work in computing. Here are some key points I heard at the
conference. A longer article with more general points will be posted later this week.

• The value of a peer-to-peer mindset is shown in a modest project
  called
  
  Your Own Internet Distribution,
  presented by
  Bob Lindell.
  Its goal is to produce an efficient multicast system for networks that
  don’t support IP multicast.

  According to Lindell, a typical way someone might add users to a
  multicast would be to build a mesh in which all users are fully
  connected—for instance, ten (4+3+2+1) connections for five users.
  Then the application would perform some sophisticated routing analysis
  and come up with a hierarchical tree that represents the best routes
  between all users. The problem is that the application would have to
  rebuild the mesh and the tree every time a user comes or goes, and
  that creates burdensome overhead in a real-life situation.

  A P2P mindset takes account of transient users and designs a solution
  that is less elegant in theory but more workable in practice. No mesh
  is created, but each user that connects is added to the best point in
  the tree. If one node becomes overwhelmed with traffic, it kicks one
  or more children off the tree and they rejoin it elsewhere.

• 
  Bill St. Arnaud,
  as well as other presenters, emphasized that there are plenty of
  legitimate applications, especially peer-to-peer applications, that
  require high bandwidth. So bandwidth problems won’t go away, even if
  all the file-sharing sites are shut down.

  St. Arnaud, who helps Canadian universities develop fiber networks, is
  in a highly unusual position because his colleagues have plenty of
  bandwidth and are looking for applications to fill it. His
  
  presentation
  
  showed some promising educational projects.

• Most university administrators, in contrast, really need to rein in
  file sharing. It’s driving normal research- and class-oriented traffic
  off of their networks. The most promising technologies for “traffic
  shaping” don’t involve blocking particular ports (because file sharing
  programs can work around that) or hard limits on usage (because a lot
  of network users have big bandwidth needs for good reasons related to
  university business). Instead, sophisticated traffic shaping watches
  each users’ bandwidth use and gradually cuts down on the bandwidth
  allocated to them as usage increases.

• Two projects illustrate the validity of a peer-to-peer approach in
  ways that are particularly easy to see:

  • 
    Porivo,
    presented by CEO
    
    Gordon Kass,
    is a commercial venture about which I wrote a
    
    profile
    
    last year. Porivo installs its software on participating end-user
    sites to test the responsiveness of web sites under absolutely
    realistic conditions.

  • 
    SHOCK,
    a research project presented by
    
    Eytan Adar,
    lets people find authorities on particular subjects while maintaining
    the privacy of both the authorities and the requesters. Each expert
    stores a profile on his or her personal computer and the profile is
    queried when anyone sends a request to the network for help.

  In addition,
  
  Raymond Leung
  
  described a video distribution system (an application pursued by lots
  of P2P researchers) that depends on storing chunks of videos on
  users’s systems, and
  
  Werner Vogels
  
  presented a
  
  publish/subscribe system
  
  that pushes new articles of interest through a chain of users.