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The Fight For End-To-End: Part Two
from the crack-that-whip dept.
The final segment of the morning covered caching. The main issue centered around transparent caching, where users ask for certain content but their request is silently fulfilled by a caching proxy server instead, generally without the user having any way to detect this. The standard concept of caching has the user being presented with the same content she would otherwise have gotten from the requested site, but that need not be true - Singapore, China and Australia have all used transparent caches to censor their citizens. This can also be a security violation (are you really talking to the secure server on stupidpettoys.com, or a proxy in between? Most users won't notice the difference.). Ann Brick noted a subsidiary issue - big commercial players have the ability to pay for their sites to be cached, while individuals do not. Similar to the QoS issue, this might be used to discriminate between paying, fast, commercial sites, and sites owned by individuals or even competitors.
David Clark made the insightful observation that dollars spent on caching don't go to general network improvements -- one small piece of the network is improved by caches, but the same money spent improving the whole network could improve it for everyone. Timothy Denton concluded this segment with the characterization of transparent caching as the difference between "form follows function" and "function follows form": the mere presence of caching and the ability to interfere with content delivery in the middle of the network destroys end-to-end and creates opportunities for mischief.
In the afternoon, there were two larger sessions covering broadband and wireless Internet access. In both areas, the companies controlling these access methods have strong motivations to violate end-to-end principles.
Jerry Duvall led the broadband discussion. He presented a rather fascinating economists' view of the situation -- an economists' world being solely concerned with customers, producers and markets. Laws are necessary to enable markets -- contract law, commercial law, fraud law, and so on are needed in order for markets to function. He summoned up the ghost of Adam Smith with a brief review of capitalism: producers always conspire against the public to get more profits from them, only competition keeps them in check. Marketing, lock-in, monopolization, and predatory pricing are always used by producers. He denied that end-to-end represented any sort of a perfect competitive market, however, suggesting that customer wants cause problems -- in some cases, customers actually want bundles from a single provider, and may actually prefer non-end-to-end Internet access. From an economist's point of view, end-to-end is only a means to an end. The end in this case is creating value for the customer. If that involves end-to-end Internet access, fine. If it doesn't, still fine. The value to the customer is paramount, engineering elegance is secondary.
Duvall also suggested that many observers have a naive view of regulation. With regard to the debate over open access to cable systems, he stated that there was no easy way for regulators to "come in and fix it." Regulation implies overcoming the resistance of entrenched players, and in the case of open access to cable systems, AT&T and other cable giants have proven adept at fighting lawsuits in support of their ability to keep their systems closed.
As we've seen previously, there was discussion of the reasons why end-to-end can be violated: sometimes customers want it, but (probably more often) the wants of companies are the driving force. Duvall suggested the external value of end-to-end in fostering competition and democratic values isn't adequately valued in most considerations of the economics of broadband. That is, the cost of violating end-to-end is spread out among many users of the network, but the benefits from that action accrue mainly to individual companies -- in economic parlance, this is called externalizing costs.
Another panelist emphasized the democratic value of open systems, a recurring topic in Lessig's writings. There was a bit more discussion of bundling-as-an-aid-for-novice-users vs. bundling-as-a-way-to-lock-in-customers. Jerome Saltzer reiterated the time-tested solution for monopoly problems: separate the content from the content-carriers. Deborah Lathen, acting perhaps as devil's advocate, asked why the builder of the pipe shouldn't be allowed to monopolize it. Duvall noted that no matter what the FCC might do to regulate cable carriers, that economic theory doesn't hold much chance for relief -- any time there's a monopoly (over the cable pipe), the monopolist is going to be able to extract monopoly rents, one way or another. If regulation affects a certain aspects of the business, the monopolist will find some other way to leverage the monopoly for greater profits. The only sure remedy is eliminating the monopoly.
Further audience discussion raised the idea that the concept of "an ISP" is a odd sort of legacy brought about by the necessity to have an intermediary between the telephone network and the TCP/IP network. In the future, the concept of an ISP may change radically. A question was asked: what benefit does the public get by allowing the cable companies to monopolize access? There were no good answers.
Mark Laubach gave a good overview of the architecture of cable Internet access, referring to the DOCSIS standard, which wasn't designed with open access in mind. Laubach stated that "basic IP dialtone" -- that is, a simple TCP/IP Internet connection without frills or bundled services -- should be a consumer right, which should apply to every broadband service regardless of delivery method: cable, DSL, wireless or satellite services.
Peter Huber summarized the open-access debate as it affected phone companies. The phone companies had a 1Mhz twisted pair of copper strands that they swore up and down couldn't be shared. They were ordered to share it, and now are doing so: local and long-distance competition, shared data/voice over that tiny line, co-location at central offices, etc. Now the cable companies have a 750mhz copper wire that they claim is "impossible" to share. Huber emphasized that whatever the regulations, cable and phone companies should be treated equally. Currently there are disjointed regulations, which (depending on your viewpoint) either unduly hamper phone companies or leave cable companies unfairly unrestricted.
Further discussion brought out the case of Stockholm, Sweden. Stockholm and certain other cities have taken on the job of laying fiber-optic cable as a municipal service, similar to sewer service or water or roads. Since the municipality built the pipe to the home, there is no issue of a company attempting to monopolize the pipe, and any company which wants to offer Internet service over the pipe may do so. As a result, Stockholm residents are getting extremely fast access speeds at prices less than U.S. residents pay for cable Internet access, and customers don't have to worry about the cable monopoly steadily reducing their upstream speeds, or banning servers, or whatever other crackdown U.S. cable providers have thought of most recently. The panel then debated whether (and how) it would make sense to move the U.S. to that sort of municipal model. A panelist threw out the figure that true open access to cable pipes might require a choice of 400 ISPs. An audience member suggested that as things are currently going in the U.S., there might be a choice of five ISPs at most, hand-picked by the cable provider.
David Clark added that whatever solution is proposed, it must be an ongoing process -- since cable Internet access is certainly not going to be the final stage of bandwidth development. Finally the broadband session closed with a pithy statement that, despite claims to the contrary, content is not king -- there is, and always has been, more money in individuals talking to each other than in one-way content distribution. The question that remains is how to convince broadband providers that there is more money to be made in selling large quantities of low-profit services rather than small quantities of more profitable ones.
The day concluded with a session about wireless Internet access. Unsurprisingly, WAP was the first topic to come up: a closed, end-to-end-unfriendly, expensive protocol that is all but deceased in the market, yet still actively promoted by companies that hope to benefit from controlling wireless Internet access.
Karl Auerbach had an insightful comment about why to use plain vanilla TCP/IP instead of a bespoke wireless protocol. Similar to the argument raised by Bruce Schneier and others that using a proven crypto algorithm makes sense because there are a lot of bad protocol writers in the world, Auerbach posited that freely available TCP/IP stacks have had the bugs beaten out of them, but the average proprietary protocol hasn't. The topic shifted to the location information that is now required to be built in to mobile phones. The panel discussed the control issues inherent in different network architectures: location information could be built into the phone, and controlled by the user, or it could be built into the cell towers, and controlled by the phone company (or law enforcement, or advertisers). It looks like the second architecture will be the one that is deployed.
Yochai Benkler brought up the issue of spread spectrum changing the rules for FCC frequency allocation -- more communications may shift to frequencies where the FCC does not require licenses to broadcast. Dewayne Hendricks gave a lengthy and interesting description of how amateur radio is currently being used in a manner similar to the venerable Fidonet to pass packet data over the short-wave frequencies via a store-and-forward system. The interesting part is that Amateur Packet Radio has been around for 15 years or so. Hendricks' concept was that the first truly free network would be one composed of independent wireless spread-spectrum devices creating an ad hoc network which could not be censored or controlled by any entity whatsoever. One audience member quipped that disruptive technologies always appear to incumbents as toys.
Hendricks noted some other wireless WANs, such as one in the San Francisco Bay area using Breezecom wireless cards and antennae. (Coincidentally, Salon did a story on wireless WANs just a few days ago.) Dale Hatfield noted that Hendricks' network could be created today using licensed spectrum, and noted that the greatest danger is incumbent spectrum-holders pushing regulations which protect their investments by making it difficult for the FCC to open up or use sections of the spectrum for these innovative uses.
Towards the end, one member of the audience (and I do apologize for not catching who it was), pulled everything together by noting the convergence between end-to-end as a technological issue, open access as an economic issue, and democracy and public debate as a political issue. The idea of eliminating "gatekeepers" on the internet is important for a great many reasons, whether you look at it as a technological issue of promoting progress and innovation, or as an economic issue of fostering competition and preventing monopolies from abusing their power, or as an issue of promoting free and unrestrained speech on the communications media of the 21st century. This is certainly one of the most important issues facing the country today, but relatively few people know anything -- even a smidgeon -- about it, or at most they've read a few news reports about the AOL/Time Warner merger. I'm glad to see such a diverse and intelligent group working on the issues, and if they don't yet have all the answers, it's only because they want to get it right.
Sharing (Score:3)
The phone companies had a 1Mhz twisted pair of copper strands that they swore up and down couldn't be shared. They were ordered to share it, and now are doing so: local and long-distance competition, shared data/voice over that tiny line, co-location at central offices, etc. Now the cable companies have a 750mhz copper wire that they claim is "impossible" to share.
I do hope the folks from the FCC who were in attendance make special note of this.
...phil
The devolution of the Internet (Score:3)
That's correct, this is NOT pure end-to-end, and no, email is NOT a valid exception. What you're doing is preventing your customers from directly using mail servers other than your own. Regardless of your intentions, this could just as easily be viewed as a monopolistic act, and when it's done by large companies like AOL, becomes just that.
I've recently had this done to me by Earthlink. I used to use my own mail server colocated at a hosting site to send outbound email. In the last few months, Earthlink, who I use as my local ISP, began blocking port 25, which means I can no longer access my own mail server to send email. I consider this unacceptable.
Others replies in this article have mentioned other services that they can't use with their provider, for example VNC. I had to abandon IBM Global Network when they started using a proxy which prohibited me from using local names for machines on a remote network, i.e. it wouldn't allow web requests to remote machines defined in my hosts file, since the "transparent" IBM proxy didn't recognize the machine name in the HTTP GET packet, even though my machine was attempting to send the request directly to the correct IP address. This prevented me from running intranet applications remotely.
I think there's a real risk is that the Internet will slowly devolve into a system which only allows communications on certain predefined ports, like 80, using predefined protocols, like HTTP. Already, we see systems that go to great lengths to package their communications into HTTP form in order to bypass firewalls and proxies. This will just create a stupid arms race in which people who want to abuse the network just get more creative about how they do that, while people who have legitimate uses will find the functionality they have available continually eroded.
While it might be possible to pay more money to get the services you want, this has the potential to significantly impede development of future systems if not everyone has access to the same features. After all, I fervently hope that HTTP 1.1 is not the last word in communications protocols - but how will the next revolutionary replacement be developed if the inventors aren't allowed to send anything other than approved packets across the network to approved ports?
This is incredibly important! (Score:3)
In one stroke they cover all of the perennial Slashdot themes: technology and good software engineering, freedom versus corporate control, government intervention, censorship (no hot grits though
These people are deciding who gets to "own" the information delivery system that will be more crucial than most people can imagine right now. It is incredibly important that we get it right the first time. The infinite wisdom of the designers of TCP/IP is now showing in that the network has scaled infeasibly well over thirty years later. There are ignorant, greedy people out there who want to fundamentally screw this up so they can make money out of it.
Thank you to the original author by the way, for the excellent summary of the proceedings.
For what it's worth, I'm all for Stockholm's model. IMHO bandwith is an infrastructure thing and like roads, sewers and electricity, should be provided and maintained by the state -- as by its nature it's most efficient to do these things in a monopoly fashion. I'd prefer to have shit broadband due to an incompetent local council than because an Evil Corporation had me by the balls.
Cheers, Robert.
Eliminate the gatekeepers! (Score:3)
My work's firewall prohibits VNC (or any direct connections) from my home computer to my work computer in the name of security.
Now I have this really fast connection which has no value for telecommuting: remote control, file transfer, telnet, etc. Great! Maybe this can be fixed by a VPN, but that's just some other thing that I have to figure out rather than getting real work done.
Re:Eliminate the gatekeepers! (Score:3)
Not only do we need to fear government imposed censorship (as we already see in China), but also corporate imposed censorship. I can see, say, Verzion preventing packets containing anti-Verzion content from being passed.
Re:Eliminate the gatekeepers! (Score:3)
You may want to consider recompiling the source for VNC and running it on a higher numbered port, such as would be seen in passive ftp--this would be easier than setting up a VPN. All bets are off if they're actually doing packet inspection, which I doubt.
You've got it (Score:4)
This is very similar to the way the phone company used to work. AT&T used to own everything, from the local loop to the long lines to the very phone on your wall. They had no real incentive to hold down costs, because they were guaranteed a slice of everything and a certain rate of return on investment. This led to enormous overcharging for long-distance service and nowhere near enough work on making the local loop cheap (because it was subsidized, and making it cheaper reduced the investment on which AT&T got its return). Separating the various functions led to enormous increases in choice for both long-distance and phone instruments, answering machines, voice mail and you-name-it.
Cable companies don't have the guaranteed return which AT&T once had, but most of them do have local monopolies stemming from the fact that most cities only allowed one cable company per area. As I have noted before, it is just plain wrong to allow this accident of history to dictate what services can be obtained by subscribers in a particular area. The cable is there to deliver packets, and the cable company should be able to charge money for it. The cable companies ought not to be allowed to have any financial relationship to the companies which generate the packets, nor discriminate between them, any more than SWB should be allowed to discriminate between long-distance providers.
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Eliminate the gatekeepers! (Score:4)
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No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.
Ownership of lines (Score:4)
I ask because of the problems I've had with this. I live in Amarillo TX. I wanted to get DSL from a local ISP (ARNet). Naturally, only Southwestern Bell is allowed to work on the physical lines. Southwestern Bell also offers DSL service.
I tried for more than two months to get DSL service. ARNet would place the order, and SWB would encounter a tiny problem and cancel my order without telling either ARNet or me. Eventually, two months after it started SWB canceled my order for the third time (I only found out because I called ARNet, and they called SWB, this is they way I found out about the pervious two cancelations) saying that I could never have DSL where I live because there was an "obstructor" on the trunk line.
I have difficulty believing that I would have gotten this much hassle had I gone to SWB directly for my DSL.
Finally, I gave up and am now getting broadband through COX cable.
2600 had similar problems: http://www.2600.com/news/2000/1002.html [2600.com]
Is there a solution to maintenance bullying? Or will we need to forbid the physical line providers from providing service simply to insure that they don't abuse their maintenance monopoly to get customers away from everyone else?