[iwar] net.wars: The broadband monopolies

net.wars

By Wendy M. Grossman: Friday 26 December 2003, 12:08
 

BACK WHEN the Net was young B- when the men were men, the women were men, and
the electrons were all nervous B- we used to talk about how important it was
to support small, independent ISPs. In fact, I once got email from a reader
trashing me for having a CompuServe account on just that basis.

The principle still stands. The smaller the number of companies that control
access to the Internet, the more easily they are controlled. The larger
those companies are, the less they will care about Internet freedoms or even
simply the right to experiment and implement new ideas.

The last half of the 1990s saw a lot of consolidation among ISPs. Most of
any size wound up being owned either by telcos or Earthlink. In the UK, for
example, Demon got bought by Scottish Telecom (a subsidiary of Scottish
Power, the company that then ludicrously renamed itself Thus), Pipex got
bought by UUnet, which in turn got eaten by Worldcom along with most of the
rest of the Internet backbone. In the US, Earthlink swallowed up Mindspring,
Netcom, and all sorts of others. CompuServe itself is now billed as AOL's
"budget arm".

But the real consolidation didn't begin until broadband arrived. Now, in a
lot of places in the US you're lucky if you have a choice of supplier, and
when you do it's usually between DSL from one of the giant telcos or cable
from one of the giant cable companies. Things are a little better in the UK,
where if you can get DSL you can at least choose from ISPs from big to
personal, although the cable companies are still huge and the ultimate
supplier of DSL is almost always BT.

Which brings us to Comcast. Larry Lessig wrote in his book The Future of
Ideas about the possibility that given a few subtle changes to the
Internet's infrastructure it would be relatively easy for the cable
companies or another small handful of telcos or other large businesses to
take control of the Net, turning it into the kind of closed systems TV or
the old telephone networks used to be. This dire prediction may be upon us.

I was at a friend's house and wanted to do something simple B- VPN into my
home network and get my contact manager to exchange data with its mate
sitting on my desktop. Couldn't understand why it didn't work. So I did the
things you do: I fiddled. I got someone on the other end to inspect the
router settings. Went through all the settings on the computer with the
incoming connection. No. Google search!

My friends are Comcast subscribers. Comcast has been progressively turning
on functions to block VPN traffic for the last four or five months. If you
fight through the Comcast site to find the terms of service you discover
that's only the beginning. Under their rules prohibiting you from using your
Internet connection for "any business purpose" you are arguably in violation
if you so much as buy a book from Amazon.com.

There's always been a general expectation among Internet users that the
Internet connection you buy is limited only by its speed. It's
telecommunications. Does the phone company tell you it contravenes the terms
of residential service if you use your phone at home to call sales prospects
one day a week? But US cable companies are used to supplying packages of TV
channels and thinking in tiers; unlike their counterparts elsewhere they
have not been in the business of selling phone service. Maybe they think VPN
is just another premium channel, like Home Box Office.

This is assuming you don't buy this argument that the problem is the amount
of traffic VPN usage generates. I'm sure there are exceptions, but I bet the
average VPN user is less of a drain on the network than the average
file-sharer, even the average legal file-sharer. If you wanted to ensure
that Internet usage was fairly parceled out among your residential users,
you wouldn't block specific applications, you'd simply throttle their
bandwidth. Comcast simply wants to push anyone it can onto the more
expensive $95 a month "professional" service.

In fact, although phone companies do not now monitor your phone usage and
demand you switch to a business service if they think you're operating a
business on your residential phone, they did at one time B- back in the old
AT&T monopoly days. Comcast is behaving like a monopoly supplier, and
realistically, in many areas that's exactly what it is. You may argue that
cable companies, like anyone else, have the right to set their terms and
conditions any way they want, and if you don't like it you can take your
business elsewhere. But very often there is no competing supplier,
particularly since Comcast acquired this part of AT&T's business.

The lack of competing suppliers is also true in their main business of
selling cable TV subscriptions. Franchises in the US were granted by local
towns to what once were tens of thousands of independent suppliers, who
largely got bought up in the 1980s by what became a tiny handful of
nationals. Comcast owns and operates a few TV channels, which it sells to
subscribers.

One of the first big anti-trust suits forced the movie studios to exit the
business of owning theaters. Along about ten years from now, Comcast could
be next and on the same basic principle: content suppliers should not own
the distribution chain. Which, by then, will be increasingly the Internet.
Blocking VPN traffic is a bad omen. B5

Wendy M. GrossmanB9s Web site has an extensive archive of her books,
articles, and music, and links to all the earlier columns in this series.
She has an intermittent blog. Readers are welcome to post there or to send
email, but please turn off HTML.

-- This communication is confidential to the parties it is intended to serve --
Fred Cohen - http://all.net/ - fc@all.net - fc@unhca.com - tel/fax: 925-454-0171
Fred Cohen & Associates - University of New Haven - Security Posture

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Received on Sun Dec 28 15:21:13 2003