Internet Filtering Lobby Forms

mbone writes "Wired's David Kravets reports on a new lobbying effort to support the filtering of internet traffic called Arts & Labs. Coverage is available at PC World as well. The lobby's members include AT&T, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, NBC Universal, Viacom and the Songwriters Guild of America. Their web site says, 'network operators must have the flexibility to manage and expand their networks to defend against net pollution and illegal file-trafficking which threatens to congest and delay the network for all consumers.' Does it seem that this is an attempt to categorize P2P with spam and malware, or is it just me?"

Comments

'must'

[slimjim8094]

Why must? Just think, with more consumer choice, this could be a 'specialty' ISP that you made a conscious decision to subscribe to.

As it is, they're trying to say 'existing ISP need to be able to filter'. Why's that? It sure isn't about customer choice; otherwise it would be a 'could' or a 'should'

And we're back to net neutrality again, but this time with a pretty 'think of the children' mask.

Re:'must'

[slimjim8094]

Wait, disregard my above comment for dumbassery. This has nothing to do with children... I should go to bed.

But I'll try to salvage it:

Assuming there was consumer choice in the ISP market, why wouldn't you be able to choose 'granny ISP' that allowed email, websites, and iTunes but filtered porn, hack attempts, and would clean your computer for you if you got infected? And then there's the HARDCORE TORRENT provider with a (possibly) lower bandwidth, but no throttling and high upstream, with the assumption that people will torrent 24/7.

As it is, they're selling a 'one-size-fits-all' plan of high-bandwidth, but we'll cut you off if you use it more than we want, and charge you more than you should pay.

This is trying to shoehorn this strategy into a changing market. People are using IPTV and there are more people knowing how to use BitTorrent... but they don't want to upgrade their system to support new uses. So, to fend off the law knocking on their door, they're trying to get it named 'malware' because their system can't handle it and it hurts other people sometimes.

Re:'must'

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that usage is correct. An ISP must be able to do that, otherwise it would not be a choice for an ISP. It is not "must do it" and not "must not do it".

Re:'must'

[Anonymous Coward]

I like that, "think of the children."

ISP's need to be able to filter whatever they want because of the children...or because they could then charge content providers extra if they want. Once you do away with net neutrality, we can rely on big businesses to help themselves. But don't worry, the robber barons will donate some money to the poor unfortunates that will no longer be able to compete. Or maybe they'll donate condoms to Africa with some of that money. Sorry, but I'm not feeling overly optimistic about the ability of most big businesses to play fairly, without getting laws passed that favor them.

Maybe some year when I'm not being asked to bail out slimeball businessmen with my taxes, I'll feel differently. BTW, 700 billion isn't much. Just take the net worth of the richest man in the world, multiply it by 13 or 14, and you're in the neighborhood. I was looking at figures and comments about social security, and it's called the largest government giveaway program. I think it'll be surpassed shortly.

Re:'must'

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe some year when I'm not being asked to bail out slimeball businessmen with my taxes, I'll feel differently. BTW, 700 billion isn't much. Just take the net worth of the richest man in the world, multiply it by 13 or 14, and you're in the neighborhood. I was looking at figures and comments about social security, and it's called the largest government giveaway program. I think it'll be surpassed shortly.

Yeah... and then you didn't yet include the 1500 billion of emergency credit the fed bank gave to banks in the past week.

It's not the same soup though, it's got a whole different taste! The social security money goes to poor or sick people, ordinary human beings. But the 700 billion goes to..... the banks who caused this shit in the first place! The man in the street is being ripped of *TWICE* this time, once by the banks, and now by the taxman!

Americans! Land of freedom! Where are your protests, where are your riots?! Are you all just gonna put up with this? They're ripping you off *twice* and you all just sit there and let them get away with it??

Re:'must'

[giantweevil]

Wait, "freedom"?

Obviously you don't live in America, the Patriot act specifically forbids any of this "freedom" you seem to think exists. Thinking differently than the president on any issue makes you a terrorist.

I mean, it's not like we have a constitution that gives free speech that's being ignored by the current administration or anything.~

Re:'must'

[Jack Conrad]

Actually, we sort of don't, depending on how you define 'constitution' -- free speech was in the first amendment.

Re:'must'

[Grimbleton]

The best part of the situation is I'm a college student, and couldn't get a measly student loan this year because of all this bullshit. TERI is completely frozen.

Re:'must'

[giantweevil]

Amendments to the constitution are part of the constitution.

It's a formal addition or alteration, unlike reinterpretation by the courts or laws of congress.

Re:'must'

[PunkOfLinux]

The same thing happened to PHEAA - they can't sell off their student loans, so they just... stopped this year :\

I think it's ridiculous that we're bailing these people out; it's disgusting that they are so important to the economy that their collapse will cause a huge failure.

Re:'must'

[LordLucless]

Basically, because if they did that, the hardcore torrent providers would all go out of business, and the torrenters would flock to the granny ISPs and start complaining about them.

Everyday users subsidise those who use more in the current system. That is why companies are trying to ban, or restrict heavy users. The more they do, the more profit they get. They don't want to cater to them - they want them to go away.

Re:'must'

[MeNeXT]

Yes "think of the children"

If they can filter illegal content then for sure they can filter child porn. Hold them responsible for all the content that passes through the network. Lets call these service providers Content Service Providers so the general public will not mix the 2 up. ISP are gust carriers and CSP will be responsible for ALL the content. If they can filter music then the can filter child porn.

Re:'must'

[Curunir_wolf]

This is a pretty transparent attempt to change the "Internet" into a broadcast service - like TV. It's a money grab for the big corporations. I guess they decided since Washington is bent on bailing out all the banks, it's time to ask for their own big handout at the expense of the taxpayers.

Check out the site. Their "Creativity Online" section has this description:

There are a variety of reliable and legal places to enjoy great content online. Visit our Creativity Online database to learn about the great places you can enjoy content safely online.

Well... check out the list of sites they have there: ABC.com, Hulu.com, Netflix, MTV, Sony, etc. etc. It reads like a who's who of giant global media corporations.

And guess what? All those media corporations can pay big bucks for "access" to the ISP customers. This is more of the "we should get to double-dip charges for network access", except now with the added benefit of "and block everybody else".

This is probably the biggest threat to a free and open Internet I have ever seen

Re:'must'

[inKubus]

What you have here is a bunch of broadcasters trying to turn the internet into the same one-way, one-sided medium they've always enjoyed. Guess what, they did it to radio, they did it to TV, they did it to publishing. But the thing is, the internet is CHEAP. Digital bits of data are extremely cheap to move around. So there's no arguement like there was with the airwaves that we might "run out of space". So, naturally, the new villian is "illegal" activites. They could care less about the illegality of it, I'm sure, and are more interested in exploiting the public's (and the media's) (and congress's) ignorance and using that to further their own agenda, which is turning the internet into a private cable broadcast system. With providers at the top and us at the bottom. As long as data can move from my computer to another computer on the internet, there will be P2P. But if all of that data has to go through their servers (which it kindof does already, their switches and routers) then they can control everything on the wire. The internet is the best thing that's ever happened to this country and this world. Money is about ideas, not about control. The internet provides the means for ideas. They need to tune in and realize that the world has changed and will no longer tolerate their attempts at control of ideas. We, the people, do not want that anymore and this is our country, and those are our wires (paid for with our money). Well, not so fast! Ma Bell paid good money 12301 years ago to put that copper in and we're not just going to let anyone use it. Thus you see the desire to open the airwaves now.

Re:'must'

[Anonymous Coward]

What a load of nonsense, I for one fail to understand why this argument is modded up.

There are two ways you can reason this:

1. Price Point, like you suggest

2. Control

Considering point 2, it is of the most and utter importance than access to the net stays homogenous & indiscriminated and not analyzed. Your ISP should never analyze the data you sent, your ISP should not be political, the only role your ISP should have is to move bits around, shut the f*ck up and send bills.

About point 1, price point. I've worked for a number of ISP's, and it's true, most traffic is generated by a small percentage, and it is paid for by people just checking their e-mail. It's even a game, those people move from ISP to ISP. Of course, if you get rid of them, automatically a new group of bandwidth "parasites" is created.

There are two solutions to this. One is the most common: the ISP offers different (speed) packages. The guy only checking e-mail will get a basic account. The torrent guys get the "extreme" package. Solution two is a data limit. You have over X GB of traffic? You pay more.

But no, analyzing that traffic and then taking action based on the information nature of that traffic is NOT the solution. It is the Dark Way. It's about old media, control and alternatives to DRM. Get your head out of your *sses please. Parent argument is about the same as people who are prepared to take anything when some pedo affair is thrown in, or perhaps some terrorist threat? Think of the children! Think of the light users! Riiight. You seem to be easy targets for people who want control.

Re:'must'

[bendodge]

I wrote a scathing letter to all of my congressmen, and all but one of them (Idaho) are opposing the plan, one quite vocally at that (Bill Sali). I don't know what other people are doing besides complaining about it on slashdot.

Re:'must'

[unity100]

why not post with a fucking account instead of AC when expressing your opinion ?

see, i used profanity in this post. and i posted it with my own account and id, despite it is going to be modded down as flamebait.

grow some balls first, then blabber anti net neutrality crap. for that net neutrality thing is the most important thing that has created this internet as a second world as it is.

Re:'must'

[electrictroy]

Also eventually all ISPs would become like cable channels - they are not regulated by the FCC, and yet they still censor every little nipple slip or nudity or sex scene. Cable channels justify this censorship "because children might be watching" and ISPs would do the same thing for the same reason. (Goodbye playboy.com, goodbye violent websites.)

I prefer that ISPs remain *neutral* and censor nothing. Let ME figure-out what I will or will not access.

I'm sick of cable corporations acting like surrogate parents - this you can watch; this we will protect you from seeing. I don't want my ISP to start doing the same thing.

Re:'must'

[electrictroy]

Well the alternative is that YOUR bank closes-down, and takes your life savings with it. (And before you "it's insured", remember that the reason the Fed is asking Congress for help, is because they are almost out of money. FDIC can't return your money to you if the Fed's wallet is empty.)

>>>BTW, 700 billion isn't much

Not much??? At my upper-middle class salary, it would still take *7 million years* for me to earn that much money. That sounds like a really big bill to my ears.

Re:'must'

[electrictroy]

How to define "Constitution" is already defined by the Constitution itself, which states all amendments will have the same power & affect as the original articles. The Right to free speech IS a part of the Constitution. (It's also enshrined in virtually all state constitutions.)

Re:'must'

[PunkOfLinux]

Uh... I never said it wasn't much.
And I don't really have much in the bank. Maybe a thousand dollars (most of it goes to my education). Also, I would HOPE that Wacopse Federal Credit Union would be a little more responsible than to increase short-term profits by killing themselves long-term (they're non-profit).

Re:'must'

[electrictroy]

Well I have $50,000 in one bank, $60,000 in another, and $80,000 in a third bank.

And I'm worried. Like I said the Fed is running out of money. Last I heard they only have 0.2 trillion in reserve. Which means if the whole banking system starts to collapse (as happened in 1929 and 30), the Fed won't be able to insure everyone's savings. The money will simply disappear, and I will have lost a huge chunk of money.

That's why the Fed went to Congress; the Federal Reserve is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy itself & needs Congress to prop it up.

Re:'must'

[PunkOfLinux]

May be time to invest that money elsewhere.
There's no way we, as a nation, are coming out of this unscathed. At least I'm lucky enough to be in school, with pretty decent scholarships, right now. Don't have to deal with the 'real world' as much as you guys.

Re:'must'

[Anonymous Coward]

The thread starter anchored his comment on the use of "must" and then proceeded to envision filtering as an optional ISP service. That is an incorrect interpretation of the sentence "network operators must have the flexibility to manage and expand their networks to defend against net pollution and illegal file-trafficking which threatens to congest and delay the network for all consumers." If you had tried to stay calm instead of resorting to profanity, you might have noticed that I did not advocate or reject net neutrality. The thread starter on the other hand advocated that ISPs should be allowed to offer filtered internet access, which is exactly what the anti net-neutrality lobby wants.

-- AC

Re:'must'

[Anonymous Coward]

Assuming there was consumer choice in the ISP market

"were".

No surprise

[MiKM]

And Cisco has the means to produce filtering equipment, while Microsoft has recently secured a patent to watermark music and track it through the internet.

After reading the summary, I wasn't surprised that Cisco is in it for the money.

Re:No surprise

[Baton Rogue]

Well aren't they all in it for the money? AT&T, Cisco and MS for the products and services that will be used for this, and NBC, Viacom and the music industry for the "stolen" revenues that this is trying to prevent. How is it not obvious this is all about money?

Re:No surprise

[Presto Vivace]

Really this should be a customer relations issue. Not just political, we should be contacting the public affairs department of these companies directly and tell them this is not acceptable. Unlike politicians, corporations are not used to that sort of pressure tactic and they might back down.

Re:No surprise

[MiKM]

Well, yes, it all boils down to money in the end. My point was that all the other companies are directly affected by piracy - it makes sense that they are vouching to curb it. Cisco isn't affected by piracy, or if it is, not to the same extent. Based on the article, it seems that Cisco is only in this so they can sell the hardware to implement it.

Re:No surprise

[Antique Geekmeister]

Cisco is affected by sales of bandwidth handling equipment. They would much rather sell new equipment, with new patents and computationally topheavy features such as sophisticated filtering, than another round of cheap GigE switches. And their customers would rather buy one smart unit, and pay lower bandwidth costs, than fill racks with P2P supporting hardware. For a business network, I'd buy it in a heartbeat: our employees have no business running Bittorrent from their desktop on the business network, even for legitimate traffic. I try to make sure there is *one* host for authorized Bittorrent, such as CentOS DVD images, but other than that, they can do it at home.

While spam is in fact most email, has P2P yet overtaken spam as the largest single bandwidth user at most ISP's?

Re:No surprise

[WTF Chuck]

Good luck getting your letter past the shredding machine in the mail room, or your phone call back to the states from the call center in India.

Re:No surprise

[electrictroy]

Broadcasting companies that shred letters from their viewers will get slapped by a heavy fine from the FCC. They are required to keep ALL viewer correspondence for public review by the government.

Hah!

[Anonymous Coward]

I would -love- for this lobby group to be made to define clearly those terms - particularly "Net Pollution" - and explain their FOOLPROOF ways to identify them.

Not that this would make them worth listening to, but it would be a lot closer.

Re:Hah!

[MeNeXT]

Net pollution = child pron

Since they claim to be able to filter content why do they permit child pron on their equipment. Hold them responsible for all content.

Re:Hah!

[WTF Chuck]

Personally, I think that they are just shooting themselves in the foot. They obviously refuse to learn from their own history.

First, they went after Napster, and were successful in getting that shut-down. And the people moved over on, to bigger, better, faster P2P software.

Now they are trying to chase down all the "bigger, better, faster" P2P softwares. They want to make them a thing of the past. They neglect the fact that every time they try to combat the "problem", people find ways around it.

Doesn't matter what little victory they get, be it filtering, packet inspection, P2P software becoming illegal, they will always loose the following battle. People will find a way around.

With everyone so accustomed to digital piracy, the more they try to stomp it down, the more it goes into the shadows.

This is something that the people want, and will have. The more they push, the more people look for better options. Eventually, they will begin to push the "Joe Six-Pack" file sharers into discovering what Usenet is. With .nzb files, and todays newsreaders, anyone can figure it out once they find out about it. Imagine the fun that big media will have when they try to figure out how to track down what people were getting from that encrypted Usenet server, sitting in some corner of the world where the laws they try to use are laughed at.

I got a friend of mine away from BitTorrent, all it took was downloading something in 1/20th the amount of time that BT would have taken. That and not hogging up all the bandwidth by seeding afterwards was bonus.

Re:Hah!

[electrictroy]

Haven't you heard?

The various state governments are conspiring with ISPs to shutdown Usenet.

Re:Hah!

[WTF Chuck]

The ISPs don't have a monopoly on usenet servers. A quick google search will show you that. None of the big boys that have quit running their own Usenet are blocking access to outside providers, they just quit providing their own. Good way for them to save some money, and put on a pretty "think of the children" face for the lusers that don't know the full extent of Usenet, but only the NY State AG's blurb about it having some kiddy pr0n. There are SSL encrypted Usenet servers.

Sounds like a ploy

[Lord Kano]

I'm suspicious of this. I concede that illegal filesharing is a problem, but it sounds more like an attempt to turn the internet into a tightly controlled broadcase medium, like television.

No more freerepublic and no more dailykos.

LK

Re:Sounds like a ploy

[Joe U]

No more freerepublic and no more dailykos.

You still have a modem? If so, you're safe, just much much slower.

Re:Sounds like a ploy

[timmarhy]

"I concede that illegal filesharing is a problem"

is it really though? we've had torrent sites for years now and it hasn't killed itunes, which is competing at 99c vs free. i don't see any of the big studio's going through tough times because of it.

Re:Sounds like a ploy

[Stanislav_J]

I'm suspicious of this. I concede that illegal filesharing is a problem, but it sounds more like an attempt to turn the internet into a tightly controlled broadcase medium, like television.

It's already well on the way there. The Internet in the "good ol' days" was like one gigantic public forum where anybody with a cheap modem, a shareware program, and a free web host could establish a beachhead from which they could proclaim their likes and dislikes, hopes and dreams, hobbies and avocations, opinions and rants to the world. And while, of course, that element is still a part of the Net, look how dominated it has become by huge corporate commercial websites. Some of us still search for the individual blogs and sites that enrich our lives, but increasingly a lot of Net users probably spend most of their time with the Big Boys.

I foresee an increasingly widening divide between content providers and content consumers. "Net neutrality" is just the tip of the iceberg in the effort to clamp down on and marginalize the little guys. See, technically right now, even TV and newspapers DO afford an opportunity for anyone to broadcast their thing to the masses -- IF you have the money. I see the Net heading in the same direction. I believe that eventually the ability to put up your own website is going to cost ya, and cost big.....no more cheapie/freebie blogs and such. Your internet connection will remain affordable -- on a par with cable TV or subscribing to a magazine -- as long as you are just consuming the content that the corporations want you to see and hear. But if you want to actually speak to the masses instead of being a passive lump, well, show us the money and we'll see. If you want to buy even a single 30-second ad on the smallest TV station, it will run you at least hundreds, probably thousands of dollars. I see the Internet as eventually degenerating into the same unbalanced affair -- it will largely cease to be an interactive medium, and become another mass medium for the dissemination of what the folks with the power and the money want you to see.

But it was fun while it lasted...

Re:Sounds like a ploy

[Kjella]

i don't see any of the big studio's going through tough times because of it.

Have you really paid attention? CD sales are way down, far more than online sales are up. Look at EMI or Warner's stock performance and you see they've constantly disappointed these last years. Sony and Univeral (Vivendi) aren't quite as easy since they're a mix so you'd have to read their annual report, but music is definately not what's going well. Most people now use portable music players, not CDs and so CDs are just a meaningless transport medium for getting it on your player. More and more people are getting their music online, but even how badly you try to twist the numbers it looks like many people stop buying CDs and don't start buying anything else.

Even without P2P it's just too easy to swap arond with friends compared to the old days of sharpie copies or just pass them around anyway. Like last summer for a party I brought a laptop and my friend brought music and left the DVD with MP3s in the drive. Wasn't like he cared, he still had the music and wasn't much like I cared either but if you're the RIAA at 150,000$ a song then he casually forgot a DVD they could sue for 150+ million dollars over. It's just not possible to have any feeling of value over something you can handle so carelessly. Grabbing one album from iTunes is convienience. Copying 100GB of a well sorted collection of pretty much all famous bands in recent history is just absurd convienience. Did you hear Apple dropped their biggest iPod model because even the packrats didn't need more space? It's not a problem. Not in terms of bandwidth, storage or anything. I think we're very soon going to break all those bounds on information, it's only a matter of how much information we need, we can organize and we can process. Our digital tools will in practise be infinite, the human mind not.

Re:Sounds like a ploy

[hairyfeet]

Actually it'll be more like really bad cable."Oh,you want to watch that show? Give us a quarter. What,no commercials? That'll be $2.50!".

The simple fact is this: governments hate the Internet because it allows "crap" like Abu Ghraib to get out,which kinda puts a dent in the whole "hearts and minds" deal,and the megacorps hate it,because they haven't been able to "maximize its revenue stream".

Next of course will be the linking of P2P as nothing but havens for terrorists and child pr0n. Neither side will be happy until we have a "great filter of USA" where we watch only approved content,and you might as well just keep your CC next to the screen,because the net will be useless without it.

Re:Sounds like a ploy

[EdIII]

Wrong. Well, not your observation, but the end result.

The Internet will have to remain a 2-way communications medium. It can't function without being so. That's a technical limitation that cannot be overcome.

"They", which I assume you mean the Big Content Providers, will not be able to cause you to be charged more to provide content from your residence, since increasing the cost of the upstream more than 10x the cost of the downstream will not work in any market. Even if Big Content Providers merge with bandwidth providers, they still will not be able to stop you from having upstream bandwidth, albeit less than your downstream. That upstream is more than capable of delivering the "life enriching" content that you so desire. Filtering will only get them so far, as they simply must allow you to communicate with other customers. To do otherwise, would make their product a heck of a lot less valuable and somebody else would step in to fill that need.

As a business, bandwidth is sold in a completely different way than residential and business end users. It has to. The way it is sold to residential and business customers does not make sense, and only continues to exist due to a lack of proper competition, and just plain ignorance of the possibilities.

The ability for regular people to find professional hosting services will not disappear overnight, or even over decades, if it all. That's a market. A market that makes people money. That does not just disappear. Granted if someone is getting a million hits a month on their website, that professional hosting service will start to charge them more. However, there is always some advertiser willing to put down money to take advantage of knowing where a million eyeballs are going to be.

Another thing for you to consider is that secondary Internets are going to explode in the next decade. Unbalanced copyright law, litigious content providers, and opportunistic fascist neocon agendas are pushing the creation of secondary Internets at faster and faster rates. The "primary" Internet is just too vulnerable to court cases, oppressive legislation, and legal liabilities. It only makes sense that huge pressures are being brought to bear on these companies that are hosting unpopular content. Unpopular to powers-that-be of course.

Currently, these "pools" of unpopular content are protected by locating themselves in friendlier environments that can be accessed at will by the net citizens located in the remote strongholds of the big players that would wish their destruction. Working for now, but ultimately may face their demise as these friendly environments are dwindling ever so fast. Currently, to effectively control the Internet, you must control it all. That is not possible, but with growing cooperation between different governments and corporations it is becoming more of a reality year by year.

Enter the secondary Internet that I have been speaking about. Freenet is a wonderful example of the potential for the future. It will be refined, improved, and strenghtened, since the incentives to do so grow every year. Shutting down and controlling "software which lets you publish and obtain information on the Internet without fear of censorship." is not that easy. Especially when it is a functional secondary Internet providing a decentralized, private, and anonymous distribution of data across it.

The problem that faces secondary Internets, and Freenet, is that there is simply not enough bandwidth and resources available to it to make it attractive enough to everyday people. If the world progresses as you foresee, than I would predict more and more people would start to use this as a method to distribute unpopular content. Especially, if unpopular content becomes content that simply competes with the "Big Boys".

The only possible solution, the only end game that can be played, is to outlaw the ability to create truly private and anonymous communications. If it ever comes to that, then we have MUCH LARGER problems th

Re:Sounds like a ploy

[MrNaz]

Have you really paid attention? CD sales are way down, far more than online sales are up.

Could that possibly be because the last 3-5 years have seen huge drops in consumer spending overall? Correlation is not causation.

Copying 100GB of a well sorted collection of pretty much all famous bands in recent history is just absurd convienience. Did you hear Apple dropped their biggest iPod model because even the packrats didn't need more space? It's not a problem. Not in terms of bandwidth, storage or anything. I think we're very soon going to break all those bounds on information, it's only a matter of how much information we need, we can organize and we can process. Our digital tools will in practise be infinite, the human mind not.

Believe you me, the government, it's various agencies and the big boys from the provate sector will find new ways to sort, catalog and search larger volumes of information, right after they find new ways to gather larger volumes of information about you.

Re:Sounds like a ploy

[Tuoqui]

Have you really paid attention? CD sales are way down, far more than online sales are up.

Could it be because oh I dont know... People have huge racks of CD's already? People didnt rush out to buy CD's when they came out because they still had lots on vinyl.

They're losing sales because guess what every single song is a formulaic ripoff. Who needs Brittany Spears Ripoff #2987 when you have Brittany Spears Ripoffs #1-8.

Or maybe it could be that people arent buying because they heard about the Sony Rootkit Fiasco? Who wants a CD that is going to $*&# your computer up?

Or it could be because of their strong arm tactics of the RIAA leaving a sour taste in people's mouths giving them a reason to search out and check out independent labels?

Its a disaster of their own making.

Re:Sounds like a ploy

[Jimmyisikura]

With a Cd you are paying for what you may of may not like. With iTunes, and other music software, you pay for what you want. As far as the Dvd, I believe that music should be DRM free, people will swap music anyway, because for every protection there is a way around it. Moreover with audio files, you can record the song over another medium so really all you are doing is driving potential customers over to the pirating side.

Re:Sounds like a ploy

[Klaus_1250]

Every iPod sold is 100 mp3's not bought. Every iPhone sold is 200 mp3's not bought. Every overpriced telco-subscription with insane sms costs is about 30-50 mp3's not bought (and that is every month). Music is being killed by gadgets, video, gaming, messaging, etc. Everyone seems to have picked the budget consumers had for music and now try to call it their own. I used to buy 10 - 20 CD's a year, now I buy games, DVD's and hardware/gadgets.

Re:Sounds like a ploy

[MeNeXT]

How many times can you buy Hotel California from the eagles? they have more compilations than they have songs.....

You have it on tape, on LP maybe on 8 track, on CD so why do they keep releasing the same albums and expect people to buy. Most new stuff sucks and people own the old stuff. Sales are where they should be. If I don't like the music I will not buy it. Most radio stations kill POP within a couple of weeks since they over play the songs.

On another point the cost of production, all the way to the cost of distribution has dropped off the scale. To produce a CD no longer requires expensive equipment. Home computers have gotten fast enough to process recordings. Software has improved that almost any Joe with skill can create. Not to mention that the cost of marketing and distribution to billions of potential customers is almost nonexistent compared to 10 years ago.

Please the P2P explanation is just an excuse to legislate a guaranteed salary.

When you treat people as thieves they become thieves. If the album was sold for $5 and you got a pretty CD with all the artwork why would you waste time getting music on P2P? Wasting time, energy all to find out that 1 in 5 was not worth your effort. A CD costs under $1 to produce, give $1 to the artist (they make less that that per CD now), $1 for the distributor and $2 to the greedy record label.

Re:Sounds like a ploy

[Lord Kano]

Currently, to effectively control the Internet, you must control it all.

You can control one region's acess to the internet by controlling the bottle necks.

If all of the ISPs in the US, Canada and the EU all decided to try this sort of thing. They could start whitelisting. You're only allowed to access the sites that are on board with the program. A site dissents? The get scratched from the white list.

It's hightly unlikely, but as soon as some congress-critter starts talking about why we need this to stop child porn, it'll pass unanimously.

LK

Re:Sounds like a ploy

[Anonymous Coward]

In addition to all of those, remember that itunes represents not additional revenue, but a CHANGE in revenue. Who in their right minds will buy from itunes if they bought the CD? So... anyone buying from itunes most likely did that to avoid buying the CD they WOULD have bought.

Guess what. Cassette tape sales went WAY down as well after CDs hit mainstream. :P

Re:Sounds like a ploy

[EdIII]

You can control one region's acess to the internet by controlling the bottle necks

What you say is certainly true at first glance. However, there are ways around it now that are incredibly easy and simple. SO easy and simple that even the most stupid of the unwashed masses seem to figure it out.

TOR allows you to access exit nodes across the boundaries that you speak of. Quite handy at defeating a white list at those bottlenecks, and black lists for that matter. I regularly hit Gmail in Germany, which is of course a very different site due to challenges between Google and a German ISP.

You don't even need to use TOR either. A simple public proxy would in any other country would work too. Italian users did not seem to have much of a problem accessing The Pirate Bay when Italy attempted to ban it at it's cyber-borders as well. I assume that was due to mirroring, TOR, or public proxies.

A distributed, private, and anonymous network like Freenet would still operate unhindered of course as well. You cannot white list or black list an individual Freenet resource.

I know you might bring up that TOR exit nodes and Freenet nodes would not be in the white list. On the contrary, they HAVE to. Otherwise you have banned the ability for people to communicate directly with people in other countries. I really don't see governments and ISPS stopping individual connections between random citizens over the pipes, or preventing it from being secure and private.

The measures they would have to enact to truly control those bottlenecks effectively just won't appear in minimally free society. Even in China right now, if a person wants to access unpopular content, there are still ways to do it. If China cannot effectively do it, I doubt anyone else is going to do it either.

Of course, there is still the possibility that governments may tighten up so much that it makes a day at Auschwitz look like a trip to Disneyland. Once again though, if that is true, we have bigger problems don't we??

Re:Sounds like a ploy

[Anonymous Coward]

If you'll allow me to play advocatus diaboli, that's like saying that shoplifting a CD at WalMart is OK because WalMart's so big that they won't actually notice a difference in their bottom line because of it.

Yes, yes, I know, copyright infringement is not theft - I'm not saying it is. OK, another analogy: it's like saying that beating someone up is OK as long as they don't suffer any permanent damage.

This is not proof (or even evidence) that "illegal filesharing" (i.e., copyright infringement) *is* actually a problem, or at least a new one that hasn't existed in basically forever, but your logic is still flawed; and what's more, you're distracting from the GP's main point, which, quite frankly, is much more important than this.

Re:Sounds like a ploy

[Anonymous Coward]

It's "Britney", not "Brittany". Just sayin' ...

Re:Sounds like a ploy

[maestroX]

Don't give up :-)

You've tasted freedom, I did, and so did a lot of others.

I just hope the people in emerging countries do get a taste of freedom and democracy before the corps lock it in, because once ruler US has shown its inability to deal with greedy corps.

Re:Sounds like a ploy

[Stanislav_J]

The Internet will have to remain a 2-way communications medium. It can't function without being so. That's a technical limitation that cannot be overcome.

"They", which I assume you mean the Big Content Providers, will not be able to cause you to be charged more to provide content from your residence, since increasing the cost of the upstream more than 10x the cost of the downstream will not work in any market. Even if Big Content Providers merge with bandwidth providers, they still will not be able to stop you from having upstream bandwidth, albeit less than your downstream.

I'm not talking about bandwidth at the source (from your computer to and from wherever) and I'm not talking about 1-way versus 2-way communication (obviously, the Net HAS to be "2-way" to some extent as you are sending commands and requests to view various content every time you click on something).

What I am saying is this: if you want to have a website, blog, online store, etc., that content has to be "parked" -- hosted -- somewhere on somebody's server. And that's what ultimately will be made prohibitively expensive -- that piece of electronic "real estate" as well as the "traffic" costs to access the site content (THAT'S where the bandwidth will be increasingly costly). Not to mention that having anything "controversial" hosted becomes harder and harder as the companies providing the web space cover their own asses. And most folks have neither the money nor the technical expertise to house their stuff on their own server.

Enter the secondary Internet that I have been speaking about. Freenet is a wonderful example of the potential for the future. It will be refined, improved, and strenghtened, since the incentives to do so grow every year. Shutting down and controlling "software which lets you publish and obtain information on the Internet without fear of censorship." is not that easy. Especially when it is a functional secondary Internet providing a decentralized, private, and anonymous distribution of data across it.

What makes you think that such a separate and independent net would even be allowed to continue functioning? They wouldn't have to make it technically impossible, just illegal. TV and radio are already controlled (largely because of the limited number of stations that can be accommodated on the airwaves, but controlled nonetheless). You can put your own "pirate" station on the air -- there are no real technical barriers (though it will probably be quite lo-power and limited in coverage) -- but it's likely to be shut down by the FCC pretty quickly. They don't have to try to block or circumvent the technology -- just DF the signal and haul you off to the pokey. As the Internet becomes more and more of a "consumer accessing corporate content" medium rather than a "anything goes, everyone can play and participate" fee-for-all, there are increasing sentiments to regulate and control content, just like the airwaves, and to exercise FCC-like control over the whole show. (I wouldn't be a bit surprised if one day a "license" is required to originate a website.) Everything I'm describing is already happening.

So you want to set up a separate net apart from that control and oversight -- you think that wouldn't be made illegal one day? No such net would ever be truly anonymous -- just as the hackers continually find ways around DRM and other impediments, the guvmint will use their own geeks to find ways to trace what's going on on your "freenet" -- at least to some extent. And don't talk about "free speech" and "this is America" and "1st Amendment" -- those concepts have already begun to be eviscerated, and I see no abatement of the erosion of speech rights.

The only possible solution, the only end game that can be played, is to outlaw the ability to create truly private and anonymous communications.

Another project that is already well underway.....

Re:Sounds like a ploy

[gilgongo]

"Music is being killed "

Not from where I'm standing. There's more live music, more bands, more creation of music and musical forms now than ever before as far as I can tell.

Did you mean "CD sales by old, shit, or otherwise irrelevant artists" are being killed? If so, I'd agree with that - and long may that death continue.

Re:Sounds like a ploy

[Lord Kano]

TOR allows you to access exit nodes across the boundaries that you speak of.

TOR goes away if they impose routing whitelists. You'll never get to the network in the first place.

A simple public proxy would in any other country would work too. Italian users did not seem to have much of a problem accessing The Pirate Bay when Italy attempted to ban it at it's cyber-borders as well.

You are assuming that things will stay the way they are. They will not. Why do you think all of these groups and politicians are against net neutrality?

What we'll be looking at is an enormous whitelist. Say 100,000 or so "approved" domains and everything else will be unreachable, because every ISP will be legally required to drop packets to a destination outside of the whitelist.

TOR doesn't fix that.

Otherwise you have banned the ability for people to communicate directly with people in other countries.

You can communicate with them, but only through approved channels. Freenet, TOR and whatever else comes next won't be on the whitelist because they allow you to do that very thing. They allow you to have unsupervised contact with people anywhere in the world.

Of course, there is still the possibility that governments may tighten up so much that it makes a day at Auschwitz look like a trip to Disneyland. Once again though, if that is true, we have bigger problems don't we??

The free flow of information is what can prevent such a tightening.

LK

technological unfeasability

[circletimessquare]

so let's make believe you could separate all boxes in the internet as either server or client

you still need to allow something upstream (filling out forms, emailing)

then its just a matter of p2p traffic masquerading as allowed two-way protocols

sure the network providers can put more complicated filters in, but its a simple arms race, and p2p developers will merely obfuscate better

you can throttle upstream taffic, sure. so i'll get my bootleg movie in 8 days, not 8 hours

what else? outlaw encryption? so no one can use their bank online anymore?

network providers: you will spend more money enforcing a p2p ban than if you just did your fucking job: provide your customers with access to something you don't control, and never can, due to the nature of the web, and shut the fuck up

is there some horrible scarcity of fibre? is the network clogged?

then take some of the money we fucking pay you, and lay some more fibre, assholes

Re:technological unfeasability

[Anonymous Coward]

++

Re:technological unfeasability

[FST777]

Not my way to say it, but: exactly. I pay my ISP to provide me with connectivity and an IP address. It really should be my choice and my responsibility what I do with that service. If you want to combat illegal file sharing or illegal child porn, you should track down the providers and the big users and sue them. Don't use the ISPs to do that job.

And even if you want the ISPs to do part of that job, have it done right. Don't give them more power, give them rules (like: if we find a certain IP-address offending the law, give us the appropriate name and address).

I am glad that I'm not in danger of having my ISP sort out my traffic for me, yet. But if the USA implements this kind of ludicrous legislation, I'm sure the EU will follow in a few years "because it has proved to work at the other side of the Atlantic". We all know that it will only end with less freedom and more commerce (hence: either higher prices, or more advertising).

Re:technological unfeasability

[Baton Rogue]

is there some horrible scarcity of fibre? is the network clogged?

It's not that it's scarce, but that it's expensive. And it's not just the fiber that is expensive, it's the additional routers with the higher bandwidth they also need to purchase to be able to receive and send the data.
And yes, the networks are clogged, if you ask them, with P2P traffic.

then take some of the money we fucking pay you, and lay some more fibre, assholes

It's not just that simple. You don't just string the fiber between telephone poles, you have to get rights to bury the fiber where necessary, and all that costs a lot more money than just the fiber itself.

Re:technological unfeasability

[Wildclaw]

It's not that it's scarce, but that it's expensive. And it's not just the fiber that is expensive, it's the additional routers with the higher bandwidth they also need to purchase to be able to receive and send the data.

Which doesn't make any sense since many countries are able to handle higher bandwidths than the US at cheaper prices. And backbone bandwidth is so cheap (in the amount of data ISPs are talking about) that calling it expensive to send data just sounds ridicioulus.

And please don't bring up T1. It is old and inefficent technology that is used to get money from companies that have little other choice.

It's not just that simple. You don't just string the fiber between telephone poles, you have to get rights to bury the fiber where necessary, and all that costs a lot more money than just the fiber itself.

So the US strong property laws comes back to bite them in their asses. OK, that coupled with communication companies suing local towns that try to be efficent and lay down their own fiber in one sweep.

Re:technological unfeasability

[megamerican]

what else? outlaw encryption? so no one can use their bank online anymore?

If it were up to the Clinton appointed FBI Director Louis Freeh encryption would be outlawed, at least to the extent that the government would have a backdoor in any encryption scheme.

Remember when John Ashcroft defended encryption and was against Clinton wanting to listen to people's e-mails? Funny how things change so quickly when you get more power.

Re:technological unfeasability

[hairyfeet]

Ummm.....Actually,the child pr0n thing is kinda a red herring. I have a buddy at the state crime lab that specializes in computer forensics. He says it is actually quite rare to catch anyone getting their pervo fix through P2P anymore. They have set up invitation only darknets hosted from forums in countries that don't give a sh*t as long as your money is good and trade the smaller files through the darknets and the larger ones they actually ship to each other through the mail as encrypted DVDs. So while I'm sure that you get a few really stupid pervs if you banned P2P tomorrow,the majority probably wouldn't even be slowed down.

And I know this will probably be modded flamebait,but what the hell,it has always bugged me about the "war" on kiddy pr0n. Why in the hell are we spending so damned much time and money going after the sick perv wanking off in his basement instead of,oh I don't know,actually rescuing the horribly abused kids from the monsters that are f*cking them on camera? According to my friend these guys are making so much money off this sh*t they even have child pr0n "studios" like you have regular porn studios. Shouldn't we be concentrating our efforts there? These "wars" just strike me more and more as bullsh*t,like trying to stop drugs by busting the junkie on the corner while the big boys are bringing semi loads in across the border. Surely there has to be a money trail that can be followed. It has just always bugged me that we seem to worry about the perv in the basement more than the kid being raped on the screen.

Re:technological unfeasability

[MrNaz]

If they make it illegal, and any suspicious activity will just get a visit from the Black Suits.

Nobody transfers 1gb of encrypted data to and from their netbanking site.

Re:technological unfeasability

[poopdeville]

It's not just that simple. You don't just string the fiber between telephone poles,...

Why not?

Glass is lighter than steel, by volume. Glass can be enclosed in a protective covering good enough to protect the fiber from birds and the like. (Hell, the fiber/cover could be hung or otherwise directly attached to steel cable) "Re-transmitters" or whatever is necessary to keep the signal strong could conceivably be mounted on poles.

I fail to see what the big deal is, though I admittedly don't know much about the subject. Please elucidate.

Re:technological unfeasability

[Dan541]

I'd rather let 1000 paedophiles go than to block even a single packet. What, they think criminals will simply throw in the towel?

I can't speak for others but I'd rather keep that 1000 paedophiles where I can see them than chase them further underground.

Re:technological unfeasability

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather keep the 1000 pedophiles where I can shoot them, then put them under the ground.

Ruh roh!

[Bobfrankly1]

A new lobbying group with known offenders AT&T and Viacom? That sounds dandy!
*puts gun to head, pulls trigger*

Didn't they get the memo?

[magus_melchior]

Filtering content online is going to be an exercise in futility, not to mention an arms race.

Re:Didn't they get the memo?

[MrMista_B]

Sounds like you've never been to China.

Re:Didn't they get the memo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you? The filtering doesn't work. What works is propaganda, harsh punishments and frequent raids.

And what they really want...

[merreborn]

AT&T: Has a bussiness model based on overselling their bandwidth, and hoping that customers don't actually use it.
Cisco: Wants to sell filtering hardware.
NBC Universal, Viacom and the Songwriters Guild of America: Trying to save a business model that simply cannot survive in the age of digital distribution.

Microsoft...

Someone's gonna have to help me with that one. What's their role in this? Is it a continuation of their battle on software piracy?

If anything, piracy of *other people's* IP drives sales of Windows.

Re:And what they really want...

[Atlantis-Rising]

Actually, piracy of Microsoft's IP also drives sales of Windows. Microsoft is just for piracy all around, when you get right down to it.

As an incumbent and market leader, people are likely to pirate their products even when there are free alternatives available. By allowing this piracy to continue with minimal efforts to check it, more people use their software and the cycle continues. They extract revenue by targeting those same people, who have come to expect their software, when they join large, fat, slow-moving targets (like corporations).

In the same way, actually, NBC Universal, Viacom, and the Songwriter's Guild of America (well, maybe not so much them, but the RIAA, certainly) probably secure their footholds in no small part due to piracy.

Imagine such a thought experiment: Piracy was magically impossible, of music, of software, of anything. To whom do you flock? Would you flock toward the RIAA if you had to buy their products or do without? Probably not.

Re:And what they really want...

[Samantha Wright]

The benefits to Microsoft are manifold:

1. Wants to sell DRM to other companies (to make piracy "harder")
2. If BitTorrent is outlawed, only outlaws will have BitTorrent. Distributing distros just became a whole lot harder.
3. Think they'll have a market share in the online music biz against iTunes if no one can pirate. (It's not antitrusty to weld it to your web browser if Apple has a larger market share!)

In fact, the only people who lose by this are... the ones with souls!

Re:And what they really want...

[PPH]

Microsoft: Offers their DRM solutions and the idea that anything else on the Interweb must automatically be Evil and be blocked.

Re:And what they really want...

[bmo]

"Is it a continuation of their battle on software piracy?"

No. Microsoft presumes that they are evil enough to wrest away part of the money that the audio and visual recording industry rakes in. They tried this with their drm encumbered music store and drm encumbered OS. They think they can eventually get their fingers in the pie.

Microsoft, in this case, is delusional. Delusions of grandeur.

The recording industry has had a hundred years to perfect evil. Microsoft is not old enough to have learned that much evil. They won't see a penny.

--
BMO

Re:And what they really want...

[zx-15]

Microsoft - because they're in for the love of being evil.

Re:And what they really want...

[MeNeXT]

Microsoft... easy DRM. Lock in to Windows. Keep the market keep out Linux.

Re:And what they really want...

[Bob9113]

Microsoft...

Someone's gonna have to help me with that one. What's their role in this? Is it a continuation of their battle on software piracy?

Could be more than one reason, but here is one:

Microsoft hates trying to influence the government. They are much better at twisting the arms of corporations, where money speaks more freely. Granting the networks the right to provide discriminatory service is a game Microsoft can win. They'll just pay them to downgrade the service of competitors. Suppose it took four hours to download OpenOffice.org, or that the downloads constantly terminated, or did not start at all.

Suppose that were a service that the ISPs were legally allowed to sell to Microsoft.

Can't happen? They'd never get away with it?

Suppose it were legal for Microsoft to pay computer manufacturers to not ship any machines with Linux. Do you think they'd do it? Do you think they'd get away with that? They have. It all came out in the monopoly hearings. They weren't barred from the practice, and it is a matter of public record.

Filtering or logging... pick one!

[compumike]

So, let's face it... intellectual property piracy is rampant and rights owners need to do something about it. As the recent RIAA case news a day or two ago shows, it's important to prove that actual illegal distribution took place. So something is going to happen to slow the piracy.

Would you rather have:
1) active filtering, deep packet inspection, watermarking, etc
OR
2) transfer logs on a packet or file-level basis, so that they actually can prove an illegal copy was made.

I think you're going to have to choose (or, really, the industry/gov't is going to choose). Both of these are somewhat defeated by encryption, but that's only after a point-to-point connection is made -- encryption doesn't hide the fact that a particular media was requested or to verify that it was from a trustworthy source.

So hurry up and pick, because if you don't start suggesting a solution to the very real problem of piracy, I promise you that "they" will.

--
Learn electronics! Powerful microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

Re:Filtering or logging... pick one!

[dgatwood]

... encryption doesn't hide the fact that a particular media was requested or to verify that it was from a trustworthy source.

No, that's precisely what encryption is best at doing. Even at a trivial level, SSL prevents eavesdropping on web URLs. Encryption also provides you with the concept of digital signing, which lets you verify that something is unadulterated, i.e. that it is exactly the version provided by a trustworthy source.

The fact is, piracy is an unsolvable problem. As soon as you prevent mass piracy on the Internet, people will just go back to the old-fashioned means of swapping tapes. As long as there has been media to copy, there have been people who copied it without the creator's permission (and often claiming it as their own), even back in the day when that meant hand-copying a musical manuscript.... Trying to prevent piracy is like trying to prevent the wind from blowing.

There are only two things that can be done to sustain an intellectual-property-based business model in an era of rampant piracy:

1. Stay out ahead of the pirates. Produce new material faster than it can reasonably be copied. This doesn't really work very well for music, but it can be effective for more corporeal IP like microprocessor designs.
2. Make your product easily available at a low enough price and with sufficient quality so that the barrier to purchasing the product is low, thus ensuring that the majority of people buy the product legitimately.

Neither of these is something the industry is willing to do, so instead, they keep whining and will continue doing so instead of shoring up their business practices as long as anyone is willing to listen to their whining and legislate based on that whining. In the end, though, this will only speed their decline into obsolescence by destroying customer trust, destroying customer loyalty, and eroding availability (and thus visibility) of the product.

Re:And what they really want... let me help

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft has software patents on watermarking and tracking digital content, in particular music

Guess that's it for VPNs too then

[PlausibleDeniability]

Sooo... if the idea is DPI and VPNs block inspection then it's either a clipper chip for VPNs or no VPNs, cause after all if you've got nothing to hide ....

I can't blame them for trying this again but I really wish they'd prove they can act in the public good first. Hey - eliminate spam first, then you can take a shot at eliminateing my privacy.

People in Charge

[neight108]

Click on People

2 Politicians
1 President of the Songwriters Guild of America
1 Lawyer

need I say more?

Wrong part of the quote

[EdIII]

network operators must have the flexibility to manage and expand their networks to defend against net pollution and illegal file-trafficking which threatens to congest and delay the network for all consumers.

I am not concerned about the the "net pollution" being lumped in with the "illegal file-trafficking". Strictly speaking, that does not refer to P2P any more, than file transfers via FTP, Email, or instant messaging. Of course, big picture speaking, they are probably attacking P2P since that is the most popular way to share files among the masses.

What interests me is the "threatens to congest and delay the network" part of that statement. That IS NOT THE FUCKING PROBLEM OF THE CONSUMER . That IS THE PROBLEM OF THE PROVIDERS . Whether or not the congestion is caused by legitimate or illicit traffic is wholly irrelevant.

They oversold the bandwidth for years, and worse (oh so much worse), provided "unlimited" terms in their advertisements. Of course, there is no such thing as unlimited and only so much traffic can be handled by the providers various infrastructures. By and large, the masses are only using the Internet in the ways it was advertised that they could. They are blameless. Yes, I said blameless. You can complain about your "piggish" neighbor downloading 500 gigs a month and "taking" away from the available bandwidth at the street, but the real responsibility lies with the provider that told you both (and sold you both) the ability to use that bandwidth at the street in an unlimited way. Your neighbor is merely using "more" unlimited then you are.

Congestion, and delays merely being part of that problem, are caused by the users having no incentive to behave themselves accordingly. That same behavior, exhibited in public, does not pass in private. You will get your ass handed to you on a platter if you cause network problems in a corporation, and in the homes there have been more than one argument started over it. I nearly killed my room mate just last night over network "behavior". Civility stepped in at the last moment, with a little awareness of the laws against homicide, and stopped me from using my considerable bulk to squash him.

What is the cause of the lack of incentives? Unlimited of course. If you don't have a reason to behave, most of the time you won't. Human nature I guess.

The solution is not filtering, which is just a fancy way of saying copyright enforcement. The theory being that copyright infringment makes up the major bulk of the illicit traffic. Possibly true for now, but in the future it will be replaced by high definition streaming video and the problem remains. Whole neighborhoods will be streaming movies (with draconian DRM even), with multiple streams from each house since, after all, American families don't want to watch content with EACH OTHER. God forbid. If you think all that traffic alone will not cause congestions and delays, think again.

The solution, in my mind, is to increase capacity while changing the contracts under which users operate. Add a little QoS technology to it, meaning, actually FREAKIN implement it. The moment the user can transparently and easily understand the real costs of participating in that 60 gig torrent, they will start to exercise a little more judgment. Congestion will go down, satisfaction will go up, and no draconian control policies need be implemented. Not picking on torrents either. It will be a bad day for a lot of companies if families realize just how much it costs them to download those Hi-Def BD download titles at a few gigs a piece. You hit your monthly cap in two weeks and your lovely little teenagers will give you a 2-inch thick bill by the end of the month. None of that even possibly illicit either.

Ha! The most important part of that quote is where they blamed their problems on all of us again, and of course, calling us criminals at the same time.

Re:Wrong part of the quote

[Tuoqui]

They expect us to trust that their system will have no false positives and no false negatives when they cant even get SPAM FILTERING done properly...

Lets frame it in the context of Japan... They have a cap of what is it? 200 gigs a day? Why cant the US get that sort of infrastructure? Is Fiber that expensive to set up? I thought it just used glass which is basically boiled sand and there is plenty of sand out there.

The Great Firewall of America

[Anonymous Coward]

First spyware and malware
Next p2p traffic
Soon censoring of any web contact at will.

Might as well move to China now get over the wait.

Yeah right....

[Kjella]

Clogging the lines, sure... because you can't build out the lines right? I'm hoping this will be my next ISP. It's in Norwegian but what you need to understand is only before and now. They just upgraded their customers from 10/3Mbit to 10/10Mbit, 25/5Mbit to 30/30Mbit and 50/25Mbit to 50/50Mbit for the same price. They don't even deliver a slower line if you're one of the 110,000 (of 4,5mio) people that can get this, with an estimated increase of 25,000 or so next year. Within the next decade bandwidth will be so plentiful the argument will completely cease to make sense. Just like Napster didn't kill the Internet, YouTube didn't kill the Internet, piracy will never kill the Internet. It'll expand with headroom to spare to the point where you can send live HDTV if you want. In the dotcom days we laid the backbone, now we're laying fiber on the end mile. From there, anything is possible.

Re:Yeah right....

[mishehu]

Ma Bell (AT&T for those of you who don't know) has been refitting their cabinets lately for vdsl. When they screwed something up with my line and knocked my adsl off, I had one of the technicians come up and check. After he was done fixing it, I spoke with him a bit about this new service they're preparing for. Apparently it is his opinion that nobody would ever need 10 Mbps upstream, because nobody would ever be able to fill up a 10 Mbps pipe. I do believe that this type of attitude permeates Ma Bell... and those who don't believe that don't want people to be able to have 10 Mbps upstream. It makes use more interactive and less TV like if there is symmetry in the streams.

Picture yourself

[ypctx]

calling to your ISP's tech support, trying to convince them that you really need to access more than us.cnn.com and that yes you already have restarted your modem.
Welcome to the future brought to you by the reality-disconnected managerial know-it-all dumbasses.
*turns off his ww2 backpack flamethrower*

Not a new idea.

[Anachragnome]

The re-categorization or renaming of ideas, items, laws, etc. has been used many times in the past to achieve political/financial goals.

Think hemp and Marijuana, the named was changed to start afresh with a new, controlled image(a bad one) and it was put into a much stricter category of drug as far as law and government control was concerned.

It seems to be fairly effective too.

et tu, Cisco?

[Anonymous Coward]

I *am* surprised. After helping China suppress the human rights of their own people, I thought Cisco might be smart enough to lay low for a while. They are putting their reputation through the shredder.

Re:et tu, Cisco?

[Pig Hogger]

You say that like if they would care about their reputation amongst those who are their smallest (that is, not worth much trouble) clients...

The Grip Tightens

[pvspencer22]

Not surprising after Comcast does something like limit bandwith. ________________ Abalastow Compendium

The Customer is Always Right

[PPH]

So, if your customers want to use P2P applications and their ISP is hogging the bandwidth with Pay Per View or Video On Demand services, then these must be the pollution that needs blocking. Right?

They are so full of shit.

[Jane Q. Public]

They want to "police" the 'net, but they don't want any of the liability that comes with being the police. Like acting legally, and ethically, and within the rules themselves.

This is nothing more than yet another thinly-veiled attempt to wrest more power over the traffic they carry (not even veiled, really, but the excuses are thin).

Corporate-backed censorship, or "traffic shaping" or whatever language you want to use for it, has ALWAYS turned out to be a bad idea. The telephone companies do not try to tell you what to say over their lines. Internet carriers should be equally aloof. For their own good, AND ours.

no, it isn't.

[lysergic.acid]

if you visit the forums of popular gaming sites like IGN or Gamespot, you've probably seen moderators crack down on discussions of modding, emulation, CFW, or homebrew development.

i can understand if they don't allow users to discuss warez/piracy or other illegal activites because of potential liability issues. but the problem is they also try to lump console modding, custom firmware, and homebrew development together with piracy & illegal file sharing.

i found this out when i posted to a discussion about a PSX game and mentioned that i was running it on my PSP via PopStation. my post was immediately censored and i was given a warning about my TOS violation.

all i'd written in the post was that i wished this title were available on the PSN store so that i didn't have to convert it into a POPS file myself. there was no mention of any illegal activity or even file sharing, so i decided to check out the IGN message board's TOS. however, the TOS simply forbids the discussion of criminal activities and copyright infringement--though the IGN TOS considers ROMs and emulators a form of copyright infringement.

i had to explain to the mods that using PopStation to play a PSX game is not illegal and the PopStation i referred to was the PSX emulator Sony included in newer versions of the official PSP firmware. furthermore, there is nothing illegal about ripping a PSX disc and converting it to a POPS eboot file. that is fully within my fair use rights, just as ripping a music CD into MP3s or movie DVD into XviD vidoes is considered fair use. it's only the illegal distribution of MP3s, that is forbidden. so long as i don't share those files with others, i am not breaking the law.

but this kind of deliberate corporate posturing has been going on for so long, and is so prevalent, that the public has started to buy into the attitude that any kind of fair use outside of what's sanctioned by corporate industries is illegal or taboo, and must be discussed in secrecy. that's why these days you even get members of the public sticking up for corporate interests and equivocating MP3, P2P, file sharing, homebrew, modding/CFW, etc. with piracy.

i guess if we're conditioned to think that way then it'll be much easier to lobby for legislation that tosses out fair use altogether--or legislation to allow ISPs to filter internet traffic to combat P2P filesharing.

Re:no, it isn't.

[Anonymous Coward]

The ban on anything in that topic area probably has nothing to do with liability (slashdot is still standing), and everything to do with keeping cozy with the industry they sycophantically depend on either for advertising or for access.

Exactly! Like China 'must' also!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a small world after all...

No it's not you.

[Pig Hogger]

It's just the bourgeois finally waking-up and wanting to put back the genie in the bottle, so they get back to the times where only the very rich can afford a printing press or a radio station or a TV studio so they can tell everybody what THEY approve of and nothing else.

Re:No it's not you.

[couchslug]

"It's just the bourgeois finally waking-up and wanting to put back the genie in the bottle, so they get back to the times where only the very rich can afford a printing press or a radio station or a TV studio so they can tell everybody what THEY approve of and nothing else."

It's part of the cycle of history. Eventually, masters remove the reasons for slaves no to kill them, and the cycle starts anew.

Re:No it's not you.

[Pichu0102]

It's part of the cycle of history. Eventually, masters remove the reasons for slaves no to kill them, and the cycle starts anew.

Hate to break it to you, but that cycle is dead. It's all downhill for the middle and lower classes, and all uphill for the upper clsses until the end of time now. Who owns the bigger guns? Military. Who owns the military? The upper class.
Armed resistance, or for that matter, any form of resistance against the upper class will inevitably fail, because they can wipe you off the map or have you "disappeared" with just the push of a button.

Re:No it's not you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and then they'll start working the factories and cleaning up the garbage and the other lower class jobs themselfs, right?

Re:No it's not you.

[couchslug]

"Who owns the military? The upper class. Armed resistance, or for that matter, any form of resistance against the upper class will inevitably fail, because they can wipe you off the map or have you "disappeared" with just the push of a button."

Having served in the military for 26 years, I note that the people in the military are not usually of the upper class. Even if every person in the military were magically turned into trained infantry and magically bought in to enslaving their families and friends (not likely with the quantity of Southern white boys in combat arms) there is no way for them to cover all of the US.

Think Iraq is a bitch to control? Should the US population wish to shrug off the government, it could easily do so. It wouldn't take force-on-force pitched battles in most cases, and the reliance of the military on tech instead of people would guarantee failure against determined public resistance.

That said, people don't revolt because they don't have "freedom" (whatever that is), they revolt because they lack money, food, economic opportunity, etc. Power is the means to get stuff. When one has no "stuff" it makes perfect sense to kill someone else who is impeding their ability to get stuff.

No, They don't want to police the net.

[Lead Butthead]

They want to CHARGE YOU THROUGH THE NOSE for the PRIVILEGE of using the net. And you are expected TO THANK AND *PAY* THEM FOR IT. Everything else are just excuses.

Re:Can someone mod that down.

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

You could, register, and then set all posts to "-5" by default, and your viewing filter at "+5", and you'll have just the experience you like!

Alrighty then

[Ranger]

The first thing I want to filter is the filtering lobby.

i get loads of free porn

[circletimessquare]

but i need to put the porn somewhere, so i buy a hard drive. the amount of pron i have now, would have cost me $5,000 in hard drives 10 years ago. today? $50

because the technology gets better and better

10 years ago, i used ethernet. now i use giganet. 10 years ago i was dial up. now i am cable modem. the technology gets better and better. capacity increases as a natural factor of better technology and economies of scale

korea, japan, other countries: they have plenty of capacity, more than the usa, and i don't see them crying for limits on the type of network traffic they must support. and so, if the usa does throttle traffic, the next killer apps, the next centers of technological innovation, will move overseas

stop believing and selling the lie that the only solution to increasing traffic is to push back at the type of traffic clients are using. you have the technology, you have the money. spend it, and build it, and shut the fuck up

push back on your customers, and you are simply creating a desire that your competitor will fulfill instead of you. that is if you haven't throttled your competitors by buying the legislators and making competition burdensome, thereby punishing the entire nation with technological backwardness for your own tightwad lack of foresight

the future of the internet is higher and higher capacity, for better and more advanced products, and if you don't fucking build it, someone else will

and if you pervert the business environment with cronyism legislation, so there is no competition, then it will be built in other countries, and the usa will become technologically backwards because of YOU

so shut the fuck up, take the money we pay you, AND BUILD IT

Here goes some Karma

[Toll_Free]

This sure isn't going to be popular, but I didn't see anywhere that they where attempting to lump anything with anything else.

Pirating software is illegal. Get over it. Anyone else here that is a developer shits all over themselves over stupid licenses (think all the GPL crap that goes on here). As soon as you stop bitching about your licenses, maybe someone else will stand up and listen, and actually LISTEN to what you have to say.

--Toll_Free

Re:Here goes some Karma

[Tuoqui]

No Pirating Software isnt 'Illegal' it is a civil law matter until the Intellectual Property lobbies actually force a law that makes all piracy a federal offense so the US can put 10% of its population into jail instead of just the 1% they're doing at the moment.

Re:Here goes some Karma

[plasmacutter]

If the internet were around back in the 1920's

"Drinking beer is illegal. Get over it."

Legality does not necessarily equate to morality.

We live in a fundamentally unequal society where the voices of the very few "haves" drown out the have nots.

When laws are passed based on the warped morality of those cloistered in their ivory towers rather than the will of the people, civil disobedience results.

It's still going on with the drug laws (every 5th apartment I delivered pizza to on the late shift stunk of weed), despite the selective and corrupt destruction of people's lives.

Filesharing will also continue, and I will encourage anyone I meet to engage in the practice. Cue the letters suing me for "inducement" in 3, 2, 1...

Re:Here goes some Karma

[Toll_Free]

Actually, it isn't a civil problem, if your doing it for gain.

A civil problem would be distribution to your friends.

A criminal problem involves either racketeering or other criminal acts.

Period.

Twist it to what you want, but if you do it, KNOWING it is illegal, then it is illegal, period.

--Toll_Free

Spam

[nprz]

Well, they aren't doing a good job against spam. So including illegal file-traffic doesn't bug me much. Can I get a definition of 'net pollution' though? Is that this 'cloud' that everyone is talking about? :)

Those "Traffickers" create your future

[startxxx]

Those "Traffickers" create your future network for all consumers They are programmers who need music to endure long and monotonic hours of cubical work. they cannot afford buying 150 albums a month for $12 each (at least) Do you suggest that we, musical explorers, listeners of all genres, hunters of best melodies... do you expect us to congest our appetite? Before file-traffickers (sounds to me like that character assassination made to drug sharing community ;-) ), MP3 was not near being a reality. And last thing, about musicians, and some succeeding ones are my friends, they all don't care how many albums are downloaded. Even if they don't return their money - Musicians do it for the soul. Salespeople and labels do it for the stardust, and money of course. With the improving home-studio technology, you will soon realize it's time for you to get a new job and do something productive for your fellow humans If person A does music and C listens and creates java code, why dont person B stop taking commissions and get a job like the other two? How about making pizza? There's always a demand and not "illegal trafficking" of pizza...

Re:Those "Traffickers" create your future

[startxxx]

Some people listen to POP on the radio -- They get to listen to 8 hours of music which translates to 96 songs a day, which sums to about 50-60 artists or so Code monkeys like me listen to much different music then there is on the radio. We don't listen to popular stuff, I mean, Sometimes we also do. So to get to listen to 50-60 artists a day requires me to download few albums per artist in order to really evalute the artist fairly. 50 artists * 2 albums an artist a day sums up to 3000*$12 how does anyone expect a programmer to pay so much? Stop listening? LOL -- My friends make music and they dont care and no lawyered-up label is supporting them or any local scene that I know Illuminati bastards... Let the people calculate the truth not your mindless mantras!

The inane FCC quote at the root of this.

[plasmacutter]

The FCC commissioners have betrayed how utterly ignorant they are.

Look at this quote, not only does it show no clue, it even contradicts itself (emphasis mine)

"We also note that because consumers are entitled to access the lawful internet content of their choice, providers, consistent with federal policy, may block transmissions of illegal content (e.g., child pornography) or transmissions that violate copyright law. To the extent, however, that providers choose to utilize practices that are not application- or content-neutral, the risk to the open nature of the internet is particularly acute and the danger of network-management practices being used to further anti-competitive ends is strong."

Choose one, because these are mutually exclusive concepts.

You either have an open, content neutral internet, or a filtered, non-neutral internet.

supply and demand

[circletimessquare]

its a two pronged fight. even if you somehow convinced me, philosophically, that fighting only supply was the way to go, i would get right back at you by saying that destroying the demand is an effective tactic to use in fighting the supply. besides, its also a good way of finding the supply

any effort that focuses only on the supply, or only on the demand, is hamstrung

Re:supply and demand

[Anonymous Coward]

destroying the demand is an effective tactic to use in fighting the supply

Yeah, and we're winning the war on drugs. Go prohibition!

Re:supply and demand

[hairyfeet]

EXACTLY!!! When was the last time you saw "Major child pr0n studio raided!". The simple fact is you haven't,or at least I haven't. What you see is "Major child pr0n ring raided!" which turns out to be a bunch of pervs sitting in their basements and trading the same crap that was on USENET 20 years ago through some lame message board. Going after demand without doing sh*t about supply is a thousand times worse in this case,as we are talking about little kids,according to my friend REALLY little kids. Like as young as 5. Which is why I couldn't take a job there. I honestly don't think I could see that sh*t day after day and not end up f*cked in the head.

According to him these "big boys" are making some SERIOUS money,and we all know that money doesn't just go poof,that means there is a trail. Which is why I say instead of spending our limited resources on the perv in the basement we go after these "big boys" who have raped Deity knows how many kids,and all for money. And I can't imagine too many countries,no matter how lawless,wanting to be labeled by the world "child pr0n capital of the world" so I'm sure if we followed the money and gathered the evidence they'd be happy to help. Stop wasting our time on the little pervs and worry about the big fish. After all,this isn't some bag of bag of coke where "supply and demand" should be argued. This is some small child getting really horrible things done to him/her for profit. Shouldn't our number one priority be them?

Re:supply and demand

[Abcd1234]

i would get right back at you by saying that destroying the demand is an effective tactic

And how, pray tell, do you plan to destroy demand? At best, this is a mental illness we're dealing with... so your plan is to, what, just arrest every child-porn-viewing pedophile out there? Sorry bub, but that just ain't gonna work. At least going after the supplies, the people *actually* harming children, is feasible. Going after the consumers of this dreck is just playing whack-a-mole.

On the bright side, it's a great excuse to increase law enforcement expenditures.

Ornaments

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not you, it's politics. It's like some of the bills John McCain mentioned in tonight's debate. Full of ornaments like a Christmas tree. Example bill language - "Off shore drilling shall be banned in all forms ..." section C.1-17 paragraph forty niner, line 181 of the same bill ... "Gay marriage shall be the primary and only form of marriage available in the known universe ..." The massive corporations will get their way however. We continue to feed them...

ding ding ding

[daemonburrito]

Mod parent up

The DRM lock-in is insidious: Anyone wishing to create and maintain a "useful" operating system will have to license DRM software from Microsoft; software which is, happily for Microsoft, incompatible with libre software, both in terms of licensing and technology. Keep in mind that Microsoft's DRM scheme goes down to the metal.

In addition, and even more dangerous in my opinion, is the stated goal of increasing the "safety" of the internet by allowing ISPs to filter by application. And by application, they actually mean the whole stack. ISPs will be able to dictate which software you can use in their ToS. It doesn't take much imagination to figure out who will provide the "safe" platform.

And for those who are buying into this ISP competition argument: This lobby and others are taking advantage of public ignorance about the topology of the internet. AT&T is supporting this initiative because they wish to be able to shape traffic on the backbone. Notice the very purposeful use of the term "network operator" instead of "Internet Service Provider".

boycott everybody involved, and let them know

[Anonymous Coward]

I just sent an email to all those companies, and to arts+labs itself and let them know I am boycotting them. You should do the same. The only way something bad won't come out of this is if these companies are convinced that consumers will cease to be if this sort of practice continues.

Lell you what it is

[unity100]

because their attempt at shitty copyright cop bill got floundered by bush administration and doj, they are trying to pull this stunt.

check out the pieces of shit who are in on this :

AT&T, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, NBC Universal, Viacom and the Songwriters Guild of America.

note the bold part. if ANY ms fanboi dares to lecture me on ANYthing in slashdot again, i will give them hell.

microsoft, is as of this moment, out of the i.t. & internet culture.

"SOUNDS" like ?

[unity100]

my friend. youare WAY foolish and naive.

it IS a ploy.

noone can ever push self-centered agendas in politics honestly. they always package it as something 'good for the people'. let me give you examples of similar ploys throughout history :

all crusades, both muslim's crusade starting in 700AD and christian's crusade starting 1090AD were for 'furthering' their respective religions, leaders said. actually, they were both done for conquest and pillage and colonization.

all the measures that installed caesar as dictator and signed the end of roman republic were done to combat 'corruption' of the senate in the name of people. all it did was to install an emperor. so goes for napoleon.

all the stuff nazis did were done for the 'betterment' of 'high' german nation. all it accomplished was the creation of a ruling party elite class that were no different than tyrant aristocrats.


and now here we are, some bunch of filth again advocating something supposedly for the benefit of public, whereas the intent is clear to anyone who has any technical knowledge, and a little remembrance of past events.

all companies listed there should be treated like sh@t for anyone with the tiniest bit of conscience and wisdom. for, it is a move against freedom and equal opportunity.

get a clue first

[unity100]

the record labels' own data showed that cd sales have been declining since the early 90s, AND it also showed that the decline in CD sales in 2000s were LOWER than the decline in 90s. not only that, but when it is also compared to the cassette tape sale trends of before, they show a similar pattern.

therefore there is NO correlation between filesharing, torrenting, piracy or even counterfeit cds and cd sales.

'hey people are downloading albums. it HAS to lower cd sales' -> no such stupidity exists. there are people who buy albums, and there are people who dont. the people who dont buy albums are not going to buy them if there is no file sharing. it was as such back in cassette tape days. you go around the stores, see a lot of albums, you buy only what you are interested. you listen to other albums ONLY when a friend brings them over or copies them over, but you dont go and buy it regardless of what.

it is as this today as it was before. and it wont change.

yes but

[unity100]

The Internet will have to remain a 2-way communications medium. It can't function without being so. That's a technical limitation that cannot be overcome.

your side of communication can be reduced to only 'selecting content'. and the content you can select would be the content selection those fucktards in the roster of that crap of a foundation allows.

Net neutrality and no filtering = FREE MARKET

[unity100]

the subscribers of an individual isp that is big and large enough is indistinguishable from a sizeable market.

if an isp is let to filter content in its own network, that is no different than letting them a monopoly over that particular market. if you are not in the 'allow' list of that isp, you cant ever access to subscribers on that network as an internet company or content provider.

its against all kinds of international trade agreements and national laws on free trade and competition - noone is allowed to forcibly rule a market - they can only win over a market by offering competitiveness. filtering is NOT competitiveness - its per force.

this alone should prove the hypocrisy of the corporations who dared to allow their names listed on that joke of a foundation ...

I'm all for it.

[the_other_chewey]

Reduction of red tape in the form of forms is always a good idea.
Reducing the influence of lobbies is too.

If the internet is filtering lobby forms, it is even
more useful than I already thought it is.

Filter forms used by lobbies now!

Re:Can someone mod that down.

[devaudio]

besides, i was going for Funny, not Troll, by answering the opposite of what his rhetorical question implied. Mods showed me

Re: The best thing that's ever happened

[some guy I know]

The internet is the best thing that's ever happened to this country and this world.

Better than penicillin?
Better than soap?
Better than Velcro?

Please don't say that the Internet is better than Velcro, or I shall have to pummel you relentlessly in a verbal fashion until you retract your vile claims, or until I get bored.

Never mind; I'm bored already.

Re: The best thing that's ever happened

[iamacat]

In a way, yes. Most of the world doesn't have access to penicillin, soap or velcro. Yet, if even a few students in each area have Internet access they have a chance to learn about these things and at least teach others how to minimize their chance of falling sick without soap or penicillin.