ARTS & FARCES internet

Last Tuesday, 21 December 2010, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to approve a weak and watered down internet access regulation, under the guise of supporting network neutrality. Network neutrality is the concept that each bit of information traversing the internet is treated the same as every other bit of information, without regard to content, source, or destination. FCC chair Julius Genachowski found the false middle way with his proposal, saying, “I reject both extremes in favor of a strong and sensible framework—one that protects Internet freedom and openness and promotes robust innovation and investment.”

The FCC Report and Order (.pdf; 1MB) prohibits wired broadband providers from blocking user access to sites and applications. But language like “unreasonable discrimination” and “reasonable network management” are loopholes wide enough for the providers to move even their fat corporate asses through. More importantly, the FCC rules allow for “paid prioritization” allowing deep-pocketed corporate media interests to pay providers for faster transmission speeds.

With its other hand the FCC voted to exempt wireless networks from the same provisions, citing its nascent nature.

The Media Access Project spoke for many network neutrality advocates, saying, “There is a reason that so many giant phone and cable companies are happy, and we are not. These rules are riddled with loopholes. They foreshadow years of uncertainty and regulatory confusion, which those carriers will use to their advantage.”

Level 3 Communications, the content delivery network (CDN) that Netflix uses to stream video to its customers, has accused Comcast of charging a new fee to connect to its users. Level 3 alleges the new fee puts it at a disadvantage relative to Comcast’s own cable television services. Level 3 charges Comcast with threatening the open internet and says it will seek government intervention.

“By taking this action, Comcast is effectively putting up a toll booth at the borders of its broadband internet access network, enabling it to unilaterally decide how much to charge for content which competes with its own cable TV and Xfinity delivered content,” said Thomas Stortz, Level 3’s chief legal officer, in a media release. “This action by Comcast threatens the open internet and is a clear abuse of the dominant control that Comcast exerts in broadband access markets as the nation’s largest cable provider. ... Level 3 believes Comcast’s current position violates the spirit and letter of the FCC’s proposed internet policy principles and other regulations and statutes, as well as Comcast’s previous public statements about favoring an open Internet.”

Comcast denied its new fee has anything to do with on open internet or network neutrality—the principle that all internet traffic is treated equally, without regard to type, source, or destination—calling it “a simple commercial dispute,” according to Brian Stelter, writing for the New York Times. Stelter reports Joe Waz, a Comcast senior vice president, told him that the cable company “has had a peering agreement with Level 3 to swap traffic fairly evenly. Now Level 3 is sharply increasing its traffic, he said, while resisting a commercial agreement to pay for that.”

Peering agreements are struck between separate providers to exchange traffic between customers of each network through a physical interconnection. These agreements are generally “settlement-free,” meaning that neither provider pays the other; instead, both providers receive revenue from their respective customers.

RockMelt—the long rumored “Facebook browser”—sneak-launched early Sunday evening. And with the caveat that I haven’t laid eyes (or hands) on anything other than screendumps of RockMelt, my assessment is that it’s just that: A Facebook browser. Ordinarily I wouldn’t even be writing anything like this without running the software extensively, but it requires a Facebook login, and I don’t have one. More importantly, I have no intention of ever obtaining one.

RockMelt enjoys an undeniably enviable pedigree: Bill Campbell, Marc Andreessen, Tim Howes, and Eric Vishria for starters. Built on Google’s Chromium technology, RockMelt claims to be built around social networking. In reality, it’s built around Google and Facebook.

According to Michael Calore, writing for Wired, users can “post links, videos and status updates to both Facebook and Twitter….” Support is baked in for multiple Twitter feeds, a Facebook chat client, and an RSS reader. But make no mistake, RockMelt—in its current incarnation—is a Facebook browser. Period. The user logs in to Facebook to customize RockMelt: “Friends” to the left; social networking platforms to the right. Send a message? You’re using Facebook. Start a chat? You’re using Facebook.

Calore quotes Eric Vishria, RockMelt chief executive, as saying “We’re going to remain agnostic and pick the services that the most people want to use.” Really? Agnostic? With Facebook baked in you were never agnostic and never will be.

From what I can tell, RockMelt’s sole pseudo-innovation is prefetch (“pseudo-innovation” because the concept of prefetching instructions or information has been around forever; it’s exactly what it sounds like). When the user initiates a search, RockMelt “starts pre-fetching and rendering each one of those ten search results as soon as they show up (with Flash blocked),” according to Calore.

Bottom line: RockMelt is a tepid update of Flock, which was basically a MySpace browser. So, Flock is to MySpace and Firefox as RockMelt is to Facebook and Chrome. Snore. There’s nothing really interesting to see here, move along.

Google used to support the idea of true network neutrality for the internet—the idea that all traffic on the network is treated equally, neutrally, with no priority given to any kind of traffic over another and no priority given to any creator’s traffic over another. But no more. This week Google and Verizon announced they have reached terms on digital traffic management—a system whereby some traffic on the internet is favored over other traffic; the antithesis of true network neutrality, the principal upon which the internet was founded.

Both companies for days vehemently denied any such agreement existed. Typical for Verizon, but especially evil for Google. Three days after announcing the agreement, Google tried to walk back the agreement using an especially creepy corporate double-speak without really walking it back. This move was almost universally seen for what it was: Despicable corporate maneuvering.

America is already far behind the rest of the developed worked with regard to broadband speeds. Residents of most other developed countries have a broad choice between internet service providers offering much faster and much less expensive connectivity than that available in the US. In the US, your choice is generally between the cable company and the telephone company. You may, as I do, purchase internet connectivity from an independent provider, but the telephone company provides the connection between here and there.

Google and Verizon are reportedly close to an agreement ending network neutrality—the principle that all information traversing the internet is treated equally—and allowing Verizon to offer higher speeds to content providers willing to pay the price. So report both Edward Wyatt writing for the New York Times and Cecilia Kang writing for the Washington Post. Similar reports of secret meetings between Google and the US’s largest telecommunications and cable concerns have been floating around the blogosphere for quite some time, but Wyatt’s and Kang’s reports are the first in the country’s mainstream corporate media.

Wyatt writes that the result of such an agreement could eventually be higher prices for internet users and in the place of net neutrality, “consumers could soon see a new, tiered system, which, like cable television, imposes higher costs for premium levels of service.” A federal appeals court ruled (.pdf; 106KB) that the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) didn’t have the authority to prevent internet service providers (ISPs)from blocking or slowing down specific traffic on their networks.

Google denies that any secret talks or negotiations are taking place in an article by Sharon Gaudin for Computerworld. “The New York Times is quite simply wrong,” Google spokesperson Mistique Cano wrote in an email to Gaudin. “We have not had any conversations with Verizon about paying for carriage of Google traffic. We remain as committed as we always have been to an open internet.”