The issue of copyright enforcement is a thorny one, and Stop the Cap! doesn’t spend a lot of time dwelling on it, except when it sneaks its way into our issues.

CNET News started a brush fire yesterday when they quoted a Verizon representative who claimed the company had been kicking off users who use peer to peer (typically torrent) software to exchange copyrighted material.  The gist of the piece was that Verizon has been receiving copyright infringement notices from copyright enforcers and they’ve been notifying their customers to stop or risk service suspension.

“We’ve cut some people off,” Verizon Online spokeswoman Bobbi Henson told CNET. “We do reserve the right to discontinue service. But we don’t throttle bandwidth like Comcast was doing. Verizon does not have bandwidth caps.”

With that purported admission, the story was off and running.  We received several news tips about it from readers.

But this morning, Henson claims she was misquoted and the company has not actually suspended anyone’s account, but reserves the right to do so.

For now, anyway, it appears there has been no policy change at Verizon.  The company dispatches canned e-mail messages to account holders targeted in copyright complaints asking them to stop the infringing activity.  Verizon claims most don’t have to be warned twice.  That’s a commonly found policy at most providers.

The movie and music industry have reduced the number of lawsuits it brings against alleged violators, but that doesn’t mean they’ve given up the fight.

Instead, both industries have launched lobbying and astroturf efforts to inject copyright protection into the broadband expansion and Net Neutrality debates.  The Arts+Labs “think tank” was a perfect example of that, trying to conflate Net Neutrality with piracy in the music industry’s dog and pony show performance at the New York City Council Technology In Government Committee hearing regarding Net Neutrality.

The industry hopes it can insert something akin to a “three strikes” provision into telecommunications law that would bar repeat copyright violators from having Internet access. Unfortunately, history has shown that the bar has been set so low as to what represents “proof,” a mere allegation under these policies could be sufficient to put your finances and potential broadband access in peril.

The Buffalo News ran a commentary piece from Massachusetts for readers in western New York

It is becoming more important than ever to break out Google when you find anti-consumer rhetoric in your local newspaper or online regarding Net Neutrality.  Too often, newspapers, local broadcast media, and online news sources don’t bother to fully inform their readers or viewers about inherent conflicts of interest found in those advocating opposition to Net Neutrality.

Case in point, a commentary in The Buffalo News titled “Policy meant to protect users could stifle innovation.”  The only thing Net Neutrality threatens to stifle is the author’s paycheck.

The writer, Susie Kim Riley, paints a Net Neutral-world of grainy online video, no more “lite” plans for those who only need to use the net to send and receive e-mail, uneven downloads, and bans on video conferencing for small businesses introducing new products.

Shame on you, dear readers, for wanting a free and open Internet without your provider interfering with your service to enhance their bottom line.

Remarkably, this blizzard of bull didn’t just turn up in the Buffalo newspaper.  Riley’s scaremongering also turned up nearly word for word in The Detroit News.  Apparently newspapers are hard-pressed to publish the views of local residents and are now regurgitating mass-mailed opinion pieces written in other states.

Most anti-Net Neutrality drivel shares common themes which we like to call industry talking points.  Their overall theme: the nasty government, without cause, wants to overregulate the Internet to tie the hands of innocent providers who seek better products for their customers.

Stop the Cap! readers have had plenty of experience with helpful providers who bring these appetizers to the table:

• Internet Overcharging schemes that claim “fair pricing” through usage caps and tiered billing, but in fact cost everyone more;
• Throttled broadband speeds, often causing a 90 percent or more reduction in advertised speeds for services targeted by providers;
• Schemes to monetize broadband products and services by providing “enhanced” service to those willing to pay to have their content “enhanced;”
• Exemptions from usage caps and meters for content partners;
• An unwillingness to make appropriate investments in highly profitable broadband networks, instead relying on traffic reduction schemes like caps, allowances, and high pricing to discourage “excess usage.”

Twice is Nice. The Detroit News ran the same guest editorial, nearly word for word, as The Buffalo News

Where Net Neutrality goes unprotected, providers begin rolling out Stifled Broadband.  Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and several other countries endure this today.  The only innovation this brings is new ways to charge consumers more money for worse service, making a handful of barely competitive providers very rich.  But such wealth empires aren’t created by providers alone.  Selling the equipment that fiddles with your Internet connection to throttle speeds, monetize usage, and cut off “abusers” is a growth industry as long as Net Neutrality protection is kept at bay.

Stifle it.

That’s where Riley comes in.  She is founder and chief technology officer of a company called Camiant, which bills itself a leader in “real time policy control.”  Control is right.  Camiant’s products and services are all about controlling your online experience.  Her company sells products like “Multimedia Policy Engines,” which can artificially impede or enhance broadband traffic at the whim of your provider.  Just add their “Fair Usage Management” (FUM) extension and your provider can begin spying on your usage: determining what you are doing with your broadband connection, measuring if you are a heavy user/abuser worthy of punishment, and then injecting the appropriate punishment — throttled broadband service, a bigger bill from usage penalties and fees, or even being kicked offline.  Your provider has a world of arbitrary, easy to configure limits, fees, and penalties at his disposal thanks to FUM.

In short, Camiant’s bread and butter is spread by the cable and telecom industry who buys the company’s products and services.  Is it any surprise Riley is opposed to Net Neutrality?  Pass it and Camiant either needs to develop a new line of products or subsist on selling their schemes abroad, where such protections might not exist.

Of course, newspaper readers don’t have any information about Riley’s very-vested interest in this debate.  Although both papers identify Riley as “founder and chief technology officer of Camiant, a technology firm in Marlborough, Massachusetts,” calling Camiant a technology firm is about as informative as calling Hurricane Katrina a weather event.  Lack of full disclosure does a great disservice to readers of both newspapers.  Instead, how about “Camiant markets and sells products that may be prohibited if Net Neutrality becomes law in the United States.”

OnLive puts the processing power to render and play games on their end, and streams the result to you over your broadband connection (click to enlarge)

OnLive, the cloud-based videogame streaming service, was on display during a live dem0 of the service at Columbia University.  The service, which literally streams game play across fast broadband networks, could seriously challenge the videogame console marketplace.  Instead of using an expensive piece of hardware at home to play videogames such as w88, OnLive puts the hardware at their end and streams the results to any computer or television.  If it works, it means consumers won’t need the highest performance videocards or latest new CPU.  They’ll just need a fast broadband connection to let OnLive’s own servers do all of the processing.

The founder and CEO of OnLive, Steve Perlman, shows considerable enthusiasm for the concept, and several major investors including AT&T and Time Warner have backed the venture, which could help guarantee smooth passage on their broadband networks.

Still, a product that requires a minimum of a 5Mbps broadband connection for HD-quality streamed game play could consume an enormous amount of data — up to 2.25 GB per hour of gaming.  Although cable and fiber-based broadband connections will suffice, many DSL customers don’t have service fast enough to support OnLive.  Among those that do, any usage caps or allowances will significantly reduce the value of the service to potential subscribers.  Frontier Communications’ infamous 5GB “acceptable use” per month, for instance, would allow just over two hours of use per month, assuming you did nothing else with your DSL service.

Even Comcast’s 250GB usage allowance cuts game play to a little over 100 hours per month.  That’s a ludicrous amount of gaming for most of us, but not for some gaming addicts who may have tried games like 핑카지노.  Besides, it also assumes you don’t use your Comcast broadband service to watch video or other bandwidth-intensive online services.

Time Warner Cable’s proposed 40GB usage limit, shelved indefinitely in April after consumer protests, would permit less than an hour of play per day, assuming your Road Runner service was for nothing but OnLive.

In short, assuming OnLive works as promoted, its biggest threat to success will come from external factors mostly outside of its control — namely cap-happy ISPs that could quickly make streamed cloud computing untenable for all but the wealthiest among us.

What could OnLive do to reduce its risk from caps?  Partner with ISPs in a non-Net Neutral broadband world, of course.  That investment from AT&T, for example, could theoretically pave the way for AT&T to exempt OnLive from any usage limits that come from its own Internet Overcharging experiments in Beaumont, Texas and Reno, Nevada.  That would be a clear violation of Net Neutrality, if enacted into law.

Scenarios like this should drive consumers to support Net Neutrality policies.  ISPs forming “preferred partnerships” with innovative services like OnLive might seem consumer-friendly at first, but not in the long-term because it spells the death of would-be “non-preferred” start-ups, and helps pave the way even faster to Internet Overcharging schemes letting broadband providers pick the winners and losers of the future.

[flv width=”484″ height=”292″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/OnLive Columbia University Demo.flv[/flv]

OnLive founder and CEO Steve Perlman demonstrates OnLive and talks about cloud-based, streaming game play at this gathering at Columbia University in New York. (49 minutes)
(If stream stops for buffering, pause it for a few minutes to let a significant amount of the file pre-load, which should reduce re-buffering problems.)

Comcast has agreed to settle a $16 million dollar class action lawsuit filed on behalf of broadband customers who experienced slowed speeds while using peer to peer applications.  The original lawsuit, Hart v. Comcast, accused the company of advertising broadband speeds that were unavailable to customers when using certain applications the company allegedly impaired from April 1, 2006 to December 31, 2008.  As part of the proposed settlement, Comcast denies any wrongdoing but has agreed to modify its “network management” policies and feels further litigation over the matter would not be in the company’s best interests.

Customers are eligible for a settlement up to $16:

If you live in the United States or its Territories, have a current or former Comcast High-Speed Internet account, and either used or attempted to use Comcast service to use:

• The Ares, BitTorrent, eDonkey, FastTrack or Gnutella P2P protocols at any time from April 1, 2006 to December 31, 2008; and/or
• Lotus Notes to send e-mail any time from March 26, 2007 to October 3, 2007.

Starting January 5, 2010 affected customers can file a claim online or by mail for their share of the settlement.  Additional information is available on the settlement website P2PCongestionSettlement.com.

BitTorrent's peer to peer protocol was impacted by Comcast's speed throttle

The Comcast throttling incident helped make the case for Net Neutrality proponents that broadband providers would, in certain instances, be willing to impede traffic it deemed undesirable or burdensome.  Peer to peer traffic has been blamed by several providers for creating congestion problems on their broadband networks, particularly those that share a limited amount of bandwidth among hundreds of customers.  Unlike typical file transfers, which originate in one location and deliver content to consumers, peer-to-peer relies on groups of people sharing individual pieces of files with one another until everyone obtains the complete file.  Because many peer to peer networks consider it good etiquette to share as much as one receives, upstream bandwidth is consumed at a much higher than average rate.

For consumers who leave file sharing applications running 24/7, the amount of traffic can build to considerable levels.  Many providers consider such traffic a nuisance that clogs their networks, and some have sought to artificially reduce the speed of such traffic.

Redefining their "new position" to basically mean their "old position"

AT&T’s all-new position on Net Neutrality suspiciously sounds like its old position on Net Neutrality.

In a three-page letter addressed to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, James W. Cicconi, AT&T’s senior vice president for external and legislative affairs wrote in glowing terms about the Obama Administration’s efforts to expand broadband service and preserving the “open Internet.”  Those goals are shared by AT&T, according to Cicconi.  But are they?

AT&T has spent millions fighting Net Neutrality policies, calling them unnecessary and harmful to broadband innovation and investment.  Ed Whitacre, Jr., AT&T’s former chairman and CEO infamously kicked off a contentious debate when he declared content producers shouldn’t be allowed to use AT&T’s “pipes for free.”

Little has changed.

Yesterday’s letter to Genachowski brings nothing new to the table from AT&T.  In short, they still feel broad-based Net Neutrality regulations will be harmful to investment.  AT&T wants the FCC’s definition of Net Neutrality to be “flexible enough to accommodate the types of voluntary business agreements that have been permitted for 75 years.”  Flexible, in this instance, means gutting the clear, unambiguous prohibition against fiddling with Internet traffic and inserting loopholes that gut the policy’s effectiveness.  AT&T’s “voluntary agreements” never include consumers.

AT&T wants to provide “value-added” services to content producers who agree to pay more to obtain them.  That typically means additional speed or a guarantee of prioritized service.  Unfortunately, on a finite broadband network, those getting preferential treatment can reduce the quality of service for those who don’t pay.  By trying to refocus the FCC’s attention on obsessing over subjective interpretations of “unreasonable and anti-competitive” content discrimination, AT&T gets a free pass to configure a broadband protection racket and rake in money from content producers afraid to be stuck in the slow lane.

Cicconi

AT&T also continues to complain that such regulations would prevent the company from offering consumers “value-added” broadband services.  As long as those services do not discriminate, providers can freely provide network enhancements like faster speed tiers, “Powerboost” technology which temporarily speeds up connections, and even network management which keeps viruses, malware, and other junk traffic away from subscribers.

Ben Scott at Free Press, a consumer advocacy group, read between AT&T’s latest lines and saw a naked effort to gut Net Neutrality before being enacted:

“After leading a rabid anti-net neutrality lobbying campaign for years, AT&T now submits a letter to the Federal Communications Commission purporting to offer common ground,” Scott said. “What they are proposing would allow them to violate the core principle of Net Neutrality — letting them control the Internet by picking winners and losers in a pay-for-play scheme. That would destroy the free and open Internet, and the FCC should reject this false compromise out of hand.”

“Make no mistake, AT&T opposes Net Neutrality. Their proposed solution is a bait and switch. As bait, they ask to return to a standard of nondiscrimination that was long applied to the telephone network. But they fail to mention that this standard was part of a system of pro-competitive common carriage rules that they have railed against applying to broadband networks for years. They haven’t changed their mind about common carriage. They are simply cherry-picking one piece of the old rules and calling it a compromise. The entire Net Neutrality debate is about the creation of a new system of nondiscrimination that fits broadband networks, not telephone networks –a debate the telephone companies forced by stripping away consumer protection rules from broadband under the Bush administration,” Scott added.

Public Knowledge also called out AT&T in a statement from Gigi Sohn.

AT&T has tried to draw what is an imaginary line among types of discrimination. The company advised the FCC that while ‘unreasonable’ discrimination can be banned, any discrimination caused by ‘voluntary commercial agreements’ is just fine because the parties involved agreed to it. That is nonsense.

As we have said consistently, the Internet has functioned as well as it has because control of the crucial roles at each end of the network. Side deals made by a carrier like AT&T and a content provider or other company take that control out of the hands of the consumer.

Similarly, it is unfortunate that AT&T has resorted to the old tactic of threatening not to invest in its network if the company does not get what it wants in a rulemaking. The growth of the Internet will be driven by consumer demand, not by gimmicks. If the company is truly interested in consumers, it will allow consumers to remain in control.