Policy Blog Entries by Tim Wu

A word or two more on “internet misrepresentation,” the movement I discussed in an earlier post. Some of the others involved who I want to mention are David P. Reed, who worked on the early internet, Dave Burstein who is the editor of the always-interesting DSL Prime, Gordon Cook, editor of the Cook Report, and Steve Wozinack, co-author of the original “breakout” among other project, and alot of other very interesting people.

The official web site is http://www.dpsproject.com

I wanted to reiterate that one thing that isn’t getting enough attention are problems of broadband transparency. Carriers really should be required to tell consumers and application designers what kind of bandwidth and latency they’re getting — at least a good estimate, if its a shared network. The argument against such information disclosure is non-existent.

Its like ingredients in food, or required reporting for corporations. Information is what makes the market work.

Over the last few weeks a group of thinkers, led mostly by Seth Johnson, has put forward an interesting idea. They suggest that perhaps one of the best ways to preserve what is best about the internet is to make it illegal to represent non-neutral internet offerings as “internet service.”

In other words, if you offer a tiered plan or block some sites and call you service an “internet service,” you’ve broken the law.

The idea is clever. One of the challenges in any proposed rule is distinguishing between what carriers ought and need to have the right to do, and what are distortionary practices. The proposed rule gives carriers the right to, say, set up a private IP-TV service that has nothing really to do with the internet, without breaking the law.

On the other hand, it sheds light on something very important. The proposed Net Neutrality rules haven’t done enough to force network providers to disclose what, exactly, they are selling their customers. There is no argument against broadband disclosure rules that has any strength — its as simple as the case for accurate ingredient labels on food.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve read a few sources suggesting that Google be subject to neutrality rules, as suggested by something called the Gonzalez amendment.

Let me explain why I think the analogy its misleading — and that the whole thing is a red herring.

First, the costs of market entry in the search engine market are completely different. I can set up Noogle.com tomorrow — I may not have that many customers, but I can try. The minimum investments for starting a competing broadband service and reaching any serious number of customers are far larger, perhaps in the hundreds of millions, if you can get regulatory approval.

Second, the exclusive abilities of search engines are different.

Last week, here in China, Google.com was been blocked all week. There’s little work around for that; little I can do about it. Its a violation of what would be network neutrality rules, but I don’t have a lot of options.

Meanwhile, if Google features an ad for Amazon.com on the sidebar, that hardly excludes me from getting to Barnes and Noble. Even if Google doesn’t return, say, Barnes & Noble on a search, there are other ways to get there. When broadband providers block, you don’t have many options.

In a phrase: infrastructure makes a difference.

I am a believer in author’s rights — that authors are the best long-term stewards of their copyrights, even if they do delegate out much of the work of exploiting their own works.

For that reason, as an author as well as a student of copyright, I’ve been thinking we need better ways, as a group, to make our rights inalienable. Let me explain.

Typically, when you agree to publish, you deal first with a non-legal person — and then later are asked to assign your rights, sometimes after publication. As everyone knows, you’re in a tough position in which an author typically has no bargaining power. And you face the greatest argument of all — the boilerplate. “This is our standard agreement,” they always say.

What authors, or at least many authors, need is a better way to say, “sorry, I’d love to sign the agreement, but I cannot legally assign you those rights,” or even a way to say “I can sign this form, but it won’t be a valid assignment.”

There are groups working on ways to do this — some believe that pre-publication with a creative commons license might do the trick. But I think we need a simple way for authors to make their rights inalienable, if they want.

Of course, not all authors will want to or be able to make their rights inalienable. But some will.

During the legal fight over network neutrality — its important to remember what matters most.

While the law can and does matter, what matters most is the ethic. That is, the sense that there’s something wrong with a centralized provider dictating what information you can get to, and how. A sensitivity to that kind of control is what the fight is all about. Its easy too get used to being spoon-fed; but an informed citizenry resists.

Some of this may sound woolly, but at the deepest levels this is really what the NN fight is all about, the developing ethic of decentralized information distribution. It develops when people feel angry when sites are blocked, when operators even suggest playing favorites, and so on. Americans, over a few hundred years, have developed a distaste for political censorship, but they’re also developing a distaste for non-neutral information carriage.

It’s not always fashionable to say good things about U.S. Broadband — but I do want to say one thing:

Cable. I’ve been traveling alot lately, and while the U.S. has less broadband penetration than it should, the one thing we do have is more cable broadband than DSL.

And let’s just be clear about this - Cable really is much better. The network designs are better than DSL, the technology is better, the lack of PPPoE is better. Just better.

Some of the credit is due to late 1970s FCC policy, which let cable out of its regulatory prison. That’s why we at least have a duopoly in broadband, for example. Alot of other countries kept cable buried to protect broadcast.

In addition, my guess is that there’s way more bandwidth that the Cable Cos can coax out of that coax. If they would just give up on, say, half of those ridiculous and unwatched channels, and throw the rest at internet bandwidth, cable might be in a position to bury the Bells long-term. Especially if cable got serious about the business market.

But like all companies, cable has its existing revenue streams, established ways of doing business, and is slow to change. But if I were running a cable company, I know what I’d do.

The toughest thing about using the Internet in China is this — no Google or Wikipedia!

I’m living in Beijing this summer, and for the most part its a great life. But Google.com comes and goes — its been blocked all week — and wikipedia is blocked altogether. I miss them!

It reminds me that, amidst the Network Neutrality debate in the United States, the most important rules are those that ban blocking. I happen to have opinions about the rest, thought they can be debated. But the blocking of sites by service providers is a real drag..