Policy Blog Entries by Mehan Jayasuriya

Girl Talk a.k.a. Pittsburgh-based mashup artist Greg Gillis, has been making waves in both the electronic/dance and indie rock communities for a few years now. Specializing in sample-based DJ mixes, Gillis creates music that is dense, tirelessly referential and thoroughly postmodern. His breakthrough album, 2006's Night Ripper, proved that a well-executed mashup can have a life beyond the Internet and his latest release, the pay-what-you-want, Creative Commons licensed Feed the Animals, seems poised to push even further into the mainstream. Gillis has become quite the hot topic as of late and his name often pops up in the virtual pages of publications like Pitchfork and Stereogum, as DJs in clubs around the country shamelessly try to imitate his style. One place where you might not expect to hear Gillis mentioned, however, is in the corridors of power on Capitol Hill. Despite this fact, not only did Gillis' name pop up twice this week during Congressional and FCC hearings but on both occasions he was held up as exemplifying a new breed of creative professional. Welcome to yet another week in the increasingly scattershot world of D.C. tech policy.

I've been a Comcast cable television and Internet customer for almost two years now. And to be quite honest, during those two years, I've had relatively few complaints. Sure, I'm not crazy about my upstream BitTorrent traffic getting throttled. But that aside, I feel as if I've always enjoyed a fairly high level of service. I'm more or less pleased with the speeds that I get with my Internet connection, the picture and sound quality of my cable television service is high enough to pass muster and I can't remember ever experiencing any downtime (which initially came as a shock, after having been a DSL customer for a number of years). And all those horror stories about Comcast technicians? Mine arrived right on time for my installation appointment and was both courteous and helpful--even if he did try to sell me a cable descrambler box. In fact, during the last few years, I've only had one complaint regarding Comcast's Internet service: the price tag that comes attached to it has always seemed a bit high. As of yesterday, however, that's no longer an issue for me.

Ever since Robb Topolski unleashed his exposé on behavioral advertising company NebuAd, behavioral advertisers and their partners have found themselves in the hot seat. And judging by the looks of it, that heat isn't going to let up anytime soon. You'll recall that back in May, Representatives Joe Barton (R-TX, Chairman and Ranking Member of the Committee on Energy and Commerce) and Edward Markey (D-MA, Chairman of the Telecommunications and the Internet Subcommittee) sent a letter to NebuAd's CEO, politely asking him to put his pilot tests on hold, pending an investigation into the company's practices. A coalition of 15 consumer advocacy and privacy groups, including Public Knowledge, voiced its support for Barton and Markey's letter and urged the Congressmen to continue their investigation into the practice of behavioral advertising. And continue they have.

After graduating from college in 2005, I spent a year living in a small fishing village in Aomori Prefecture, on the northern tip of Japan’s main island, Honshu. Aomori is one of Japan’s poorest and most rural prefectures and its defining characteristics are cold weather, mountains and a lot of snow (I often jokingly refer to it as the “Wyoming of Japan”). My apartment in Aomori was lacking a number of amenities that we Americans take for granted—air conditioning, central heating and insulation being the most notable among them. One thing that I did have, however, was a 100 Mbps fiber-optic Internet connection, for which I paid the equivalent of around $30 USD per month. Fast forward to today. Verizon, the first major U.S. carrier to roll out fiber-to-the-home, has started selling its FiOS Internet service in a handful of U.S. markets. Unfortunately, you can’t yet get FiOS in places like Wyoming—so far, deployments have been mostly limited to urban areas like New York City and the suburbs of Washington D.C. You also can’t get 100 Mbps service—FiOS currently tops off at 50 Mbps. And how much, you ask, does that 50 Mbps service cost? $144.95 per month.

I’ve been plying my trade as a blogger for quite a while—okay, well, “quite a while” in blog years, anyway. During that time, I’ve learned that the old guard print journalists and their scrappy web counterparts don’t always see eye-to-eye on matters of citation and attribution. On the web, the mantra has always been “share and share alike”: most bloggers generally quote and cite each other freely, returning the favor in the form of a link. This works because the Internet economy runs on page views, which are equally coveted by advertisers, writers and business folks alike. Unfortunately, some content producers with roots in the print world, most notably the large wire services, have failed to understand this unspoken code of conduct. I know that I’m not the only one who has worked for a web publication that received a stern letter from the likes of Reuters or Bloomberg, which essentially said “don’t cite, quote or link to our content”. Sure, this proved to be an inconvenience at times—sometimes the major wire services had exclusive stories that no one else had—but to avoid a legal squabble, the easiest thing to do was to simply stop linking to and quoting from the offended party. After all, if these services want to shoot themselves in the foot, why not simply let them? Here’s why: because rights holders, including the major wire services, do not get to decide what is and isn’t fair use under the law.

It’s been a few weeks since our last report on NebuAd and its attempt to install Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) devices on broadband networks throughout the country for the purposes of behavioral advertising (if you’re unfamiliar with NebuAd, you might want to start here). Quite a bit has happened since then: as you may have already heard, Public Knowledge, in partnership with 14 other consumer advocacy and privacy groups, urged members of Congress to open up a formal investigation into the privacy threat posed by companies like NebuAd. If such an investigation takes place, we’re likely to learn a whole lot more about NebuAd and how the company does business with the ISPs. In the meantime, we decided to do a little investigating of our own. With the help of noted networking researcher Robb Topolski, Public Knowledge and Free Press conducted a technical analysis of NebuAd, in order to figure out exactly how the company’s behavioral advertising technology works—and what specific risks it poses to the end user. What we found is that, in terms of actual methodology, NebuAd has more in common with hackers than it does with most web advertising companies.

Last Friday, Public Knowledge president and co-founder Gigi Sohn spoke on a panel entitled "Net Neutrality: It’s Back Again!" at the 2008 Broadband Policy Summit here in Washington. I managed to shoot some video footage of the panel and I've included some of the highlights below, though you'll have to accept my apologies for the poor video quality (the light and mirror-filled room offered a sobering lesson in the limitations of the Flip Video Ultra). At any rate, the audio is quite clear, so be sure to check out these clips if you weren't at last week's summit.

Part I: What is reasonable network management?

In the world of U.S. tech policy, few regulatory bodies are as closely watched as the Federal Communications Commission. While there’s no shortage of tech journalists who follow the Commission’s every move, relatively little is written about the personal viewpoints of the FCC’s five Commissioners and how these appointed officials work together to determine FCC policy. In an interview with Ars Technica last week, two-term Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein offered a rare glimpse at the inner workings of the FCC and also spoke openly about the need for more transparency at the agency, his hopes for the next administration and how the FCC can better serve the public interest. His most insightful comments, however, were on the topic of Net Neutrality and how the battle for neutral networks is linked to the American tradition of decentralized media.

When discussing Net Neutrality, a phrase that often gets bandied about is “reasonable network management”. Just what, exactly, constitutes “reasonable” network management? While ISPs like Comcast and AT&T would have you believe that packet-spoofing and content filtering are reasonable practices, we here at Public Knowledge disagree. In accordance with the core principles of Net Neutrality, we believe that a reasonable network management technology is one that does not privilege, degrade or prioritize traffic based on the content, applications or services that it is associated with. But what would such a technology look like?

Turtle-catching, Indiana Jones and gummy bears. These are the sorts of topics that are being discussed on my Twitter home page right now; proof-positive that I’m not the only one who thinks that the service’s 140 character communiqués serve as the perfect method of delivery for the most trivial thoughts. Unfortunately, not everyone uses Twitter for such lighthearted means—and no, I’m not talking about folks who live-twit Senate hearings. This past week, Twitter found itself having to answer some tough questions about the policing of social media networks and the resulting conversation has implications for anyone who uses such web-based services.