I have a nifty little service I buy from my telephone provider called “teleblock.” It blocks calls originiating from certain types of phone calls unless I affirmatively allow them. Thanks to this nifty service, I am once again able to sleep late on Sundays.
I bring this up because if there is a common carriage service left in the telecom world, it’s plain old telephone service (POTS). My POTS landline is absolutely regulated as a “Title II” common carrier telephone service. But despite being a common carrier Title II telecom service, my POTS provider can offer me a very useful tool for limiting annoying calls.
This is why we should look with a rather skeptical eye at the claims of cable cos and telcos that granting our various complaints and petitions at the FCC (both the Comcast p2p blocking and the wireless text messaging/short code petitions) that granting our Petitions will result in a flood of pornographic spam, offering our underage children the chance to enlarge various body parts that they shouldn’t even think about until well after puberty. This deluge of spam, child pornography, etc. on helpless users will result, network providers tell us, because the noble and brave network providers will be powerless — POWERLESS we tell you — to provide any kind of blocking or filtering software.
But somehow, despite being subject to full Title II common carrier regulation, my POTS provider manages to give me what amounts to an effective spam filter. Indeed, I have found it far more effective than anything the carriers offer me for spam in their current unregulated state. How is this possible?
The answer is that the claim that net neutrality would somehow prevent providers from offering filtering services to users — whether to block spam or protect children — is bunk. I cannot say it any clearer. As demonstrated by the ability of my common carrier Title II POTS provider to offer me “teleblock” service, the repeated assertions by carriers that even mild rules against certain kinds of discrimination would open the sluice gates of spam are untrue. This argument is nothing more than a bogeyman conceived by carriers to frighten and delude the ignorant and gullible — a description that sadly applies to some ungodly number of decisionmakers.
What net neutrality would do, however, and the critical difference between services like teleblock offered by my common carrier POTS provider and the services that Comcast, AT&T and other broadband providers wish to offer, ir prevent carriers from picking and choosing what gets to users regardless of the user’s express choices. My common carrier can offer me teleblock and even ask me to pay for it. But it can’t block 800 numbers randomly on a theory that this would somehow reduce demand on the system. If I elect to use the service, my common carrier POTS provider tells me the rules for the service and obeys these rules. It does not cut side deals with telemarkerters to overide my preferences. It is a common carrier. It can offer any service, including filtering services, as long as it cedes control of the filter to me and does not try to monetize the incoming traffic at my expense.
THAT is what the broadband carriers find so intolerable. It’s not about the ability to offer spam filters or protection for minor children. It’s about keeping that trump card in hand that lets the carrier have ultimate control. It’s about the little fine print on page 15 of your user agreement that lets the carrier change the terms of service so that the filter you opted into no longer works the way they advertised it, because the broadband carrier now has a special partnership with certain providers. It’s not about blocking spam or access to indecent content. It’s about control. Specifically, it is about the carrier controlling the user, rather than the user controlling the service offered by the carrier.
Everyone is familiar with the tale of the “the boy who cried ‘wolf’.” It is about time people wised up to the tale of the carriers who cry “spam.” If the most regulated entity in the telecommunications world, my common carrier Title II wireline POTS provider can offer me the equivalent of a spam filter, so can a broadband provider operating under the modest non-discriminatory rules of network neutrality. Hopefully, regulators will grow up and stop believing the fairy tales from the carriers that cry “spam.”
Mr. Feld, Your assessment
Mr. Feld,
Your assessment that ISPs would have to allow floods of porn, solicitation, etc is valid. Its a red herring on their part and I concur.
However I find your simile of a POTS service vs those of a TCP routing service also disingenuous. The architecture of the the two systems are radically different. Nor is the ability of or lack thereof a matter of policy.
‘TeleBlock’ facilitated thru the POTS SS7 network is a one to one match against a single number in the SCP database. That type of lookup can be accomplished in the 800millisec specification for SS7.
Lets look at TCP. The first hurdle is that the database lookup is a many to many match. A higher order of difficulty in a given time period. Logical names and source IP addresses can be spoofed. Which gets compounded by some 2-5% of the clients on the ‘Net being zombies doing someone else’s bidding. The ‘where’ that filter should occur is also critical. At a top level TCP node would be insurmountable. The node would literally have to know not only what to be filtered but do a deep packet analysis to discern whether to forward or not. For the purposes of optimizing the filtering it should occur at the closest node to the customer. The most optimal placement being the customer prem equipment done by the customer themselves.
Could an ISP do the filtering? I have no doubt they could. But at what cost and would I be willing to pay for it as I doubt it will be cheap. Nor will it ever be perfect. And as far as policy goes should it be mandated? We have V-chips on all late model televisions. Its an end node device very much like a customer prem router in providing content. We don’t specify that it is the broadcasters responsibility to filter content that is left to parents to decide what the receiver permits. Happily such tools already exist which parents can utilize. Why should the policy choice be any different for broadband services?
I would hazard that my fellow Americans can figure out how to filter out the spam on their own networks. We’re a resourceful bunch.
I was not speaking of the
I was not speaking of the technical issues. I was speaking simply of the legal regime. Broadband carriers claim that if they are prohibitted from degrading bittorrent and other p2p applications, or otherwise subject to network neutrality, they will be legally prohibtted from oferring any sort of filtering services.
My point was that as a legal matter, this is rubbish. If the law does not prohibit a common carrier from offering certain kinds of filtering, the law would not prevent broadband providers from offering certain kinds of filtering.
I make no comparison as a matter of technology, nor do I advocate mandatory filtering.
TELEMARKETING, COMMON
TELEMARKETING, COMMON CARRIAGE AND NET NEUTRALITY
Telemarketing became the problem it did due in part to the default “opt in” access forced on everyone with a phone, then absurd claims that one could “opt out” on an individual basis. The structure of cost recovery also shifted cost to others, like those receiving the unwanted calls - already an externality.
The phone companies had every incentive to keep it going. Like the first phase of Caller ID service, the idea was to know the number of the call before answering, but this conflicted with blocking one’s number on outgoing calls to defeat Caller ID in first place, so they pushed hard for outgoing calls not to be blocked as the opt in default to generate more revenue. Or the unlisted telephone numbers not charged originally for “opting out” of an “opt in” phone book, and so on.
In opposing net neutrality, the same players have reversed position on the modern equivalent of telemarketing - spam and other unwanted information - now they want to “protect” users (did someone say “nanny state” via private deregulated monopoly?) from the same earlier forms of unwanted information to which they turned a blind eye in the past, even though most understand, for example, that today’s email can be received on an “opt in” default list designed by the user and so forth, or in reverse, like Harold’s nifty “opt out” list for certain calls.
The technical notion that certain content is difficult to identify at certain levels in the network cuts both ways, to obscure unwanted or illegal content, but in the other direction to support the net neutral notion that content should be separate from its technical underpinning and controlled by end users.
In this context, for example, that P2P is technically superior in its efficiency to seek out and utilize unused bandwidth should not be confused with the ability to identify the content carried by it.