Image copyright Laralova

Professor Lyons’s fundamental mistake was to conflate opposition to data caps with opposition to price discrimination more generally. Price discrimination in broadband pricing is a positive phenomenon. It allows ISPs to create different pricing packages that appeal to different types of customers — from those heavy gamers to the grandmother who only checks her email. My organization, Public Knowledge, does not oppose the idea of price discrimination, and I am not aware of any of our allies that do either. But price discrimination does not require using data caps. And the alternative to data caps is not one price for everyone.

How can I be so sure? Because ISPs impose price discrimination today using speed tiers. And it turns out that speed tiers have a number of positive attributes that data caps lack.

Most people understand speed. While they may not know how many megabytes are in a gigabyte, even the emailing grandma knows that a page that does not load very quickly or a video that constantly buffers is because of a slow Internet connection.

Furthermore, customers realize that their connection is too slow while they are using the Internet. When the video buffers or the page is slow they can ponder, at that very moment, if the delay is annoying enough to justify paying for a faster tier. With monthly caps, a user gets an alert and then needs to reconstruct days, weeks, or even a month’s worth of usage to try to determine what they were doing to get them close to the cap. Then they need to decide if it is worth paying extra to be able to do it again in the future.

Finally, speed tiers are a “gentle” signal to consumers. If your Internet connection is not fast enough, the worst thing that happens is that things happen a bit too slowly for your liking. Go over your data cap and you could be on the hook for significant overage fees.

The gentle nature of speed-based tiers fuel a virtuous cycle. Exploration leads to discovery, which leads to decisions to purchase faster tiers. These purchases provide capital to invest in the network, which in turn brings faster service for everyone. This increased speed fuels even more exploration, which starts the cycle all over again.

In contrast, data-based tiers incentivize sticking to what you know, avoiding trying new things that could cost you overage fees. This is a recipe for stagnation.

But what about the idea that caps are set so high that only those crazy early adopters would ever hit them? History tells us that today’s early adopters are tomorrow’s average user. There was a time when all sorts of today’s common Internet activities — VOIP phone calls, streaming videos, uploading and sharing images — were on the cutting edge. There is no clear mechanism that would force caps to increase over time. That means that caps that appear high today will become problems tomorrow. Unless, of course, people are so worried about their cap that they never try anything new.

And this avoidance of new things highlights real competitive concerns. A 300GB cap may sound like a lot (assuming you are the type of person who even knows what a GB is, and what you could do with 300 of them) until you think about making use of it. Using Comcast’s own assumptions, we have calculated that switching from Comcast cable to an all-HD online video competitor would require 648GB per month. And that’s before you use your Internet connection for anything else. When viewed in that context, these caps are not just about targeting individual competitors. Instead, they target competition itself.

Of course, antitrust law has a role in instances where incumbents are using data caps on the Internet service they offer in order to protect their cable service. But it is not the only answer. Antitrust law does a great job when there is evidence of collusion and price fixing, but less of a good job when incumbents take steps to exclude new competitors. And antitrust alone does not have tools to address situations where incumbents move to adopt a pricing strategy that confuses consumers and slows innovation in the wider economy.

Forcing us to decide between data caps and a one-price-fits-all, dilapidated broadband network is a false strategy. There are ways to create a sustainable broadband price structure that fuels network investment and larger innovation in our economy without resorting to a model that encourages consumers to over-buy and under-use data. If Internet pricing really is the next policy frontier, our first step should be to make sure we understand what we are actually debating.

Michael Weinberg is the vice president at Public Knowledge. Michael primarily focuses on copyright, issues before the FCC and emerging technologies like 3-D printing.

TV image copyright antpkr

It’s finally happening. The Internet is taking over TV. It’s just happening differently than many of us imagined. There are two major transformations under way:

• The Rise of the Internet Distributors. Led by Netflix, the group of new distributors includes Amazon and Microsoft now, but maybe Apple and Google later. They are largely distributing traditional TV shows in a nontraditional way. All the content is delivered over IP, and usually as part of a paid subscription or per-episode EST (electronic sell-through). Important to note that all of this content contains no advertising and is available entirely on demand. This content falls into the “non-substitutional” content bucket. To watch it, you don’t need to be a cable TV subscriber.
• The Rise of Alternative Content Producers. Thanks to YouTube’s Channel strategy and investment in hundreds of content providers, new producers of content are emerging and offering nontraditional programming, usually in shorter form. This content is marked by dramatically different production economics than traditional TV content, taking advantage of an expanded labor pool and low-cost cameras and computer editing. This alternative content is chipping away at long- and mid-tail viewership on traditional networks (the “filler” and “nice-to-see” buckets).

Both of these transformations are successful to date, and will only become more so. Rich Greenfield has a nice summary of why the TV industry suddenly loves Netflix. (Disclosure: I’ve been a NFLX shareholder for some time.) The first transformation takes advantage of the massive pressure MVPDs place on traditional cable nets to not offer their programming direct to consumers. In this case, the HBOs and AMCs requirement that you authenticate your existing cable subscription in order to watch their programming over IP successfully persuades the cord-nevers to just avoid the programming on those networks until the hit shows are offered through Netflix or EST. Netflix, once again, looks like the hero. Those empty threats by Jeff Bewkes that he will never work with Netflix turned out to be, well, empty. The second transformation will take longer to fully prove out, but I believe it will happen. As more of our viewership takes place over IP, we lose our allegiance to networks as the point of distribution and allow new distributors to guide us toward content choice.

There is a third budding area of transformation, but I don’t yet see evidence that a business exists: Trying to repackage cable TV bundles and sell them over IP. Companies like Aereo and Nimble TV offer versions of this. I believe we live in a show-based world. Consumers aren’t looking for networks (with the exception of ESPN and regional sports nets) so much as they are looking for shows. Shows delivered over IP allow for the slow unbundling of television. One of the many challenges about this model for traditional broadcasters is that there is no advertising in this world. The traditional cable-net business model enjoys two great revenue streams — affiliate fees and ad dollars. In IP-delivered shows, there are no ads.

Who are the winners and losers in this model? Well, show creators continue to flourish. The new distributors enjoy great success. Of course, ISPs, who are often the same companies as the MVPDs, do fine in the ISP business, but I believe the decline in total cable subs will continue. In a world where shows do not contain advertising, why do we need Nielsen? They have been a measurement standard for decades, largely because advertisers needed a third-party validator of viewership. You can see why they have a vested interest in insisting TV ad viewership is not on the decline (despite everyone’s experience to the contrary). I don’t think cable nets are in immediate trouble. They enjoy a great business model now, and also get to reap EST or licensing benefits after the shows air. But the Netflix “House of Cards” effort shows that consumers will now expect to be able to watch shows whenever they want, and not be bothered by inconvenient broadcast schedules. The day is coming when the cable nets will have to respond.

For startups, one of the wide-open spaces seems to be in cross-provider discovery. Now that my shows are spread among Netflix, Amazon, YouTube and on my DVR, I would prefer one interface to reach them all. Companies like Dijit’s NextGuide, Peel, Squrl and Telly are taking cracks at this important space.

David Pakman is a partner at Venrock, focusing on ad tech, social/mobile media, consumer services, Web services, e-commerce, big data, SaaS and anything else hugely exciting and disruptive. This post is also live on his blog.

MonkeyBrains has so far raised a little more than $10,000 from 17 backers, and it’s committed to give all that funding back if it doesn’t reach its goal by Feb. 19.

But the thing is, MonkeyBrains doesn’t actually want a satellite — as the campaign pitch puts it, “Our initial research seems to indicate having a satellite in orbit may not speed up your internet at all.” The company’s pitch video talks up the potential of UFOs.

Instead, MonkeyBrains founder Rudy Rucker said that the crowdfunding campaign is a roundabout stunt attempting to call attention to “the failure of the City of San Francisco’s Department of Technology to lease us city fiber.”

Rucker wrote in an email, “Right now, there is a need for faster Internet in San Francisco. We are filling that gap with wireless, but a fiber to the home network would set the bar 100 times higher. Our current plan (without funding) is to get our CLEC status, stay self-funded, and slowly roll it out, but if we get the funding, we’ll dive in faster.”

As for the Indiegogo campaign? “The goal is high, but the satellite campaign is set to ‘fixed funding’ as I don’t want anyone to be shy about donating $1,000 or $10,000,” Rucker said. “Wouldn’t it feel great to risk $1,000 for something awesome with little risk of losing that money? It would feel 100 times better to put $100,000 on the line — and maybe you can use it as a tax shelter — so go for it!”

Image copyright Nataly Bannykh

But my experience — both on the way up and the way down — is a good window into one of the central questions facing President Obama as he prepares to take the oath of office for a second time on Jan. 21: What role, if any, should the government play in nurturing entrepreneurs and, by extension, jobs, in America? In our case, we really had no expectation that government would play any role whatsoever. Unfortunately, though, we were wrong. Dead wrong. It did play a role and, for the most part, it was not a good one. It doesn’t have to be that way; there are fixes that can be made.

The original idea was straightforward: Replace “error” pages, which are generated when you type a mistake in your web browser — “amazon,cm,” for instance — with search results that contained paid advertising. We figured, if there were enough such mistypes — indeed, it happens millions of times a day — the money could be substantial. The first challenge was to raise enough capital to turn our concept into reality. At the time, investors — still burned by the dot-com implosion of 2001 — were understandably wary of tech startups and a business based on errors sounded, well, decidedly unsexy.

Enter the government, specifically the state of Virginia, where we are based. At the time the state had just set up a $3 million “gap” fund, so named to fill the void, or gap in time, between the initial launch of a company and the time it’s ready to take on venture capital money. We applied and received $100,0000 — the first company to get such money — and the terms were good. That’s because the primary goal of such programs — which many states now run — is jobs and taxes, not just return on investment (although that’s nice, too). It was just what we needed to get going, and we did just that. We named the company Paxfire.

But what one arm of government giveth, another arm can quickly taketh away. We learned that government officials are often wary of, if not downright hostile to, the kind of disruption that is an all-but-inevitable consequence of innovation. We developed a unique approach for quickly capturing a boatload of errors, namely placing computer servers deep inside the heart of the Internet, specifically in front of domain name servers run by registries such as Verisign and Neustar.

It worked great, with one teeny tiny problem: A lot of techies — including the father of the Internet (and Google evangelist), Vint Cerf — didn’t like that we were mucking around with the guts of the Internet. More specifically, they thought what we were doing was a violation of “net neutrality,” an ever-evolving patchwork of rules that says that infrastructure providers shouldn’t mess around with traffic they handle, but, rather, simply pass it from Point A to Point B. By contrast, we argued the redirection of errors was specifically allowed by technical standards bodies like the IEEE under a provision known as “wildcarding.” Who was right? It’s a toss up. The mere debate, however, prompted tremulous bureaucrats at the U.S. Commerce Dept. — congenitally allergic to even the slightest whiff of controversy — to tell the registries (who are regulated by Commerce) to knock it off. We thought the complaints were nonsense. After all, how bad could it be to get rid of errors and replace them with relevant search results? But it didn’t matter. The government had, effectively, dealt us a death blow.

Then, largely out of necessity, we pivoted. Rather than play in an area of the Internet where Washington bureaucrats held sway, we moved the playing field to a different — and less regulated — part of the Internet. Here the players were Internet Services Providers, or ISPs, which, generally speaking, had fewer government masters to worry about. With thin margins and the promise of highly profitable revenue from errors (we didn’t charge anything for our technology, but, rather, took a revenue share) there was little resistance from the ISP community. The business took off: We quickly signed up nearly 50 ISPs, often splitting the revenue 50-50. We expanded internationally, to Europe, South America and Asia. The money started rolling in. Investment bankers, such as Allen & Co., came calling, offering to shop us to potential buyers.

We had struck gold, and wasted no time capitalizing on the opportunity. But if we were the proverbial hare, the government, specifically the U.S. Patent Office, was more like the tortoise in this Aesop fable. Early on, we had asked them to reward our innovation with a patent, effectively establishing a moat around our business that we hoped would deter competitors. It didn’t, in part because the patent office — blithely disconnected from the realities of a fast-moving marketplace — took nearly seven years to approve our application (a pending patent is about as useful as a car without wheels). Just to get a patent examiner to even look at our application took years (a problem that could easily be fixed by adding more examiners). In the meantime, at least four other companies jumped into the fray. In short order, the competition drove down our lucrative 50-50 deals to more like 80-20. Layoffs ensued. The competition was stomping all over our intellectual property with impunity and, with less money coming in the door, it was tougher to enforce our rights.

We knew we needed to come up with a second act, and fast. But, at this point, the consequences of government inaction came into sharp focus. Despite repeated efforts at reform, almost always stymied by political gridlock in Washington, federal rules make it a snap, and potentially quite lucrative, for people to file civil lawsuits, no matter how ludicrous. We became a target. Our legal bills began exceeding our R&D budget. One suit against us, a proposed class action, came from an elderly woman in New York City who claimed, in all seriousness, that we had wrongly taken away her errors. I kid you not. The unspoken message could have been plucked out of the HBO series “The Sopranos”: Pay up, or else. Almost overnight, a $10 million buyout offer, which we were prepared to accept, vanished, many of our customers bolted, though some have stayed. Though too late for us, the antidote to the problem of specious civil suits can be found in Britain (which has relatively few of them), namely, forcing the loser to pay all costs.

Nobody, least of all me, is suggesting that government should provide anything more than a level playing field in which anybody with a bright idea and a little pluck can succeed. The settlement between Google and the Federal Trade Commission on Jan. 3 was an attempt to do just that in search. Even with a level playing field, companies, ours included, succeed and fail for a variety of complex and unexpected reasons, but there are ways to shift the odds: More state and federal seed money would grease the skids, and clearing away structural impediments — like adding more patent examiners and following the British model to curb the number of specious civil suits — would probably help, too. A little luck never hurts but, ultimately, as any good entrepreneur should know, it’s up to the individual to succeed or fail on his own, regardless of the obstacles.

Mark Lewyn, a founder of Paxfire and several other technology companies, has written on media and technology topics for many years for a wide range of publications, including Businessweek, Newsweek, the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today. He can be reached at mark.lewyn@gmail.com.

And that’s good news. The FCC’s ongoing Measuring Broadband America program has had a fair bit of success in shaming underperforming ISPs into delivering the sort of speeds they promised their customers. It’s possible that this new program will have a similar effect on mobile broadband providers.

“We know from experience: Transparency on broadband speeds drives improvement in broadband speeds,” FCC chairman Julius Genachowski said in a prepared statement. “Our new mobile broadband measurement initiative extends the program to smartphones and other wireless devices. It will empower consumers and encourage improvements in mobile networks and programs, benefiting millions of Americans.”

Here’s hoping he’s right.

As bad as this sounds, don’t panic yet. Most ISPs are upgrading their networks to support the transition to IPv6, and content providers are following suit.

Starting at the IPv6 World Launch Day on June 6th, 2012, many of the world’s most popular Web sites will make content permanently accessible over IPv6. While the launch will expose some problems with “broken” IPv6 implementations in operating systems and browsers, most end users will get the content they want over IPv6 without issues.

So if there won’t be major service disruptions for the billions of Internet users worldwide, why should we care? Because the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 is the biggest single change in IP networking since the start of the Internet. And while it is a functional inevitability, the “new” Internet also presents a huge opportunity for enterprises, operators and content providers to turn the network transition from a necessity into a valuable business tool.

How we got in this situation and why we will get out

Internet Protocol 4, or “IPv4,” is one of the original Internet protocols that specifies the source and destination for data transferred over the Internet. Due to rapid Internet growth and our insatiable appetite for new devices, we’ve now used up over 93 percent of available IPv4 addresses.

The remaining 300 million unallocated IP addresses will go fast. Analysts estimate the number of Internet-connected devices could triple in the next three years from around 5 billion today to 15 billion by 2015. This increase will be driven by the ever increasing number of smartphones, TVs, portable gaming devices, tablets and laptops, as well as a variety of new smart devices such as home monitoring systems, appliances, smart meters and even automobiles.

The only long-term solution is for ISPs to upgrade their networks to IPv6, giving them more IP addresses. The good news is that they are.

Network-based solutions and applications provider Nominum surveyed 67 ISPs — which provide Internet service to over 110 million households — about their IPv6 plans. We found that 97 percent of these companies have implemented or plan to implement IPv6: 23 percent have already done so, 35 percent plan to do so this year and 39 percent plan to do so in 2013 or later. Not surprisingly, expanding the pool of IP addresses in order to grow their business was the number one business reason for making the change.

The business case for IPv6

It has been said that there is no business case for IPv6 for enterprises. This is simply not true.

Google and other forward-looking content providers are aggressively promoting IPv6. Why? What value do they see that most other enterprises don’t yet?

These are a few business cases to consider:

• Increased customer loyalty — IPv6 makes “connection-intensive” content such as Facebook or Google Maps faster and enables new applications such as peer-to-peer gaming.
• Higher network efficiency — IPv6 supports much larger packet size, which makes downloading videos and accessing cloud applications faster and less expensive.
• Cost reduction — Many large enterprises (especially ones that have made acquisitions) have multiple “islands” of identical private IP addresses connected together by expensive Network Address Translators (NATs) that can be eliminated with IPv6.
• Increased revenue — IPv6 addresses contain much more information than IPv4 addresses including the device manufacturer and Mac address, a unique identifier for each device on the network. This will make it easier for ISPs to offer their subscribers optional network-based apps like parental controls that allow families to choose what content their kids are allowed to view from any device. It will also allow content providers and their advertisers to more accurately target search results, content and advertisements to specific people and devices based on their IP address. In fact, this may be the biggest motivation for many ad-driven content-providers to adopt IPv6.

Now What?

Now is a good time for every network operator to think about how IPv6 fits into his or her future plans. Beyond looking at their need for IP addresses, companies should consider other business benefits such as the ones above. ISPs should continue interoperability testing and carefully monitor the pace of IPv4 exhaustion versus their current deployment plans.

Large enterprises should:

• Verify that all new network equipment and applications purchased are IPv6 compatible.
• Evaluate how IPv6 could help in their cloud initiatives.
• Consider conducting an IPv6 pilot of their Web site.
• Consider upgrading users to more recent operating systems such as Windows 7 or OS X Lion with better IPv6 support in advance of any deployment.

Small businesses should ask about their ISP’s plans to offer IPv6 service. Like the introduction of other major technologies, including the Internet itself, we are probably underestimating the change IPv6 will bring once broadly deployed. Once IPv6 is deployed there will surely be new applications that we haven’t yet thought of, and the Internet user’s experience will be better than ever before. Innovative companies will find ways to use this transition to improve efficiency, increase competitive differentiation and become more agile.

As Manager of Fixed Broadband Solutions, Craig oversees worldwide product marketing for Nominum.

But then again, it’s not the most aggressive move Reed Hastings could make. Note that the chart Netflix provides makes it quite difficult to really evaluate broadband provider against broadband provider, without doing a whole lot of squinting.

And even then, I can’t tell which light-blue line represents CableOne and which one represents CenturyTel.

We do know, because Netflix already told us, that Charter gets the best marks. And it appears that Clearwire, the wireless service co-owned by Sprint and some of the big cable companies, ranks dead last.

The news that most of you care about: Time Warner Cable and Comcast, the nation’s two biggest cable companies, appear to be in the top part of Netflix’s rankings. I’m asking the company for clarification for those of us with decaying vision.

And here it is, via CNET–a top-to-bottom ranking:

1. Charter
2. Comcast
3. Time Warner
4. Cox
5. Suddenlink
6. Cablevision
7. Cable One
8. Verizon
9. AT&T
10. BellSouth
11. Embarq
12. Windstream
13. Qwest
14. Century Tel
15. Frontier
16. Clearwire

You can click on the chart below to see a larger version, and you can read a technical explanation of what it measures over at the official Netflix tech blog.

Interesting PR campaign from Netflix, which is fighting with the cable guys and telcos over the cost of delivering all that streaming video to your living room: The company is going to publish a list of broadband Internet providers, ranked by performance.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings’s letter to shareholders goes on about his company’s position vs. the ISPs at great length, and I’ll reproduce it at the bottom of the post.

But you can summarize it in a sentence: If the broadband guys insist on gouging us to get video to our customers, we’re going to make a very public stink.

So tomorrow’s list is a warning shot, meant to give the ISPs a sense of where Netflix is willing to go on this one.

Hastings says the list will detail “which ISPs provide the best, most consistent high-speed Internet for streaming Netflix,” and offers a preview: Charter is tops, right now.

But if you invert Hastings’s description, you get what he really means: We’re going to tell some broadband customers that they’re getting screwed and should switch to a new provider. Heads up, Time Warner Cable, Comcast, etc.

In other news, Netflix casually tossed off another very good quarter: The company added three million subscribers in the last three months of 2010, and says that a third of its new customers are choosing its new streaming-only plan. International expansion is still on the table for 2011 and is a major focus for Netflix going forward, Hastings said.

Here’s his warning/threat to the broadband business:

Recently the FCC adopted a version of net neutrality for wired networks in the U.S., and it’s a step in the right direction. The focus is on fair-play within an ISP’s network, but does not explicitly address entry into the ISP’s network.

Delivering Internet video in scale creates costs for both Netflix and for ISPs. We think the cost sharing between Internet video suppliers and ISPs should be that we have to haul the bits to the various regional front-doors that the ISPs operate, and that they then carry the bits the last mile to the consumer who has requested them, with each side paying its own costs. This open, regional, nocharges, interchange model is something for which we are advocating. Today, some ISPs charge us, or our CDN partners, to let in the bits their customers have requested from us, and we think this is inappropriate. As long as we pay for getting the bits to the regional interchanges of the ISP’s choosing, we don’t think they should be able to use their exclusive control of their residential customers to force us to pay them to let in the data their customers’ desire. Their customers already pay them to deliver the bits on their network, and requiring us to pay even though we deliver the bits to their network is an inappropriate reflection of their last mile exclusive control of their residential customers.

Conversely, this open, regional, no-charges model should disallow content providers like Netflix and ESPN3 from shutting off certain ISPs unless those ISPs pay the content provider. Hopefully, we can get broad voluntary agreement on this open, regional, no-charges, interchange model. Some ISPs already operate by this open, regional, no-charges, interchange model, but without any commitment to maintain it going forward.

Tomorrow, we’ll publish on our blog ongoing performance statistics about ISPs collected from our 20 million subscribers detailing which ISPs provide the best, most-consistent high speed internet for streaming Netflix. We can tell you now, though, that for our subscribers streaming Netflix, Charter is the highest-performance ISP in the United States.

Recently, there was a report that at peak times Netflix subscribers in the U.S. were driving about 20% of peak downstream last-mile Internet traffic. This may or may not be accurate, but it should be noted that because we pay for the data to be delivered to regional ISP front doors, little of this traffic goes over the Internet or ISP backbone networks, thereby minimizing ISP costs, avoiding congestion, and improving performance for end-using consumers.

An independent negative issue for Netflix and other Internet video providers would be a move by wired ISPs to shift consumers to pay-per-gigabyte models instead of the current unlimited-up-to-a-large-cap approach. We hope this doesn’t happen, and will do what we can to promote the unlimited-up-to-alarge-cap model. Wired ISPs have large fixed costs of building and maintaining their last mile network of residential cable and fiber.

The ISPs’ costs, however, to deliver a marginal gigabyte, which is about an hour of viewing, from one of our regional interchange points over their last mile wired network to the consumer is less than a penny, and falling, so there is no reason that pay-per-gigabyte is economically necessary. Moreover, at $1 per gigabyte over wired networks, it would be grossly overpriced.

Associated Press:

The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority didn’t point to specific material on YouTube that prompted it to block the site, only citing “growing sacrilegious contents.” The government took action against both Facebook and YouTube after it failed to persuade the sites to remove the “derogatory material,” the regulatory body said in a statement….

The regulatory body said it has blocked more than 450 Internet links containing offensive material, but it is unclear how many of the links were blocked in the past two days. Access to the online encyclopedia site Wikipedia and the photo sharing site Flickr also was restricted Thursday.

YouTube’s comment, via email: “We have received reports that the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority has ordered Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Pakistan to block access to YouTube. We are looking into the matter and are working to ensure that the service is restored as soon as possible.”

The moves are a reaction to “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day,” which is a reaction to Muslim protests about an episode of “South Park” last month.

As the AP notes, Pakistan has temporarily blocked access to YouTube before. So have other countries, including Turkey and Thailand. And China has a permanent ban on the site, as well as on Facebook. This doesn’t mean people who live there can’t actually get to the sites–that’s what proxy servers are for–but it does mean it’s harder to do so.

Bright and early this morning at 8 am PT, BoomTown will be jacked into the matrix for an invitation-only media and analyst briefing to hear exactly what the heck Cisco (CSCO) has been yammering on about of late.

Last month, the networking giant said in a mysterioso email that it would be making “a significant announcement that will forever change the Internet and its impact on consumers, businesses and governments.”

Significant? Forever? It had better be good.

Like a jet pack from which you can communicate your Foursquare location (“I’m Mayor of the Clouds!”).

Or perhaps a chip you can implant in your head that will give you live updates of every single Apple (AAPL) iPad rumor.

Or a cogent explanation of how to extricate yourself from Google Buzz.

Or, at long last, maybe Cisco has figured out a way to fix the dropped calls crisis on the AT&T (T) mobile network–a tech solution I would nominate for a Nobel Prize if it ever came to pass.

In all seriousness, due to the speculation around what Cisco will unveil, its stock hit a 52-week high yesterday–up 92 cents, or 3.7 percent, to $26.13–and analysts were speculating on what the company will say.

The consensus: A new router to improve–please, oh Lord, please–wireless transmission of Web video and heavy data that often slow mobile and ISP networks.

It’s part of a new focus on the ever-growing but ever-slowing wireless data networks.

Google (GOOG) said recently that it was planning to build a superspeedy broadband service. In addition, the Federal Communications Commission is set to unveil its own ambitious plan to improve high-speed Internet access across the United States.

Well, it’ll be good, since the consumption of video online is growing like crazy and a constant bottleneck is likely without some relief.

Cisco has gotten deep into video of late, both in pushing networking gear and in acquiring video device maker like Pure Digital, the company behind my beloved Flip digital camera.

It is also working on innovative holographic and television-based home telepresence technologies.

So, is it too much to ask Cisco for a simple jet pack that works? I think not!

In his memo, Hustinx criticizes the secrecy of the talks from which ACTA arose and worries that as an international treaty to fight digital piracy, the agreement is in danger of running afoul of European Union privacy and data protection law requirements.

“Privacy and data protection must be taken into account from the very beginning of the negotiations, not when the schemes and procedures have been defined and agreed and it is therefore too late to find alternative, privacy compliant solutions,” Hustinx wrote.

“While intellectual property is important to society and must be protected,” he added, “it should not be placed above individuals’ fundamental rights to privacy, data protection, and other rights such as presumption of innocence, effective judicial protection and freedom of expression.”

Evidently, that’s exactly where IP has been placed in the current draft of ACTA, which seems to be designed to encourage ISPs to monitor their customers’ Internet use for illegal file-sharing and potentially, to blackball repeat offenders on their networks.

“Insofar as the current draft of ACTA includes or at least indirectly pushes for three strikes Internet disconnection policies, ACTA would profoundly restrict the fundamental rights and freedoms of European citizens, most notably the protection of personal data and privacy,” Hustinx wrote.

“The EDPS takes the view that three strikes Internet disconnection policies are not necessary to achieve the purpose of enforcing intellectual property rights,” he concluded. “The EDPS is convinced that alternative, less intrusive solutions exist or, at least, that the envisaged policies can be performed in a less intrusive manner or at a more limited scope, notably through the form of targeted ad hoc monitoring.”

Yahoo is close to selling its Zimbra unit to VMware, according to several sources close to the situation.

Sources said the deal could be announced soon, but the price for the open-source email unit was still unclear.

But the price, sources said, is much lower than what Zimbra fetched when Yahoo bought the Silicon Valley start-up in late 2007 for $350 million.

Yahoo has been trying to sell Zimbra for some months now, but it had not attracted enough substantive bidders. According to one source, Yahoo (YHOO) CEO then approached VMware (VMW) CEO Paul Maritz, whom she knows well from their years as tech execs.

Bartz ran Autodesk (ADSK) for many years and Maritz was a longtime top exec at Microsoft (MSFT).

One source noted that the reason that VMware was interested in nabbing Zimbra was that its execs want to
expand “up the stack” from the software company’s position in virtualization.

BoomTown reported in late September that Zimbra was for sale by Yahoo, which has been targeting assets for “de-acquisition” that are not central to the strategies of its new management.

Late last year when announcing its new $100 million marketing campaign, Bartz said at a media briefing: “Most of our assets are very core to the company. Those that aren’t, where it makes sense we will sell and where it makes sense we will shut down.”

Yahoo has done that with several properties, such its JumpCut video editing service.

But Zimbra, as well as its small business and jobs sites have been on the block.

The sale of Zimbra will present a possible complication, since its innovative technology has been integrated–although not as extensively as some have felt it should be–into Yahoo’s popular email offering. But the Yahoo could easily license what it needs as part of the deal with VMware.

But, sources said, Yahoo is now not interested in running Zimbra’s white-label, open-source email commercial product, which serves the university and ISP markets. There, its main rival has been Google (GOOG).

Yahoo declined to comment and emails sent to VMware have gone unanswered as yet, but source expect an announcement within two weeks.

Where? In Sweden, of course, which is where Spotify started, and which acts as a sort of test lab/best-case-scenario provider for the service.

The company has announced a two-year deal with Telia, a European telco/Internet service provider, “to work together developing Spotify’s music service for computers, mobile phones and eventually TV as well.” No details about what that TV service might be, but the companies say a mobile offering will be available for Swedes within a “few months.”

That’s interesting, since Spotify already has a mobile offering: Subscribers to its premium service can use the company’s iPhone app, which Apple (AAPL) approved last month. No description of how the new service will differ.

It’s also worth noting that this is Spotify’s second deal with a Swedish ISP. It already has a linkup with Bredbandsbolaget, owned by Telenor, a Scandinavian telco, which allows users to bundle their subscription fees with their Internet bills.

It’s also the only territory where the service has a bundling deal, and industry observers think that tie-up has a great deal to do with the company’s much talked about success there.

Everywhere else, though, Spotify remains a work in progress. It claims 5.5 million users, but as of last month only about 100,000 of them were paying the company a monthly fee, according to people familiar with the service. It is currently trying to break into the U.S. market, but has been mired in discussions with the big music labels–the same ones that have licensed the company in Europe–for months.

For more on the company’s plans, see this interview Kara Swisher conducted with co-founder Daniel Ek last month:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091008/spotify-promises-a-tv-service-in-sweden-of-course/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090921/yahoos-adds-zimbra-to-the-garage-sale-as-it-tries-to-shed-what-isnt-you/ http://allthingsd.com/20090921/yahoos-adds-zimbra-to-the-garage-sale-as-it-tries-to-shed-what-isnt-you/#comments Mon, 21 Sep 2009 11:16:05 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=18639

According to numerous sources, Yahoo has been shopping around Zimbra, the open-source email company it bought in late 2007 for $350 million.

Zimbra is only one of the many assets of Yahoo (YHOO) that are now on the block, including its personals business, its HotJobs online classified unit and many more to come, said sources.

The effort to unload Zimbra is yet another sign that the company is trying to slim down its diverse portfolio, even as it strives to redefine itself this week with a new, pricey marketing campaign that seeks to position Yahoo primarily as a consumer company.

As first reported by BoomTown last week, Yahoo will be introducing a massive branding campaign tomorrow on the second day of Advertising Week in New York.

The new focus Yahoo is aiming for with advertisers is to stress its huge size and scale with consumers. The troubled Internet giant is still one of the most trafficked sites on the Web.

And consumers will also be reminded of this. The Wall Street Journal wrote a follow-up story yesterday on the marketing effort, noting that the $100 million campaign’s tagline is “It’s You.”

Get it? The “Y” in Yahoo is the same as the one in You!

The details of the plan will be made public tomorrow at a press conference immediately after a keynote speech–titled “Yahoo’s Consumer Revolution…Round II”–that the company’s new CMO, Elisa Steele, is set to deliver at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s MIXX conference.

The goal, said several sources at Yahoo, will be to stress Yahoo’s consumer business over all others, which are supported mostly via brand advertising, leaving more extraneous ones out in the cold.

Which is why Zimbra–like a lot of other Yahoo properties–is being shopped around by its top mergers and acquisitions exec, Greg Mrva and others.

(Mrva’s new job title should be: VP of un-mergers and de-acquisitions.)

Backed by Benchmark Capital, Redpoint Ventures and Accel Partners, Zimbra was an innovative start-up whose main business was to provide clients–including Comcast (CMCSA), many ISPs and a number of colleges–with white-label email software capabilities.

Yahoo bought the company to goose that business, whose main rival has been Google (GOOG)–along with using Zimbra technology to improve its massive consumer email offering, also under siege from Google.

That integration has gone slowly, and Yahoo now has less interest in selling email products to others.

But the price Yahoo would get, many think, would be significantly lower that what it paid for Zimbra.

Nonetheless, potential buyers include Comcast and Google, as well as private-equity investors.

In addition, it is not out of the question that its former venture investors could be interested in a classic Silicon Valley buyback.

Zimbra’s founder and CEO, Satish Dharmaraj, who left Yahoo earlier this year, is now working at Redpoint.

Here is a video interview I did with Dharmaraj in early 2008, after the Yahoo deal was struck:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090921/yahoos-adds-zimbra-to-the-garage-sale-as-it-tries-to-shed-what-isnt-you/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20090805/mossbergs-mailbox-5/ http://allthingsd.com/20090805/mossbergs-mailbox-5/#comments Wed, 05 Aug 2009 20:14:02 +0000 Walt Mossberg http://mailbox.allthingsd.com/20090805/mossberg%e2%80%99s-mailbox/ Microsoft has been disclosing only minimum system requirements for Windows 7. In the past, they offered both minimum and higher “recommended” system requirements. There was a big difference between the two. Are you aware of a set of recommended system requirements for Windows 7?

Microsoft tells me they don’t plan to issue a “recommended” hardware configuration for Windows 7, because the company believes there are too many varied uses to cover, and that any such statement would be too complex. The company also claims its minimum requirements have proved “generous” enough to cover most cases during the year of widespread testing of pre-release versions.

The minimum required hardware for Windows 7 is as follows: a 1 gigahertz or faster 32-bit or 64-bit processor; 1 gigabyte of memory for the 32-bit version of Windows 7 or 2 GB for the 64-bit version; and 16 GB of available hard disk space for 32-bit or 20 GB for 64-bit. In addition, Windows 7 will require a graphics card or integrated graphics chip that is compatible with at least Microsoft’s DirectX 9 graphics system and at least the 1.0 version of its graphics driver standard called WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model).

More details are at: windows.microsoft.com/systemrequirements. I would suggest at least doubling the memory Microsoft recommends, not because I believe the company is lying, but to give yourself some headroom as your needs and interests grow.

I have used Mac laptops for the past 15 years, and am in the market for a new machine. When it comes to computers, I’m not “the sharpest knife in the drawer,” and I only use my laptop for very simple, basic tasks. What new laptop would you recommend? I do not desire or need exceptional file storage, graphic capability or any other esoteric spec.

You could get a cheap, small Windows laptop called a netbook, which would meet your simple needs. Acer, Asus, Lenovo and others make good ones. But I’m not sure that’s the best choice for you, given your self-description. If you’re a longtime Mac user, and you are used to the Mac, I’d suggest you consider sticking with it, because any netbook would require you to learn a new operating system and new software, even for simple tasks. Mac laptops are excellent machines, with a great operating system and built-in software. The only negative is cost, which you didn’t mention as a criterion. Apple doesn’t make bargain laptops. The cheapest Mac laptop, at $999, costs about triple what you could pay for a netbook.

I would like to change my Internet Service Provider (ISP), but fear doing so, since the task of informing all my email contacts of the new address seems grossly laborious. Are you aware of any utility available that will perform this task accurately?

The only one I ever tested is called TrueSwitch, and is available at trueswitch.com. It is a service that copies all your email, address books, calendar entries and bookmarks from the old ISP to the new one; notifies everyone in your address book of your new email address; and even forwards email from your old address to your new one for 30 days. It costs $20, but is free if you are switching to certain services, including Yahoo or Comcast.

One caveat: My test of TrueSwitch occurred five years ago, and, while it worked well then, I can’t be certain that it still does.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, online for free at the All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090805/mossbergs-mailbox-5/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20090519/project-playlist-picks-up-total-music-leftovers-from-universal-but-hasnt-settled-lawsuit/ http://allthingsd.com/20090519/project-playlist-picks-up-total-music-leftovers-from-universal-but-hasnt-settled-lawsuit/#comments Tue, 19 May 2009 20:47:58 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=7525 The music industry’s online forays have always inspired head-scratching, but this one is odd even by those standards: Project Playlist, the online music service currently being sued by Warner Music Group (WMG) and Universal Music Group, is bolstering its tech staff by buying the assets of… a music service owned by Universal Music Group and Sony (SNE).

But the lawsuits have yet to be resolved.

Confusing? Of course.

Here’s Project Playlist’s description of the deal, which references layoffs at the company to eliminate redundancies with the new acquisition, but doesn’t specify how many folks are being let go. Given that Total Music only employed about 30 folks at its peak and was essentially shut down last winter, it’s hard to see how many Total Music employees are coming aboard–I’m guessing fewer than a dozen, and am trying to confirm.

We recently acquired assets and employees from TotalMusic LLC, a digital catalog management and reporting system. This acquisition is an important platform that will allow us to host a streaming music service, help us with e-commerce solutions and provide a set of application programming interfaces that will be invaluable to us as we offer next generation digital music services to our users.

Today we are integrating the assets of TotalMusic into our Playlist operation. As a result we have to address some overlap in certain areas and let some employees go both from Playlist and Total Music. This is no reflection on the talent of the people we had to release, rather a responsibility we have to run a lean organization with no redundancies and clear lines of reporting.  This often happens when two companies merge, but it is never easy.

On a positive note, we are very excited about the progress we are making. With the Total Music acquisition and our recent licensing agreements with Sony ATV and EMI Publishing, we are developing new features and services everyday that will form an even deeper bond with our 45 million loyal users and create new revenue opportunities for our company as well as our music content partners. More to come, watch this Space!!

Total Music, which Universal started in the fall of 2007 and shut down this February after joining up with Sony along the way, was supposed to be a subscription music service that got bundled in with devices or with ISPs/cable guys/telcos, etc. Given that it never, to my understanding, streamed a single song or collected a penny in revenue, it’s interesting to see that Project Playlist thinks there’s something there worth buying.

The bigger picture: It’s hard to see how this company can move forward until new CEO John Sykes, who replaced Owen Van Natta when he decamped to run MySpace for News Corp. (NWS), can clear up lawsuits with Universal and Warner and then get Facebook and MySpace to let it back onto their respective sites. The social services were crucial to Playlist since they generated the majority of its visitors, but they cut them off last fall, presumably under pressure from the labels.

Given that Van Natta is now running MySpace and that Playlist was at least able to negotiate an asset purchase from Universal, perhaps there’s a shot at getting all of that accomplished. Then the service could concentrate on the even tougher task of trying to make money in digital music.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090519/project-playlist-picks-up-total-music-leftovers-from-universal-but-hasnt-settled-lawsuit/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090518/online-ad-snoop-nebuad-gives-up-the-ghost-whos-next/ http://allthingsd.com/20090518/online-ad-snoop-nebuad-gives-up-the-ghost-whos-next/#comments Mon, 18 May 2009 21:47:27 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=7485 Talk to online ad folks for any amount of time and you’ll walk away thinking that behavioral targeting–whereby marketers track and chase Web surfers based on which sites they visit and what they do there–is both old hat and the wave of the future. But I’m still convinced that there’s a very big gap between the way the ad industry views this stuff and the way politicians and average Americans do.

And I think that gap is going to trip up a lot of big players in the years to come.

For a reminder, head on over to NebuAd’s Web site, which no longer works. That’s because the targeting firm, which once employed 60 people, closed up shop on Friday, according to MediaPost.

NebuAd was supposed to work with various Internet service providers and track Web surfing behavior of the ISPs’ customers, then sell that data back to the ISPs. That plan blew up last summer when the company became the subject of congressional hearings, and by last fall just about all of its former clients had run screaming from the company.

The standard response here from ad folks is that NebuAd was a bad apple that practiced a particularly noxious version of targeting. And that the press, lawmakers and the general public don’t really understand how targeting works.

And all of that may be true! But even if it is just a perception problem and the online ad business has only the best intentions when it comes to collecting and using personal Web data, it’s a perception problem that the industry has done a lousy job of fighting.

So said my lunch date today, who’s a veteran of several big online publishing companies, and who tells me that the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the industry’s trade group, is petrified of more NebuAds because they will likely lead to regulation.

Recall that Rick Boucher, a conservative Democratic congressman from Virginia, has already promised to regulate behavioral targeting at the likes of Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO) and Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL. If the thought of that sort of thing is so distasteful to the ad guys, they’re going to have to start selling much more persuasively than they’re doing right now.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090518/online-ad-snoop-nebuad-gives-up-the-ghost-whos-next/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090402/suns-big-blue-light-special-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20090402/suns-big-blue-light-special-2/#comments Thu, 02 Apr 2009 21:26:06 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=15935

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090402/suns-big-blue-light-special-2/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090402/suns-big-blue-light-special/ http://allthingsd.com/20090402/suns-big-blue-light-special/#comments Thu, 02 Apr 2009 21:26:06 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=15935

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090402/suns-big-blue-light-special/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090402/swedish-file-sharers-mull-vpn-virtual-pirate-network/ http://allthingsd.com/20090402/swedish-file-sharers-mull-vpn-virtual-pirate-network/#comments Thu, 02 Apr 2009 16:54:30 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=15894 If Sweden’s Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive was crafted to scare the hell out of the country’s Internet population, it seems to have had the desired affect. Swedish Internet traffic dropped by a third on Wednesday after the law, which allows copyright holders to force ISPs to divulge the IP addresses of computers sharing copyrighted material, was implemented and five audio book publishers rushed immediately to use it.

“The majority of all internet traffic is file sharing, which is why nothing other than the new IPRED law can explain this major drop in traffic,” Anti-piracy Agency lawyer Henrik Pontén told Metro. “This sends a very strong signal that the legislation works.” Christian Engstrom, vice chairman of the Pirate Party, a group seeking copyright law reform, agreed, but said the decline is likely to be only temporary. Once the public realizes that the odds of being busted for file-sharing are low, Internet traffic will return to normal levels again. “Today, there is a very drastic reduction in internet traffic,” Engstrom told The BBC. “But experience from other countries suggests that while file-sharing drops on the day a law is passed, it starts climbing again. One of the reasons is that it takes people a few weeks to figure out how to change their security settings so that can share files anonymously. We estimate there are two million file-sharing [computers] in Sweden, so even if they prosecuted a 1,000 people to make an example of them, for an individual user it is still a very small risk.”

[Image credit: Chart courtesy Royal Pingdom]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090402/swedish-file-sharers-mull-vpn-virtual-pirate-network/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090326/new-zealand-reconsiders-three-strikes-rule-on-internet-use/ http://allthingsd.com/20090326/new-zealand-reconsiders-three-strikes-rule-on-internet-use/#comments Thu, 26 Mar 2009 17:25:47 +0000 Marisa Taylor http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=9878 New Zealand agreed this week to reconsider a controversial law that cut off Internet access to people accused of copyright violations.

The country’s parliament passed Section 92a of the Copyright (New Technologies) Amendment Act in 2008, also known as the “three-strikes” rule, which would have come into play in February 2009. If an Internet user was even accused of file-sharing or otherwise violating copyright laws, his or her Internet-service provider would cut off service.

The implementation of the amendment was pushed back to March 27 so that ISPs could agree on a code of conduct, but the rallying cry from Internet free-speech organizations such as the Creative Freedom Foundation pushed the Parliament to rethink its strategy.

How could a democratic government consider cutting off Internet access for people who haven’t been convicted of a copyright violation? Danny O’Brien, the international outreach coordinator at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that New Zealand changed its copyright law to be in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the U.S., but then chose to interpret the language differently than the U.S.

Read the rest of this post

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090326/new-zealand-reconsiders-three-strikes-rule-on-internet-use/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090225/transferring-data-to-an-iphone/ http://allthingsd.com/20090225/transferring-data-to-an-iphone/#comments Thu, 26 Feb 2009 01:00:02 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://mailbox.allthingsd.com/20090225/transferring-data-to-an-iphone/ Here are a few questions I’ve received recently from people like you, and my answers. I have edited and restated the questions a bit, for readability.

---

I am thinking about buying an iPhone to replace my Palm Treo. However, I have an extensive contact list and calendar within my Palm software. How would I transfer them to the iPhone?

There are a number of cumbersome methods, but a simple approach would be to sync the Treo to Microsoft Outlook, which can then later be synced to the iPhone.

You say Vista’s graphical interface works best with a separate, or “discrete,” graphics card that has its own memory. You add that some “integrated” graphics systems work fine, too, but they claim some of your main memory. So, if I get an extra 1 GB of main memory, will that compensate for not getting a dedicated video card?

Buying extra memory can help overall performance on systems with minimal standard memory and integrated graphics, which do drain memory. So I’m all for that. But the superiority of discrete graphics cards for Vista goes beyond the fact that they have their own memory. In general, they are more capable than integrated graphics at doing the actual graphics processing. So adding more memory to a system with integrated graphics doesn’t give it all the ability of one with a discrete card.

Is there any program or easy way of transferring email addresses when you change your ISP? Everybody I have talked to says it is a mess.

Although I haven’t tested it in some years, a service called TrueSwitch, at trueswitch.com, is in business to do exactly that. It copies over your address book, and even notifies your contacts of your changed email address, if you wish. When I did test it, it worked fine.

• You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, online free of charge at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090225/transferring-data-to-an-iphone/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20090220/when-pdfs-attack/ http://allthingsd.com/20090220/when-pdfs-attack/#comments Fri, 20 Feb 2009 19:00:01 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=13291

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090220/when-pdfs-attack/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090220/u2-the-unforgettable-embarassment/ http://allthingsd.com/20090220/u2-the-unforgettable-embarassment/#comments Fri, 20 Feb 2009 15:35:19 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=13246 U2 manager Paul McGuinness must be beside himself. Despite the band’s best efforts to prevent its new album, “No Line on the Horizon,” from appearing prematurely on the Internet, copies are being distributed there a week prior to its scheduled release.

It’s not the fault of the ISPs, never mind that they are, according to McGuinness, “destroying the recorded music industry” by failing to tackle piracy. Nor is it the fault of Apple (AAPL) and the makers of other digital media players who are wrongly profiting from their “burglary kits.” Nor can it be blamed solely on Silicon Valley and its “entrepreneurial, hippie values,” which in McGuinness’s opinion have bred a deep disregard for the true value of music.

No, it appears there’s no one to blame for this particular cock-up but Universal Music, which mistakenly put the album up for sale earlier this week at getmusic.com.au. It was only available there for a brief period, but there was time enough for fans to buy it legally. Not surprisingly, copies of the record began showing up on torrent indexes a short while later.

An embarrassing turn of events for a band that had gone to extraordinary lengths to prevent exactly this situation from happening. Still, as TechDirt’s Mike Masnick notes, there’s a lesson to be learned here. “At some point, folks in the music industry are going to (finally) recognize a rather simple fact: it just takes one digital copy of a song/movie/whatever to get out there, and it’s everywhere. You can’t stop it. No matter how annoying it is. No matter what laws it violates. It will happen.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090220/u2-the-unforgettable-embarassment/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20081215/googles-net-neutrality-nightmare/ http://allthingsd.com/20081215/googles-net-neutrality-nightmare/#comments Mon, 15 Dec 2008 16:02:52 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=9605 Ironic, isn’t it, that Google, one of Net neutrality’s staunchest advocates, has been approaching major cable and phone companies with a proposal that appears to violate the very tenets of that principle? How could a company that has argued tirelessly that all Internet traffic should be treated equally suddenly reverse course and seek preferential treatment for its own traffic?

How could a company whose Chief Internet Evangelist, Vint Cerf, once told the Senate Commerce Committee that allowing “broadband carriers to control what people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the principles that have made the Internet such a success,” approach those carriers with a proposal that would seemingly do just that?

There’s a very simple answer to that question: Google is not doing that, and reports suggesting that is are misguided. Yes, Google (GOOG) “has approached major cable and phone companies” with a plan to “place Google servers directly within the network of the service providers.” Yes, this plan would improve content delivery speeds.

And, no, doing so does not violate the concept of network neutrality. If it did, companies like Akamai and Limelight, which also have servers hosted at broadband provider facilities, would long ago have been tarred as anti-Net neutrality villains. Colocating caching servers is a common practice that improves bandwidth usage by bringing data closer to the end user. And while it will certainly make Google’s services faster and more responsive, it won’t do so at the expense of non-Google services. That would be a violation of Net neutrality.

“Some critics have questioned whether improving Web performance through edge caching–temporary storage of frequently accessed data on servers that are located close to end users–violates the concept of network neutrality,” Richard Whitt, Google’s Washington telecom and media counsel explains. “As I said last summer, this myth–which unfortunately underlies a confused story in Monday’s Wall Street Journal–is based on a misunderstanding of the way in which the open Internet works…. All of Google’s colocation agreements with ISPs–which we’ve done through projects called OpenEdge and Google Global Cache–are non-exclusive, meaning any other entity could employ similar arrangements. Also, none of them require (or encourage) that Google traffic be treated with higher priority than other traffic.”

So Google is not negotiating exclusive deals for privileged access. It is not proposing “a fast lane for its own content.” It is not seeking to prioritize its traffic in violation of the Net neutrality principles it espouses. Frankly, this story has little to do with Net neutrality at all. “Network neutrality is about the routing of packets,” Tech Liberation Front’s Tim Lee explained earlier this year when Akamai was accused of violating Net neutrality. “A network is neutral if it faithfully transmits information from one end of the network to the other and doesn’t discriminate among packets based on their contents. Neutrality is, in other words, about the behavior of the routers that move packets around the network. It has nothing to do with the behavior of servers at the edges of the network because they don’t route anyone’s packets.”

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