Liberty's Blog

Tolls on The Information Highway

If the broadband carriers have their way, they will be charging extra for premium access to the the Internet for priority traffic.

Naturally, consumer advocates and the Web companies that would be paying the toll are calling it highway robbery.

"Allowing broadband carriers to control what people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the principles that have made the Internet such a success," Vinton Cerf told a Senate committee recently. Cerf, who played a key role in building the Internet, is now the "Chief Internet Evangelist" at Google Inc.

On the Internet, information is carried in "packets," small chunks of data. An e-mail might be divided into several packets and travel different routes to the destination, much like cars have multiple ways of getting somewhere. The packets may arrive out of order, a few even late, but data can be reassembled to reconstitute the e-mail.

This design grew out of the military's desire for a network that was both simple and reliable. And as the Internet became more widely available, this equal treatment of traffic was part of what made it attractive; individuals, startups and big corporations were on the same footing.

Now, however, the Internet is being used for things the engineers of the 1960s and 70s couldn't have envisioned, like video, telephone calls and Internet games.

It doesn't matter if an e-mail gets where it's going half a second late, but a half-second's delay in a phone call is annoying, and a half-second's delay in a fast-moving game can mean a missed shot.

Thus, the telecommunications companies want to be able to provide "tiered service," guaranteeing that, for a price, some packets will get to their destination on time.

The problem is that while priority traffic gets on the super highway, the rest of the traffic gets assigned tho gravel two laner. This amounts to scheme where the providers make more money, and the every day user gets worse service. It doesnt sound like progress to me.

Meanwhile it looks like AOL's proposal to provide premium spam service is in trouble. The hairbrained scheme is under attack from a variety of fronts.
On Tuesday, an unlikely coalition of more than 50 groups, representing some 15 million people, launched a campaign to fight AOL's new pay-to-send email scheme.

In addition to Free Press and Electronic Frontier Foundation, coalition members include Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, MoveOn.org, Gun Owners of America, the Association of Cancer Online Resources, the Humane Society, the AFL-CIO, RightMarch and others.

Cumulatively, these groups count more than 3 million AOL subscribers as members, or in excess of 15 percent of AOL's customer base.

They just don't get it. While AOL continues to cut services and charge outragous prices the figure out even more ways to alienate their customer base.

AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham presents his company's new regime as a boon to end-users, stating -- misleadingly -- that a certification system will protect user inboxes from spam. This isn't true. AOL subscribers will receive certified email in addition to the regular traffic that clutters most inboxes.

"We continue to provide exceptional service to all email senders who conform to our antispam guidelines," Graham writes in a rebuttal to our campaign. "In fact, CertifiedEmail serves as a valuable, new standard and threshold for the delivery of legitimate email that will serve as a guidepost for other email senders to follow and adhere to."

Nice try, Nicholas. AOL hasn't solved the spam problem at all; they've merely created a second tier for delivery, one favoring those who can afford to pay AOL's express rate. The other tier -- which has been increasingly compromised by AOL's inability to distinguish honest email from spam -- will remain in place. It may get worse, even, as AOL tries to "incentivise" more users to move from the free lane to their toll road.

posted by Liberty @ 8:04 PM