Numerous stakeholders, watchdogs, and industry analysts have already commented on yesterday’s public disagreement between Comcast and Level 3 Communications. It’s a fascinating dispute regarding the bizarre world of “peering” agreements.

On the ride to school today, I was disappointed to hear Marketplace cover the story without even mentioning “net neutrality” or the “open internet”.

Below is the letter to the editor I sent this afternoon. Please feel free to comment, cannibalize, or re-send as your own. We need news organizations to do a better job accurately covering issues of internet freedom.

Dear Marketplace,

You missed an opportunity to cover the bigger implications of Level 3′s public complaint against Comcast this morning. Beyond immediate concerns over streaming video, the outcome of this dispute may fundamentally change the open nature of the internet. Users depend on peering agreements among countless intermediary ISPs when they access web services. We may never know the extent to which Level 3 traffic is overwhelming Comcast’s network but their unavoidable conflict of interest demonstrates a profound inability to self-regulate.

Members of Students for Free Culture include tomorrow’s internet users, developers, thinkers, and entrepreneurs. We depend on Marketplace for its critical coverage of the tech industry. Rather than focus on fees for Netflix subscribers, this story sorely needed discussion of the FCC’s struggle with “net neutrality” and Comcast’s pending acquisition of NBC/Universal.

Looking forward to further coverage as the negotiations develop!

Sincerely,

Kevin Driscoll
Students for Free Culture
University of Southern California

Want further reading? Here are some tabs:

• Level 3 press release regarding new fees from Comcast
• Comcast responds on its blog, customers sound off in the comments
• GigaOM Comcast/Level 3 timeline
• Save the Internet lists 7 recent examples of Comcast’s bad behavior
• Public Knowledge calls this a “third strike” against Comcast
• Stop Big Media describes this as Comcast being “caught red-handed”

On the White House blog Tom Kalil and Aneesh Chopra are drawing attention to the role that students have in creating innovative online services that drive America forward. Noting the technologies and services as broad as Mosaic and Google that have come from students, they propose:

“an initiative that would cultivate, with student involvement, such a wave of innovation. Although it’s impossible to predict what the next generation of applications will be, universities, companies, and students could work together under such an initiative, which would serve as a sort of “Petri dish” where new ideas could incubate and grow.”

In our net neutrality FCC filing, the Board of SFC made similar points:

Network neutrality is also important to the United States as it struggles to emerge from the current recession and maintain its position as one of the world’s most innovative economies. The centrality of the Internet to students goes beyond the use of Twitter or MySpace. It even goes beyond the application of technology to learning and scholarship. Students can, and do, play an exciting role in American entrepreneurship. One need look no further than the enormously successful examples of Google and Facebook – innovative companies that came from the creativity and persistence of students who had access to a high-quality, open Internet. A transparent and non-discriminatory network removes barriers to entrepreneurs, be they students or otherwise.

Kalil and Chopra encourage students and others to write to broadband@ostp.gov to suggest ideas for how the broadband grant money should be spent.

What are your ideas for promoting student innovation?

ARPAnet Interface message processor (IMP), BBN, 1967

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is considering adopting national rules to protect the open Internet. On January 13, the FCC is hosting a public workshop at MIT that will include some of the founders of the Internet alongside entrepreneurs, technologists, and policymakers (see agenda and panelist bios below).

On one hand, the workshop is an opportunity for community members to hear experts discuss the features of the Open Internet that are important to preserve.

But much more crucially, this workshop is an opportunity to enter your questions, thoughts, concerns, and suggestions into the public record. The FCC will use this information in its decision-making process. Your contributions to this workshop will have have a significant impact on the course of action that the FCC ultimately takes.

Think about it: how does the Internet’s openness affects your ability to work, study, create, and communicate? On what network features do you rely? What have you done with it? What do you hope to do in the future?

There is no doubt that large corporations (like the newly-merged Comcast/NBC Universal) have organized lobbyists to register their interests. Free culture is not their priority.

Who will lobby on behalf of the student, the fan, the hacker, the gamer, and the entrepreneur?

The FCC needs to hear your voice.

Innovation, Investment, and the Open Internet

• January 13th, 2010
• 4:30 pm EST
• MIT Media Lab, Bartos Theater
• Streaming: http://www.openinternet.gov/workshops
• Agenda/ bios: http://wiki.freeculture.org/FCC_Workshop_January_13

If you are local to Boston, please come in person. If you can’t make it at 4:30, it is OK to come late. Simply showing up is a powerful demonstration of the concern that exists among everyday internet users.

As you undoubtedly know, college campuses are, in many ways, ground zero for the battles being waged for the future of intellectual property. The thousands of Americans that have been sued by the entertainment industry in the past few years include countless students who were accused of illegally downloading music.

Although the lawsuits may have stopped, the entertainment industry lobbyists are still set on using any means necessary to stop music “piracy” – oftentimes regardless of the unintended consequences. One of those efforts was included in a 2008 law entitled the Higher Education Opportunity Act which requires institutions of higher learning to take a number of steps to protect the business models of the entertainment industry.

Earlier this week, EDUCAUSE hosted a very informative webcast about how to comply with these P2P provisions. What follows is a summary and some thoughts on what students can do at their school.

The P2P Provisions

Gregory Jackson of EDUCAUSE outlined the requirements of the law. Essentially there are:

1. An annual disclosure to students that copyright infringement subjects them to civil and criminal liabilities, a summary of the Federal penalties for copyright infringement, and a description of the school’s policies for copyright infringement.
2. The development of plans to effectively combat unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials, including educating the community, procedures for handling transgressions, and employing at least one technological deterrents (such as bandwidth shaping, traffic monitoring, vigorously responding to DMCA notices, and 3rd party commercial products).
3. Offer, to the extent practical, legal alternatives to P2P downloading, as determined by the institution.

There are some good pieces: the law is explicit in the individual autonomy and authority of schools in deciding the particularities of their plan (though it is obviously mandatory to comply); furthermore, none of these requirements should “unduly interfere” with the educational and research use of the network.

The Role of Students

Although this law, which in many ways turns our schools into private copyright cops for the entertainment industry, was largely crafted without the input of one of the largest constituencies – students – there is still room for us to be involved.

Schools have until July of next year to finalize their plans for compliance. There is a wide latitude for many of the provisions, oftentimes ranging from minimally objective to overtly troublesome. Administrators who may feel pressure to over-comply need to be reminded of the interest of their students in maintaining an open and enabling network.

Oftentimes, school policy-makers are happy to hear from students. At the University of Michigan, their innovative BAYU system (which alerts students they are uploading) was crafted with support of the student government and is very popular. This is a promising procedural and product model for other schools to examine.

Obviously, there are many worrisome parts of this law – privacy concerns due to network monitoring, stiffing of speech through the overuse of DMCA take-downs, and the high costs of compliance, to name three. Therefore, it is especially important that student voices are heard on this topic.

Reach out to the administrators and technologists on campus – they’re only an email away – offering your help and reminding them how important it is to get these questions correct.

[If you are especially interested in university network policy, be sure to get involved with the Open University Campaign's effort to promote open networks at schools around the world.]

As you undoubtedly know, President Obama has led an unprecedented era of openness in American governance, and although the record is mixed, there is much reason for hope. One of the more interesting examples of participatory government that has emerged has been the crowdsourcing of citizen input during the transistion period where Americans could submit feedback for the newly elected administration and others could vote for their favorites.

Now, the Office of Public Enagagement has published a PDF of the top suggestions (also available online). It provides a zeitgeist of sorts for the American public, and, excitingly, many of the topics are related to our work at Students for Free Culture. 

A couple commenters desired increased access to knowledge (A2K):

Libraries of all types need our support, 10810 points

“The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of thegreatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from allour history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to thecollective knowledge of the human species. I think the health of our civilization, the depth ofour awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all betested by how well we support our libraries.” ~Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Carl said it best. Please continue and expand upon the support provided to libraries of all types.

– NJ Busch

From the good folks at Public Knowledge:

Hollywood’s lobbyists are running all over the Hill to sneak in a copyright filtering provision into the stimulus package. The amendment allow ISPs to “deter” child pornography and copyright infringement through network management techniques. The amendment is very, very controversial for a couple of reasons:

1. First, infringement can’t be found through “network management” techniques. There are legal uses for copyrighted works even without permission of the owner.
2. Second, it would require Internet companies to examine every bit of information everyone puts on the Web in order to find those allegedly infringing works, without a hint of probable cause. That would be a massive invasion of privacy, done at the request of one industry, violating the rights of everyone who is online.

You don’t need me to explain how bad this is. What we need is for everyone to contact Congress and voice your dissent. Head over to Public Knowledge and help now!

Well, crap, guys. How did we let this one slip by?

HR 4137, the College Opportunity and Affordability Act just passed Congress and is expected to be signed into law very soon.

Inside the bill is the Campus-Based Digital Theft Prevention act, a provision which requires colleges to subscribe to RIAA-approved services like the new Napster and to install software on the network which monitors and interrupt transfers which they decide they don’t like. This is a mandate for a non-neutral internet on college campuses. Students are being targeted by a cooperation between the government and the intellectual property industry to spy on us, filter our internet and the resources of our schools by spending our tuition costs on their DRM’d service. And unfortunately, we let this slip under the radar.

For the full story about the passing is available on Ars Technica, who have done a better write up than I could do. I also wrote about this on my personal site just over one year ago. It seems the bill has been watered down slightly from the original amendment, but the effect is the same.

But where was the opposition from Free Culture? I’m not trying to blame anyone but myself, but I think that we must develop a way to constantly monitor and publicly oppose this type of legislation. Otherwise, what is the point of our organization if we continue to allow things like this to happen?! We’re going to be an absolute laughing stock if we have silly events which celebrate the death of DRM when we don’t make a sound about federal legislation which requires all of our schools to purchase products which use it. There was only one blog post about the bill, 8 months ago. Not a peep since then, no page on the front page about pending legislation. So I can’t say that we missed this entirely, but a single blog post doesn’t affect anything outside of our own community, which is where the problem lies. It isn’t working because it isn’t enough.

So what are we supposed to do in the meantime?

First, I think we should develop a page (perhaps on the wiki?) and a squad to monitor the progress of legislation which could be a threat to us.

Second, we should be supporting Lawrence Lessig’s Change-Congress Movement which will stop corporations from having so much influence over Congressmen. Particularly Democratic congressmen from California.

Third, I would personally recommend that any student should be using secure protocols for all of their data transfers to prevent their being snooped on and tampered with. One such upcoming protocol is Anomos, a secure and anonymous multi-peer-to-peer file distribution platform. I’m a lead developer on this project and I will write a post on this blog about it once our alpha release candidate is announced.

Does anybody else have any ideas about steps we can take from things like this going unnoticed again? Let’s gets some discussion going in the comments.

Rich, Boston University Free Culture

NBC recently filed comments for the FCC recommending that ISPs be required to screen all the traffic passing over their network for copyright infringement. The social and economic costs of such a system would be enormous, and that’s on top of the concerns of technical feasibility!

Last week, FreeCulture.org signed a response statement along with Consumer Federation of America, EDUCAUSE, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Electronic Privacy Information Center, Free Press, Knowledge Ecology International, Media Access Project, New America Foundation, Public Knowledge, and U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

NBC Universal (“NBC”) has asked the Commission to require that broadband providers “use readily available means to prevent the use of their broadband networks to transfer pirated content.” While we agree that there are appropriate ways to discourage copyright infringement on the Internet, NBC’s call to require that broadband providers use “bandwidth management tools” to effect this end is misguided. Any attempt to use this technology to control what may be done on the Internet will have serious unintended consequences. Particularly, these technologies limit First Amendment freedoms, stifle innovation, threaten personal privacy, and do little to address the underlying problem. Additionally, NBC’s proposal invites the FCC to exceed its jurisdiction.

You can read the full comments on Public Knowledge’s site or as a PDF.

Also check out NBC‘s original comments (PDF link) for a good laugh, and Public Knowledge’s coverage and commentary.