Net Neutrality

Ed Markey (D-MA) and Anna Eshoo (D-CA) last week introduced HR 3458, The Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009 (PDF). This bill is much better than past bills in that it doesn’t contain any prohibition on classes of service or preferential treatment of packets based on protocol or application, as opposed to based on source, destination, or owner. It still, however, gives the FCC new powers to regulate the Internet and puts the onus of developing specific regulations on the FCC. And it looks like the language will give the FCC the power to regulate Apple’s iTunes store with respect to iPhone Internet-related applications, as well as to force the opening up of wireless walled gardens. The bill leaves open to the FCC the ability to treat “private transmission capacity services” as exempt from the requirements of the bill, so long as they don’t impact Internet capacity for the end user. It also provides disclosure requirements for ISPs to report on any methods they use for network and capacity management that may impact Internet traffic. ...

Adam Frucci at Gizmodo writes: So, are you enjoying the snappy, clean performance of Google Chrome since downloading yesterday? If so, you might want to take a closer peek at the end user license agreement you didn’t pay any attention to when downloading and installing it. Because according to what you agreed to, Google owns everything you publish and create while using Chrome. Ah-whaaa?This is false. The EULA doesn’t transfer ownership of anything. The provision that has everyone upset is the rather broadly worded provision 11.1: 11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.Note that the very first sentence says that you retain all intellectual property rights. This gives Google the rights to do the things it already does–let other people play YouTube videos you upload, syndicate your Blogger content, store cached versions of your web pages, allow people to see versions of your web pages translated into other languages, display thumbnails of images on your web pages in Google Images search, and so forth. The last sentence appears to limit it solely for the purpose “to display, distribute and promote the Services” and not allow them to, say, use your content in order to compete with you, undermine your intellectual property rights, etc. An earlier provision in the EULA also makes this explicit: 9.4 Other than the limited license set forth in Section 11, Google acknowledges and agrees that it obtains no right, title or interest from you (or your licensors) under these Terms in or to any Content that you submit, post, transmit or display on, or through, the Services, including any intellectual property rights which subsist in that Content (whether those rights happen to be registered or not, and wherever in the world those rights may exist). Unless you have agreed otherwise in writing with Google, you agree that you are responsible for protecting and enforcing those rights and that Google has no obligation to do so on your behalf.So even if 11.1 is a bit too broad, there’s this provision to fall back on if you feel your intellectual property rights are being infringed. Some commenters at Gizmodo said that they didn’t agree with this provision and therefore have uninstalled the software, but that’s not sufficient to terminate this agreement. Terminating the agreement requires you to give notice to Google in writing and close all of your accounts with them: 13.2 If you want to terminate your legal agreement with Google, you may do so by (a) notifying Google at any time and (b) closing your accounts for all of the Services which you use, where Google has made this option available to you. Your notice should be sent, in writing, to Google’s address which is set out at the beginning of these Terms.One thing that is clear from these terms is that Google definitely wants to interpose itself between user and content in a manner similar to what Microsoft has done for years with Windows, and in a much stickier way than telecom providers are between user and content. If you have network neutrality concerns about telecom providers or had antitrust concerns about Microsoft’s bundling of the Internet Explorer web browser with Windows, you should probably have similar concerns about Google, given the way use of its browser is bundled with an EULA covering all of its services. Shouldn’t I be able to discontinue this EULA by getting rid of the browser, and not by terminating all of my accounts with Google? Will there be a lawsuit about unbundling the Google Chrome browser from the rest of its services? UPDATE: Ars Technica reports that Google says this was an error and they will be correcting the license, which was borrowed from other Google services, apparently without careful review. It also notes that since Chrome is distributed under an open license, users can download the source code and compile it themselves without being bound by the agreement. The major flaw in the 11.1 language is that it gives Google the right to publish content you merely “display” in the browser, even if it’s private content on a local server or restricted content from a secured website. That clearly wasn’t their intent, but that’s an implication of how it was written. ...

There’s a telecom panel at the Netroots Nation conference today on the subject of “Big Telecom: An Emerging Threat to Our Democracy?” The implied answer is yes, and it appears that every participant on the panel will be making that case. Here’s the description of the panel: Massive telecom companies control virtually all of our voice and internet communications these days—and new evidence shows a near-total lack of commitment to our democracy. AT&T has proposed filtering all content traveling on its network. Verizon tried initially to block NARAL’s pro-choice text messages. Most telecom companies are fighting net neutrality. Can democracy survive an assault by those who control the tubes?The panel members don’t include anyone with any experience managing or operating an actual telecom network, but instead includes two people who have repeatedly demonstrated not only an ignorance of telecom law, technology, and policy, but who have misrepresented facts and failed to engage with the arguments of their critics, Matt Stoller and Timothy Karr (see posts on this blog in the “net neutrality” category). The closest person to a representative of a telecom is Michael Kieschnick of Working Assets, a company that is a reseller of long distance and wireless service on Sprint’s network. I agree with many of their positions–I don’t think ISPs should be allowed to block websites on the basis of disagreement with content. I think ISPs should be transparent about their network management processes and filtering. Where I disagree with them is that they advocate that the FCC step in to regulate the Internet in a way that it has never had authority to do so before, and demand that network operators not be allowed to implement classes of service with different rates of charges, or even usage caps. Art Brodsky expresses the point which has also been made by Robb Topolsky of Public Knowledge, Timothy Karr of Free Press, and Matt Stoller: In the name of “network management,” some companies want to throttle down the use of legal applications, like BitTorrent which may, coincidentally, provide competition in entertainment programming. They want to impose usage caps across the board on all customers which would stifle innovation and curb the use of video (there’s that anti-competitive meme again) without actually solving the problem of the so-called “bandwidth hogs.” The way caps are being discussed now, they would only lead to higher prices and less usage for an industry that already charges more for less than most broadband providers around the world. Parts of our broadband industry may be the only sector in the world that wants to cut down the amount of its product it wants customers to use.Brodsky’s last sentence is clearly false–broadband is like a fixed-price all-you-can-eat buffet. All businesses want to maximize their profits by maximizing revenue and minimizing costs. When bandwidth is sold at a fixed cost in unlimited amounts, where a small number of users are consuming the majority of the service, it’s in the business’s interest to restrict those users or charge them more for what they consume in order to satisfy the rest in a cost-effective manner. The options are few–you can either restrict the “bandwidth hogs” in some way, charge them more so that they pay for what they use, or raise the price for everyone. These guys seem to advocate the latter approach, while I’m in favor of allowing all the options to be used in a competitive market. Where I disagree with Comcast’s approach in issuing RST packets to block BitTorrent traffic is not that they did it, but that they were not transparent about what they were doing (and apparently didn’t quite get it quite right–it should not have completely broken BitTorrent, but only slowed it down). Brodsky’s suggestion that Comcast has an interest in blocking BitTorrent because it provides competition in the entertainment space is absurd–they have an interest in blocking it because it’s a very popular application which itself exploits Internet protocols in a way not anticipated by the designers in order to consume more bandwidth, getting around the congestion controls in TCP/IP by using multiple TCP streams. If BitTorrent traffic wasn’t filling up the majority of Comcast’s bandwidth, they’d have no interest in it, except when the MPAA and RIAA issue them subpoenas about their users infringing copyrights. If the government prohibits the use of differential classes of service (which is already heavily used by private companies to give priority to applications within their enterprise which have requirements for low latency and jitter, such as real-time streaming audio and video, including Voice over IP) and requires that congestion be dealt with by building out infrastructure sufficiently that there will never be congestion no matter how many users max out their connectivity with BitTorrent, that will reduce competition by culling smaller companies out of the picture and making market entry more difficult. In any environment where a provider’s upstream capacity is less than the sum of the capacity to every customer (and that’s everywhere, today, and always has been), all-you-can-eat bandwidth is like a commons. The more that is available, the more the heavy users will consume, to the detriment of each other and the light users. Without setting caps and having tiered pricing or implementing technology that prioritizes packets and drops from the heavy users and from less-realtime-sensitive applications first (like BitTorrent), there are no incentives against consuming everything that is available. I also think it’s a huge mistake to have the FCC start regulating the Internet. FCC chairman Kevin Martin would no doubt love to place indecency standards and filtering requirements on Internet content. Once you open the door to FCC regulation of the Internet, that becomes more likely. And the FCC has been completely ineffectual at dealing with existing abuses like fraudulent telemarketing, illegal prerecord calls to residences and cell phones, caller ID spoofing, etc., already covered by statute and regulation. I’d rather see clear statutes that include private rights of action than entrust control of the Internet to the FCC. The FCC is a slow-moving bureaucracy, and AT&T and Verizon have the deepest pockets, the most lawyers, and the most personnel who have shuffled back and forth between government (including the NSA) and industry. That gives AT&T and Verizon the tactical advantage, and leads to less competition rather than more. Which brings me to the warrantless wiretapping and telecom immunity issues, which Cindy Cohn of the EFF no doubt addressed on the Netroots Nation panel. I suspect I have little if any disagreement with her. I’ve long been a supporter of the EFF, as are many people involved in the management of ISPs. I strongly oppose telecom immunity for warrantless wiretapping, a complete abdication of Congress’ responsibility to support the U.S. Constitution. But this shows the power of AT&T and Verizon. Not only did they get what they wanted, but the very infrastructure which was built to do this massive interception of traffic for the NSA and for law enforcement interception under the CALEA laws was built for them with assistance from government funds. All telecoms have to be compliant with CALEA (now including VoIP and broadband Internet providers), but the big incumbents who were most capable of affording it on their own got it at the lowest costs, while their competition was required to build it out at their own expense even if it never gets used. But there are legitimate uses for deep packet inspection, for understanding the nature of the traffic on a network for management purposes, including tracking down security and abuse issues. Since it is in the hands of the end user to use encryption to protect sensitive content, I think use of DPI by network providers is reasonable for the purposes of providing better service in the same way that it’s reasonable for a voice provider to intercept traffic for quality measurement purposes. It’s also reasonable for interception to occur for “lawful intercept,” but it should always require a court order (i.e., both executive and judicial branch approval) on reasonable grounds. The difficulty of obtaining wiretaps depicted in the television program “The Wire” is how it should be. I’ve written a lot on these issues, much which can be found in this blog’s Network Neutrality Index. If any reader of this blog happens to have attended the Netroots Nation telecom panel or comes across a description of its content, please point me to it, as I’d like to see what was said. I don’t have high hopes for the accuracy or reasonability of statements from Stoller and Karr, but I could be surprised, and the other panelists probably had interesting and important things to say. (See my Blogger profile for the disclosure of my employment by Global Crossing, which is currently listed by Renesys as the #3 network provider on the Internet in terms of number of customers, ahead of AT&T and Verizon, behind Sprint and Level 3.) UPDATE: The “Big Telecom” panel was live-blogged (dead, unarchived link: http://openleft.com/showDiary.do;jsessionid=C865142FFB85E14AAD27045B9A342B15?diaryId=7032"). Stoller’s anecdote about the Bill of Rights on metal is referring to Dean Cameron’s “security edition” of the Bill of Rights, which was also promoted by Penn Jillette. ...

I received an email from the ACLU yesterday, informing me that they’ve jumped in on the net neutrality debate. Unfortunately, they badly misrepresent the facts: FREE THE NET: WHY YOU SHOULD CARE ABOUT NET NEUTRALITY The keys to the Internet have always been safely in public hands - until last year, when the FCC suddenly repealed longstanding Internet principles of “neutrality” and non-discrimination.The ACLU is going to make the erroneous claim that I’ve debunked repeatedly on my blog (see the Net Neutrality Index)–that the common carriage requirements on telcos constitute “net neutrality.” They will ignore the fact that cable companies–the main providers of consumer broadband Internet access in the U.S.–have never been common carriers and have never been bound by these requirements. With the blessing of the Supreme Court, a handful of profit-driven telecoms and cable companies now could effectively shut down the 21st Century marketplace of ideas by screening Internet e-mail traffic, blocking what they deem to be undesirable content, or pricing users out of the marketplace. The ACLU is going to argue that we need to create a new bureaucratic regulatory apparatus, giving sweeping new powers to the FCC to interfere with freedom of Internet providers to enter into voluntary contracts with each other and manage their own networks, and specifically prohibiting differential pricing on tiered levels of service and the ability for providers to enter into arrangements with content providers to subsidize consumer bandwidth. Historically, Net Neutrality protections filled the free speech gap. Since those protections were removed last year, nothing prevents network providers from discriminating against Internet users and application and service providers in terms of content, quality of access, and choice of equipment.This is doubly false–the common carriage requirements applied only to the last-mile consumer network connections, not to the ability of ISPs to filter; and it is false that “nothing prevents” ISPs from taking actions which would cause them to lose customers. If you’re like many people using the Internet, you don’t think about whether your Internet Service Provider is intentionally slowing down or speeding up your access to Yahoo! versus Google. Without Net Neutrality, your ISP could do just that. Imagine if your phone company was allowed to own restaurants and then provided good service and clear signals to customers who called Dominos and static and frequent busy signals for those calling Pizza Hut. It sounds outrageous, but it would be entirely possible if the telephone system wasn’t regulated under the “common carrier” framework. The telecoms and cable companies that provide Internet network services, including AT&T, BellSouth, Comcast, Qwest, Sprint, Time-Warner/AOL, and Verizon, have spent over $100 million lobbying Congress and the FCC to eliminate established Net Neutrality protections.Remember, cable companies have never been common carriers, yet this hasn’t been a problem. Why create new regulations and give more power to a government agency that has a history of not only working on behalf of the big incumbents (rather than promoting competition, which is what is needed) but of engaging in actions designed to cause discrimination against certain forms of content through censorship? It makes no sense. The assault on Internet freedom will only get worse. The FCC imposed Net Neutrality protections in merger agreements for certain network providers such as SBC/AT&T and Verizon/MCI, but those protections expire in 2007. And in July 2006, the FCC declined to include any Net Neutrality protections in Comcast and Time-Warner’s acquisition of Adelphia Cable. The pattern of the FCC opposing Net Neutrality is expected to continue, as network providers continue to consolidate into an even smaller pool of Internet gatekeepers. Without the vigorous non-discrimination principles in place before 2005, a few corporate conglomerates will control everything that you can say or do on the Internet. Net Neutrality is needed, and it is needed now.The above argument is a mish-mash of fear-mongering about things that haven’t been an issue, misrepresentation of what regulations have been in place, wild unsubstantiated claims (“a few corporate conglomerates will control everything that you can say or do on the Internet”?), and a failure to look at the actual substantive issues in the network neutrality debate. Their website contains further misinformation: ...

A study by Brix Networks, which runs TestYourVoip.com, shows that the quality of VoIP calls has degraded over the last 18 months. Their tests of VoIP connections show that 20 percent of calls have unacceptable quality, up from 15% 18 months ago. Brix’s CTO says that the cause is competition for network resources–i.e., congestion. The solution is, of course, prioritization–putting voice and other latency and jitter-sensitive traffic in a higher class of service with QoS (quality of service). Thanks to Matt Sherman for the link. Further comments on the subject may be found at Richard Bennett’s Original Blog and by James Gattuso at the Technology Liberation Front.

Seth Godin has pointed out a new Anti-Astroturfing Wiki, for exposing those who are creating fake grassroots efforts by actions like coordinating letters to the editor or blog comment posts which don’t mention the coordinating body–a practice engaged in by both advocates for and against net neutrality regulations. The current Wikipedia definition: “In American politics and advertising, the term astroturfing describes formal public relations projects which deliberately seek to engineer the impression of spontaneous, grassroots behavior. The goal is the appearance of independent public reaction to a politician, political group, product, service, event, or similar entities by centrally orchestrating the behavior of many diverse and geographically distributed individuals." The Anti-Astroturfing Wiki and campaign has been set up as part of TheNewPR Wiki by Paull Young and Trevor Cook in response to the PR Institute of Australia’s promotion of a “how-to” seminar on astroturfing even though the practice violates the PRIA Code of Ethics. Young has issued an anti-astroturfing statement: ...

In an attempt to offer something constructive, here’s a version of network neutrality–let’s call it Lippard Network Neutrality–that seems to me to be reasonable, providing me with what I want as a consumer of Internet services and what I would want if I were managing security for the provider of those services: 1. Nondiscrimination Companies that provide facilities-based wireline broadband (i.e., those who own the last-mile wires) to residences must provide unrestricted Internet access to their customers who wish to purchase Internet access, allowing the use of any Internet service or application that does not violate any laws or cause degradation or disruption to the service or other customers. The provider may engage in filtering for consumer-grade service in order to prevent the spread of malware and the sending of spam, including (for example) SMTP filtering or redirection to the provider’s mail services, but must allow the purchase of business-grade service under which customers may operate their own mail servers. The provider retains the right to suspend service or quarantine users that send spam, become compromised with malware, or engage in illegal activity or activity that disrupts the service. 2. Unbundling Providers must unbundle Internet access from other services sold over the same connection, so that a customer may use the entire capacity of the circuit for Internet access. These two requirements would give me what I want as a customer, as well as give the provider the ability to recover their costs, provide services that use QoS, provide additional filtering to protect their network and the rest of their customer base from malware, and so on. I think it’s quite reasonable for a basic consumer Internet service to do port 25 filtering, force the use of the provider’s mail servers, and to do network-based filtering of malware–but I would like the ability to pay extra for completely unfiltered Internet service and take steps to protect myself. And in fact, that’s what I’m currently paying Cox for today–I pay for business-grade service to my home in order to run my own servers here, though I could put those servers into a colo facility and get the same effect, which is what I would do if Cox decided to discontinue offering business-class service to residences. Because that option exists, it would not be necessary to mandate that providers must provide business class service as I described above, but I’d still want to be able to ensure that I could access my remotely hosted services from home. How this differs from what many network neutrality advocates are arguing for: 1. I don’t prohibit QoS or tiering, as that is a genuinely useful network feature where I expect to see future innovation of services that depend on it. 2. The nondiscrimination provision is written to allow some kind of less-than-full-Internet walled garden service at low cost–so long as customers can still purchase real Internet service. (I think such a service would be under competitive pressure to allow access to the full Internet, for the same reason AOL ended up allowing full Internet access–otherwise the service wouldn’t attract enough users to be a successful product offering.) 3. I don’t prohibit differential pricing for different services and classes of service. 4. I don’t set any restrictions on contractual arrangements (apart from these two restrictions), including interconnection agreements or who pays. I think that should be left to private negotiation and competition. 5. I don’t extend these requirements to other types of Internet providers such as backbone providers or those providing business services, as those are areas with plenty of competition. 6. I don’t extend these requirements to wireless providers, because I think that with sensible market-based allocation of spectrum, there could be plenty of independent competition with much less capital expenditure than for wireline deployment. I could possibly be persuaded that there is a place for common carriage requirements, especially for access circuits to businesses, which is where the last-mile providers could really engage in anti-competitive behavior against backbone providers that don’t own a lot of last-mile wires (e.g., Level 3, Global Crossing, Sprint), now that the major telco last-mile providers have each merged with a major backbone provider themselves (Qwest/U.S. West, AT&T/SBC/BellSouth, Verizon/MCI). This requirement currently exists in the law for telcos, and unlike the common carriage requirement for DSL, is not planned to go away next year. I would not put the above into the purview of the FCC, at least not with their current dispute resolution procedures which favor the telcos. Paul Kouroupas at Global Crossing (also my employer) has been arguing for “baseball-style” or final arbitration dispute resolution, where each side submits their best and final offer to an arbitrator, who chooses the best. This provides incentive for each side to try to reach the best agreement up front, as well as a process that can proceed quickly, without any government involvement or expense. This suggestion is the second point of Global Crossing’s proposed REFORM legislative agenda. (Unbundling and common carriage of bottlenecks such as last-mile access circuits are the sixth point.) Comments, criticisms? I should add that I believe what I’ve spelled out above is pretty close to what I’ve heard is in Sen. Stevens’ telecom reform bill, though I haven’t read it and I suspect he applies the nondiscrimination and unbundling requirements more widely than to residential broadband. ...

Matt Stoller at MyDD wrote a blog post titled “Please lie to me about Net Neutrality” in which he repeated Tom Foremski’s statement about Cox blocking Craigslist with a “blacklist,” even though he was already aware that the issue had nothing to do with a blacklist. Now that the facts are well-known and accepted (including by Craig Newmark), he now insists that he never said anything to imply that Cox was intentionally blocking Craigslist, contrary to the written record, and accuses George Ou and David Berling at ZDNet of being “lying liars." Look, Matt–why don’t you just show some integrity and admit that you were mistaken to continue to repeat Foremski’s statement after you knew there was no blacklist, and mistaken to claim that this issue has something to do with the kind of discrimination that network neutrality regulations intend to prohibit. When caught uttering falsehoods that you should have known were falsehoods, you should come clean and apologize, rather than engage in ad hominem arguments against those who point it out. Your continued demonization of your adversaries damages your credibility.

Telco 2.0 has a nice list of types of connectivity options from a business and pricing model standpoint: NameTechnical relationship of service and connectivityFinancial relationship of service and connectivityExamplesvertically integrated interactive serviceIntegratedIntegratedPSTN, mobile voice, SMSvertically integrated broadcast serviceIntegratedIntegratedFM radio, DVB-Hstand-alone best-effort connectivitySeparateSeparatedial-up, today’s broadbandQoS and billing enhanced connectivityApplication-aware; session/control plane integratedIntegratedIMSservice-funded connectivityApplication-aware; no technical integrationIntegratedSkype Zonesuser- or community-built free connectivitySeparateSeparateOpen Wi-Fi, basic muni service, meshlocal unrouted connectivityVariesNo monetary exchangeBluetooth, Family Radio Serviceother connectivityApplication-agnosticTieredParis Metro pricing They go on to give projections of the relative significance of each of these options from today through 2016–they foresee huge declines in the vertically integrated interactive service model and expansion of all of the others, with the greatest growth in the stand-alone best-effort connectivity model. That much is a pretty easy prediction based on the replacement of the PSTN with IP. What’s notable, though, is that there are other models besides stand-alone best-effort connectivity which they also see growing substantially, with QoS and billing enhanced connectivity the largest of those, through next-gen telco services like IMS. Those who advocate network neutrality regulations should be careful not to endorse rules which would prohibit or impair the possibility of innovations using business models other than stand-alone best-effort connectivity.

The original claim of a Cox “blacklist” originated from a statement by Tom Foremski at Silicon Valley Watcher. Foremski originally wrote: Back on February 23rd Authentium acknowledged that their software is blocking Craigslist but it still hasn’t fixed the problem, more than three months later. That’s a heck of long time to delete some text from their blacklist.Now, he says (quoted by George Ou at ZDNet): I assumed there was a blacklist - I have no idea how Craigslist is being blockedIn fact, we know now that it’s a combination of a bug in a firewall driver produced by Authentium software and unusual (but not incorrect) behavior by the Craigslist webserver setting the initial TCP window size to 0. The facts of the problem came out (at least between Craigslist, Cox, and Authentium) at the time the problem was first reported, was fixed in a beta release within weeks, and has only affected Cox customers who use Authentium’s security suite. BTW, I disagree with Richard Bennett and George Ou’s remarks which attribute the problem entirely or largely to Craigslist–the behavior of the server is not contrary to the RFC. The initial SYN packet from the client to Craigslist is responded to by Craigslist with a SYN-ACK packet with window size of zero, which means don’t send me any data, only an ACK. The client then sends an ACK (completing the three-way TCP handshake), at which point Craigslist sends an ACK packet with a larger window size which the pre-fix version of the Authentium software fails to process. The initial response of the Authentium software to slow down is a reasonable and apparently desired response by Craigslist–they want new clients to hold off transmitting data (an HTTP request) until they give the OK. Authentium took full responsibility for the problem, and they were right to do so. The story from Foremski was uncritically repeated by Matt Stoller at MyDD, Timothy Karr at Save the Internet (and a couple of other blogs), and now in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), in a lapse from his normally good judgment about Internet-related matters (e.g., the Cox/Wyden Internet Freedom Act of 1995 and the Cox/Wyden Internet Tax Freedom Act of 1998). Stoller and Karr went on to repeat the “blacklist” claim even after having the full story, and I don’t believe either of them has retracted the claim that this issue is relevant to the network neutrality debate. Craig Newmark complains that he didn’t get good responsiveness from Authentium, which Authentium disputes, but he has indicated satisfaction with Cox. The story has been picked up by George Ou at ZDNet (here and here) and by Glenn Harlan Reynolds at Instapundit (here, here, and here). This issue was a user software application issue that had no more to do with network neutrality than a browser incompatibility issue, a webserver disk failure, or a fiber cut. Each of these things can prevent a user from reaching some specific content, but none is imposed by the network provider or remedied by act of Congress or the FCC. Those who continue to treat it otherwise even after knowing the details are demonstrating questionable judgment and integrity. UPDATE: Craig Newmark has now stated that there was no deliberate blocking here and the Authentium explanation is correct. I’ve exchanged a few emails with him asking whether the behavior of the Craigslist.org webserver is specifically intended to regulate the rate of new HTTP connections (and whether the behavior is coming from something like an application-layer switch negotiating the TCP handshake); he said he’s passed that on to his technical team and I’ll report here if I get confirmation or refutation on that point. One puzzling paragraph of his latest blog post is this one: One good outcome of this is that we flushed out a swiftboater (in the generic sense), and this helps me understand the way disinformation gangs operate. Unfortunately, in some blogs, a good guy has been linked with the swiftboater, which isn’t fair, and hopefully, we can do something about that.I’m not sure who he’s calling a swiftboater, who he’s calling a good guy, and who he’s calling a disinformation gang. So far as I can see, the disinformation gang in this incident has been the “Save the Internet” crowd, who still have yet to admit the clear facts of the matter. I asked for clarification, but Craig declined to identify who he’s referring to (except that he’s not referring to Matt Stoller or Timothy Karr). UPDATE: July 12, 2006: The Craigslist.org webserver has changed its behavior and no longer sends a SYN-ACK packet with a window size of 0; it now gives a window size of 4380. This change by Craigslist.org works as a fix to the Authentium issue. I wonder why they only made the change now. ...