

ISPs to start policing copyright by July 12 - dangrossman
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-57397452-261/riaa-chief-isps-to-start-policing-copyright-by-july-12/?tag=mncol;topStories

======
beloch
Reasons why this is a waste of resources:

1) Detecting piracy is resource intensive. You have to design algorithms to
detect infringement and you have to implement them in a way that can keep up
with a respectable portion of your backbone bandwidth without significantly
degrading performance for consumers.

2) File sharing protocols can adapt rapidly and will most likely make more and
more extensive use of encryption. Distinguishing legal file sharing from
illegal file sharing will only get more and more difficult. Even if there
remain ways to detect infringement, this arms race with file-sharers will feed
back into 1 in a big way.

3) As Neil Young famously put it, "Piracy is the new radio". Those who adapt
to the "new radio" first will reap the rewards. Those who spend massive
amounts of cash fighting the inevitable progress of technology will just fall
behind.

What should these dinosaurs do if they want to stay competitive? Stop treating
users of the "new radio" like criminals and win them over by providing a
superior experience to what the pirates can deliver. e.g. Stop loading DVD's
and bluray's up with annoying advertisements, anti-piracy messages, and
warnings. Online stores shouldn't sell 720p videos or lossy music files when
pirates are giving away 1080p videos and lossless audio for free. Above all,
minimize the payment barrier. Make it cheap enough to feel like value is high
and make it at least as easy and fast as pirating. In short, stop spending
money to treat your customers like criminals and, instead, spend it to ensure
that legal purchases are the path of least resistance to the highest quality
experience.

~~~
gurkendoktor
> 1) Detecting piracy is resource intensive

People who torrent 24/7 just because they can are _also_ resource intensive. I
think there might be a real incentive to kick Joe Leecher out of one's
customer base and keep people who only check their email.

~~~
gcb
but no one would pay $120/mo for 328MBPS DSL⁕ only for checking email.

So there's still incentive to make P2P seems a possibility.

⁕ only 0.0001% guaranteed

~~~
ctide
Exactly this. I pay Comcast $200 / mo for 105mbit. In part because it's
retardedly fast (I do get the advertised speed generally,) and in part because
I don't ever want to think about bandwidth limits or any of the other measures
they enforce on people who aren't shoveling over forkloads of cash. If either
of those things change, I immediately downgrade.

~~~
thereallurch
Ouch, Charter only charges $82.99 a month (with modem rental) for 100Mbps.
Around the same time they introduced 100Mbps service, they introduced
bandwidth caps. (500 gb/month for 100mbit service). Bandwidth caps @charter
are a 3 strike policy.

I can get charter business @~$200 a month which is 100mbit service (no
download cap, guaranteed uptime). Are you on some sort of comcast business
plan?

~~~
ctide
No, it's their highest bandwidth residential plan. Technically, I still have
bandwidth caps (<http://imageshar.es/4f675654998b758611000b60>) but they don't
enforce them.

------
SoftwareMaven
I'd be really interested in seeing a list of ISPs that have chosen not to
sign. Even though I don't pirate, I would jump in a heartbeat if its feasible
(e.g. I can actually find a non-signed ISP) and my ISP isn't on the list.

~~~
equalarrow
I left Comcast in Jan because of SOPA. This is just another reason why these
'ISPs' are a bad choice.

I live in San Francisco and chose Sonic.net because they don't cap or do any
kind of traffic shaping. I did take a hit in my speed (from 20mb to 10mb), but
their service is top notch and I feel good about where I put my money every
month. Sonic's also been doing a fiber rollout in some areas north of SF and
in one section of the city.

I won't ever go back to Comcast. I'm interested to see how this will affect
people. Will there be an exodus from these guys for other ISPs that don't cap
or police the line?

~~~
jimray
+1 in support of sonic.net in the Bay Area. They are total pros on everything
from installation to customer service. Plus, they're building a last-mile
fiber network in SF!

------
dangrossman
This raises so many questions.

What kind of traffic inspection are these ISPs doing that would enable them to
identify infringement as it's happening?

How do they know what rights the people involved have to say that a specific
download is infringing or not?

Speaking of the general public, how does Joe Smith know that Hulu's stream of
"The Office" is legal but some other site's is not?

~~~
freehunter
I work in information security, and while my company doesn't have the
sophistication necessary to know exactly what data is contained in each and
every packet that goes through the network (that's not what we do), I could
give a "this is how _I_ would decide" overview.

We've got pretty rudimentary tools at my job, but we can still see source and
destination address (even through a NAT and proxy on our end), IP
ports/protocol, time of day and speed of connection trends, and we can do
small amounts of packet inspection (we grab the first 120 bytes of every
packet).

With this data, I'm able to tell if someone is using BitTorrent vs Skype
(they're both peer-to-peer UDP packets to random addresses, so finding the
difference is key). I can tell where their information is being sent to. If
the packet is not encrypted, I can see exactly what is being sent (the header
data will show filenames being transferred). DNS data will tell me what site
they've just visited, and packet capture will tell me what specific page
they're on and what search terms they used on that site.) With an unencrypted
session, it's as easy as piecing the domain name from DNS (thepiratebay.com)
to the packet capture (http: 11:23pm March 15, "the office",
/search/test/0/99/0) to the user (10.250.250.10) to the network flows (every
few seconds there's another couple packets going out to or coming from a few
dozen address across the world). Bam, we've got an infringing user.

Now granted, people will likely be using encryption. I don't know how the
tools handle this, we don't do anything with it at my job. However, I would
imagine the ISPs could do deeper packet inspection. I would imagine they
simply don't care if your traffic is legal or not. They may assume it's all
illegal and serve notice anyway. There may be an appeals process. As for the
difference between Hulu and joe-streams-hollywood.com, I would imagine they
have a whitelist of addresses.

 __TL;DR; I don't know, but I can make an educated guess. Best bet, encrypt
your traffic but don't rely on that to save your ass. __

~~~
quangv
scary... if ISP's sniff packets, isn't that illegal wiretapping?

~~~
trotsky
no, your ISP has very broad legal powers to inspect your traffic as long as it
occurs while it's in motion.

------
pjscott
I got hit with a dire legal warning in college from these anti-piracy-crusader
guys. Apparently I had been heavily uploading Beyonce songs on Limewire. This
was strange, as I have never used Limewire and don't much like Beyonce's
songs. I had to go to some office and fill out papers to say that I was
innocent, because someone made a completely spurious (and probably automated)
accusation against me.

These people are scum.

------
nextparadigms
I believe this is the "6 strike" system. They agreed to do this last July, and
it seems to go into effect a year later.

Also, I'm not so sure how "voluntary" this was, considering the Obama
administration was involved to "mediate" the deal. My guess is the White House
tried to pressure the ISP's into agreeing with this, though I wouldn't exactly
call the ISP's _innocent_ considering pretty much all of them now have their
own content services, and it would benefit them to cut down on piracy somehow.

~~~
ekianjo
You can only get a benefit if one is willing to pay for content. Piracy does
not equal one lost sale.

~~~
rabidsnail
The equation is different for cable companies than it is for content
producers. Cable companies (I'm including phone companies that provide TV
service) are competing with the internet itself, in aggregate. They're
thinking much longer term. If they can get people to make a habit of watching
TV through them instead of the internet, they win.

~~~
rwmj
I'm wondering on which planet cable is going to beat the internet. Presumably
it's a planet where the people prefer inconvenience, cost and poor usability.

~~~
rabidsnail
Cable is more convenent if you don't care what you're watching and don't want
to be made to choose. It's optimized for passive consumption. Most people want
a morphine IV drip, not a wine cellar.

------
noonespecial
We sure are turning chinese fast. In the end, does it really matter what
ideology underpins the censorship? Users say to themselves, "I have to be
really careful not to even appear like I'm doing something 'bad' on the
internet or I could lose my access or worse."

It doesn't matter where you got on the train or why, once it pulls into that
last station, you're done.

~~~
ttt_
It seems to me that this whole endeavor is just a doorway for more
control/censorship a couple of years from now.

Once the technology is set up and the practice is sanctioned, more and more
'bad practices' will start being policed and punished.

~~~
noonespecial
I don't believe that that's intentional. If if was that might be better
because we might have a chance at stopping it. Its an emergent behavior. The
tighter control, even enacted for "good" reasons now, attracts the type that
use it for evil later. It sucks because you can't fight the evil up front. You
sometimes have to fight the good intentions now to prevent the evil later.
That's an impossible political sell.

~~~
ttt_
>> _The tighter control, even enacted for "good" reasons now, attracts the
type that use it for evil later._

Are you so sure that those _good_ reasons aren't conceived _by_ ill intented
guys knowing what you have just described: _It sucks because you can't fight
the evil up front._

More commonly refered to as _wolf in sheep's clothing_.

Big power players are not naive.

------
Cieplak
"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any
given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on
any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched
everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever
they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in
the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in
darkness, every movement scrutinized."

------
rabidsnail
At what point will they lose their DMCA safe-harbor protection? Can we
discourage them from actively policing copyright by suing them for copyright
infringement?

~~~
jrockway
Yes. And when they lose their common carrier status, they'll be responsible
for trafficking in child pornography if any of their customers do.

I anticipate failure.

~~~
ceol
I don't believe ISPs are considered common carriers.

~~~
AutoCorrect
but by doing this they ARE giving up their safe-harbour provisions.

~~~
wmf
Why do you think so?

------
tim_h
If an ISP starts openly inspecting content like this will it become liable for
all content that passes through it's network?

Edit: I'm surprised to see this downvoted. Care to comment why?

~~~
wmf
ISPs aren't common carriers.

------
frigite
This has already been going on as others have noted.

ISPs send email citing that X external organization representing Y media
company says that you have been sharing Z content, then the ISP shuts off or
redirects all web traffic from your location except that which is allowed to
go to a webpage they specify in the email where you must acknowledge that you
got their communication and will cease and desist. It is pretty Orwellian.

We all need to switch to mesh wifi internetworking as soon as possible. With
some work, it could become a better solution than our current net, and there
would be no monthly cost to an ISP, and no MPAA, RIAA, or government
interference. Granted, there is value in rule of law and protection of
adequate compensation for created works. But when Big Brother comes down on
you and your neighbors, is that ok? These guys would have cuffed you for the
cassette mixtape you made for your girlfriend in the 10th grade if they would
have known about it. The longer you let the ISPs or the government rule the
net, the less of a chance you will have to ever get it back.

~~~
trotsky
I understand that you read about it on reddit, and they may have sounded quite
confident and/or optimistic, but I assure you an internet based on wireless
mesh and without ISPs would be completely unusable. Along with most ideas that
sound anything like that. Whatever visions you have of a future pirate nirvana
internet will have to include a bunch of pretty traditional looking fat pipes
in the center of it all.

~~~
frigite_
Actually, I didn't read about it on reddit, but thanks for thinking so highly
of me. :) And there is no way it will ever get any significant traction as
long as people dismiss it as lunacy immediately after it is mentioned.

People treated kids that programmed like socially disabled outcasts in the
1980s. Ten years later, many of those kids were making millions. Dialing into
a BBS to communicate was a waste of time. Now almost every business has a
Twitter account.

Mesh may seem stupid now, but when the current net gets locked down and turned
into a "white" government-regulated net within the next 20 years, people are
going to start connecting to the shadow "black" mesh net to share files. No,
I'm not talking about mesh nets connected to our current net. I'm talking
about a completely different internetwork. And if we wait too long, we won't
be allowed to setup such a network, because it will be outlawed before it has
a chance to flower.

I'm not saying there is a magic field of jellybeans that can replace our
current net, although IPv6 may as well be that, as slow as it has been rolled
out. But, to dismiss mesh as a crock is just plain lame.

~~~
trotsky
It seems like you think wishful thinking is a replacement for actual
engineering knowledge. The difference between your story and today is that in
the 80's (and 70's) tons of real engineers were already using the internet,
dialing plenty of BBS's, and already knew the Internet was going to be huge -
and understood the science of how it would grow.

In contrast, the _only_ people willing to suggest that a decentralized
wireless mesh has the possibility of replacing the internet are people that
haven't used one and have no rf background.

~~~
frigite_
What about Open Mesh Project, Open Source Mesh, B.A.T.M.A.N., Roofnet, GNUnet,
Dot-P2P, SMesh, Coova, Babel, SolarMESH, WING, Daihinia, P2P DNS,
Digitata.org, Netsukuku, Tonika, We Rebuild, Freifunk, Athens Wireless
Metropolitan, wlan ljubljana, The Darknet Plan, the connective, Meraki, Open
Mesh, firetide, guifi.net, OLPC, Iridium constellation, Commotion Wireless
Project, Serval, and IEEE 802.11s?

[http://emergentbydesign.com/2011/02/11/16-projects-
initiativ...](http://emergentbydesign.com/2011/02/11/16-projects-initiatives-
building-ad-hoc-wireless-mesh-networks/)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network>

~~~
trotsky
You do understand the difference between proving a technology exists and is
suitable for localized high latency low bandwidth communication and suggesting
that it's suitable to replace tier 1 isps that handle terrabits of data
traffic per second, right? No one has ever suggested that you can't run a
relatively small, localized, and centrally managed mesh network - those have
been in use for all sorts of purposes for quite some time. What you're being
told is that those technologies _don't scale_ to millions of users, long
distances or high bandwidth/low latency applications.

It's perfectly fine that you don't know a lot about networking or network
management. Just stop telling people how they can replace the internet when
you really have no idea.

If you don't want your ISPs or others sniffing your traffic user encryption.
If you don't want the RIAA telling your ISP that you're pirating music stop
putting your computer on a global list of computers that are offering to serve
popular.mp3. It's a pretty solved problem.

~~~
frigite_
"It's perfectly fine that you don't know a lot about networking or network
management."

I am not suggesting everyone can use mesh now and magically you no longer need
an ISP. I am saying that is where we need to go. And I started off many years
ago learning how to design and manage networks, getting certifications, wiring
my business with cat3 then cat5, managing routers and switches, and then I
moved onto something more interesting- now I just try to protect HN from
morons.

------
drucken
Are US ISPs being paid to do this by the entertainment industry? If so, is
there any transparency on this?

Why would the ISPs choose to do this with no legal requirement for it and
strong restrictions in how they can achieve this now or in future any
infrastructure business around it due to net neutrality and other regulator
issues? This would directly alienate their own broadband customers...

~~~
wmf
It looks like the ISPs are actually _paying_ half the cost of the system. The
mind boggles.

Everybody in the thread please read the MOU; it's probably totally different
than you think:
[http://www.copyrightinformation.org/sites/default/files/Momo...](http://www.copyrightinformation.org/sites/default/files/Momorandum%20of%20Understanding.pdf)

~~~
jostmey
Actually, the ISPs have incentive to play along! Under these rules, the ISPs
will be able to throttle back peoples internet connections, which will save
the ISPs money.

------
incongruity
How does this mix with major ISPs offering VOIP bundles – what happens if they
cut off your internet access and you are no longer able to call 911? Is there
any potential liability there?

~~~
trotsky
They don't actually cut off your network connection, they just filter it so
that you can only reach a subset of their own addresses like dhcp, dns,
trouble resolution website etc. I'm sure they just include the voip servers on
that list. That traffic is often provisioned totally separately (outside of
your commit, possibly to a separate mac) so that it might not be an issue in
the first place.

~~~
simcop2387
That would only work if you're using their bundled service. If you were using
Vonage for instance it could easily interrupt that. They can whitelist all
they want but they can never get all of them.

~~~
trotsky
yeah, but the third party voip providers all tell you that they aren't a
replacement for a landline providing E911 service because of the (many)
problems that can occur with an unmanaged pipe.

------
einhverfr
Move to central Washington state, where you have a hcoice of a dozen or so
high-speed ISP's across fiber......

This reminds me. I wonder if the change during Reagan/Clinton to pro-
consolidation, anti-competition has anything to do with making an industry
easier to control in this way.....

~~~
EricDeb
Dear god I hope you aren't suggesting moving to Ellensburg...

~~~
einhverfr
Chelan or Douglas counties would be best, so Chelan, Wenatchee, Waterville....

------
jrockway
Good news, everyone. Nobody told the ISPs about cryptography!

~~~
rabidsnail
Unless everybody moves to freenet (or some other friend-to-friend network) you
have to exchange keys at the beginning of every session with a peer. The ISP
can see that, and MITM you. SSL/TLS gets around this with a central
certificate authority that vouches for the public key of the other party.
That's damn difficult if not impossible to pull off in a decentralized system.

------
jostmey
It does not take a leap of the imagination to see how ordinary, law-abiding
citizens might accidently be affected. Here is a hypothetical scenario of how
things might play out.

People pirating music will be caught. These people will start encrypting their
web-traffic to avoid getting caught in the future. Then coders like me who use
SSH/SFTP heavily will be flagged as pirates too. Then my internet will be cut
off.

~~~
spindritf
> People pirating music will be caught. These people will start encrypting
> their web-traffic to avoid getting caught in the future.

Which won't really help since they're being tracked by their peers, I don't
think anyone is wiretapping random Internet users' connections to bust them
for piracy.

~~~
Zirro
I'm assuming he means hiding behind a VPN, which encrypts traffic and masks
your IP. If enough people start using them, I suppose they'll be the next to
feel the heat from the media-companies.

------
snambi
Well, if web policing is enforced by ISPs, it may give birth to the next
generation of internet. I'm not kidding. I'm serious.

Let me explain. Today everyone has a wifi router. Imagine, one wifi router
sending request to the next wifi router, which routes to the next router
towards the destination. It is theoretically possible to reach the destination
and get back. It may be a million hops. But, it is possible.

Today's wifi routers are designed to talk to CABLE or DSL. But they can be
made to talk to a nearby wifi router also. If we do that the entire world will
become one giant network. That would be the real internet. At that time, we
won't need ISPs.

Today majority of traffic goes through ISPs. If this type of wifi routers come
to existence, even countries like Iran cannot control internet.

This may be a blessing in disguise.

~~~
chrisballinger
Do you have any technical background in this area? The usability (latency) of
such networks is ridiculously bad, and the whole idea is based on the
assumption that the average guy will have a wifi router capable of supporting
this new protocol. The bridge nodes to connect back to the global internet are
also some easy points of failure. Not to mention that anyone stupid enough to
not be using a VPN or HTTPS over such a connection will have their information
leaked to a ton of cool hacker kids running a custom build of DD-WRT on their
Linksys router.

I don't mean to be a buzzkill, but the way around the copyright cops isn't a
janky 2.4 GHz "mesh network" using 802.11. It's going to require a lot more
than that.

~~~
snambi
It is just an idea. You are right, the current wifi routers doesn't have
capability. However, this is done by the backbone routers at present. If we go
back to the 80s, the PCs of that time cannot handle the computing needs of a
large website. However, today nearly all datacenters are run using PC
hardware. In other words the business of big servers got commoditized in the
early 2000s. In the same way, the big network backbone business will be
commoditized at some point in time. The restrictions such as this, will only
accelerate the commoditization.

------
mistercow
> Comcast, Cablevision, Verizon, Time Warner Cable and other bandwidth
> providers

According to the official Copyright Alerts site[1], the only "other bandwidth
provider" that has signed on is AT&T.

[1] <http://www.copyrightinformation.org/about>

------
acuity12
The moment a provider throttles my internet based on "piracy" is the moment I
begin investing all of my free time into making a free and invincible p2p
solution.

~~~
mindslight
Given how things _currently_ are and the hypothetical tense of your comment, I
can only conclude you're bluffing yourself.

------
Cieplak
What if you share an IP address with several other families? Does this imply
that internet would be cut off to the IP address if it were found to be
infringing?

~~~
frederico
who ever has the name on the bill seems to be the one responsible.

~~~
Jach
It'd be a great way to shut out schools and businesses from the internet.

Unless the way to opt-out of this is simply to get a business connection.

------
yaix
> [...] notices to those customers who are accused of downloading copyrighted
> content illegally. If the customer doesn't stop, [...]

Stop of being accused?

------
18pfsmt
They specifically used the words "web access," does that mean other ports are
in the clear? I imagine port 563 may see increased usage.

Anyway, I've been considering a service to allow people to swap modems (i.e.
cable -> DSL, or vice versa), to minimize switching costs. This move may make
the idea more viable.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
_They specifically used the words "web access," does that mean other ports are
in the clear?_

That's engineer thinking, not lawyer thinking. Do you _really_ think, just
because packets went over port 9999 and, let's go further and say it wasn't
even HTTP, that any attorney, judge or jury will even understand, much less
care that it's not the "web"?

~~~
etherael
Yes, because those protocols will never be bought to trial.

This is about targeting the lowest possible hanging fruit that your average
joe random idiot can click a big blue button and pull down the last version of
whatever schlock big content is pushing out.

Some guy using a bitcoin purchased usenet account over SSL from a VPN through
tor to a remote data dump and then grabbing the booty is never going to get
caught in this net.

~~~
batista
Don't bet on it.

~~~
etherael
I'd absolutely bet on it. Short of outlawing encryption such a thing is flat
out impossible, even then it's questionable due to steganography. And both of
these ignore the fact that, and I want to repeat this for emphasis; These
People Are Very Stupid (If You Want To Be Charitable You May Add "In-This-
Area" Here).

~~~
batista
Well, there had been laws treating encryption as weaponry, and forbidding it's
export. So outlawing it for such uses, is not _that_ far fetched. We've
regressed a lot in a lot of areas since the nineties.

OTOH, VPNs are needed by companies of course, so they can't outlaw this kind
of use. But it's not like they cannot poison usenet/tor et al, and catch guys
this way. If they have their way, one can imagine a future that you're only
allowed to VPN to a whitelist of addresses that you have declared beforehand
for business use --or something of that kind.

Also, how about any "odd" pattern, like repeated high volume traffic, giving
them "probable cause" to bust into your house and check for illegal downloads?

~~~
etherael
Attacks to expose your identity via tor already exist and there are accepted
methods to avoid them, no default route etc so even if something you are
running does manage to try to initiate a remote connection it will not get
anywhere anyway.

Usenet is already a haven of scum and villainy as the saying goes due to being
commonly used as a vector to distribute malware, people that are accustomed to
this environment once again take plenty of precautions to reduce their
exposure to these attacks. Another agency joining in on the poison would just
be par for the course for our theoretical target.

The idea that a person would go to this extent to avoid detection and then not
use deniable encryption volumes to stow their black data is somewhat crazy,
even if you grant that someone downloading high volumes of data for illicit
purposes is distinguishable on a probable cause basis from someone who just
really loves watching a lot of online video or uses a high volume update
channel operating system or runs a bunch of computers behind a single ip etc.

This really is asymmetric warfare terrain highly favouring the policed rather
than the policing entity if you assume infinitely competent actors on both
sides

------
alantrrs
Im from Mexico, and aparently these kind of things are already happening here.
A friend of mine told me a few weeks ago that the cable company called him to
say that he was downloading copyrighted material from warner and that he
should stop or he would be cut off.

------
EricDeb
I get the impression that a lot of people who are "heavy pirates" are the
types that simply wouldn't listen to music otherwise. I was into pirating
music simply because I could... then I realized I never listen to any of it.
Since then I rarely download.

~~~
incongruity
Well, if they are, they're also wasting their money:
[http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/04/study-pirates-
buy-...](http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/04/study-pirates-buy-tons-
more-music-than-average-folks.ars) &
[http://www.pcworld.com/article/236214/study_casts_pirate_sit...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/236214/study_casts_pirate_site_users_in_good_light.html)

Just say'n, is all...

------
joejohnson
Can anyone recommend a good VPN or other solution to encrypt all of my
traffic?

~~~
ohashi
get a free ec2 instance. How I got web in china.

------
ilaksh
I don't think its really that important for everyone to be able to get all
movies, tv shows, music and stuff for free, but the fact that the internet is
controlled by a fairly small number of companies does seem to be a problem.

To me its similar to general problems with over-centralization and/or
monopolization in many areas. There is one water company, not very many large
entertainment distributors, food production is handled by an increasingly
small number of companies, electricity comes from one company, web search
results mostly controlled by one company.

We should do a better job of using shared knowledge exchange formats to be
able to get an accurate holistic picture, but at the same time I think things
would be more robust and we would be more secure if production, distribution
and control was generally much more localized.

I actually think that we should aim for producing water, electricity and food
inside of individual homes/apartments or buildings, and also create
alternative fiber, laser and wifi mesh networks for communications.

~~~
freehunter
I don't agree with lumping the RIAA in with municipal water or electricity.
Utilities can be much cheaper and more efficient with a local monopoly than if
they were in competition. Imagine if water delivery was a free market: you'd
have a half dozen or so companies pumping water to you, and unlike with
rotatable Internet protocols, they wouldn't be able to use each others lines.
You'd have to have the same amount of water lines run to your house as there
were competing companies. Same with the choice of electricity: they can all
use one line, but in the end it has to be traceable back to the one company
who shilled out the watts for your benefit. Imagine if there were three or
four competing power plants serving your neighborhood, all running at 1/3
capacity (plant efficiency doesn't scale down nicely).

No, utilities need to be monopolized for efficiency. With rotatable protocols
though, you can trace who sent what to whom. That's where competition is a
good thing. That's why local monopolies on ISPs are ridiculous, same with
monopolies on content distribution.

~~~
ilaksh
I don't want companies competing to send me electricity or water. I want to
produce my own electricity and water.

~~~
freehunter
Well then you get into the difficulty of actually achieving this. Lets take a
mid-size metropolitan area, with a population density of 500 people per square
mile. How does everyone in the apartment buildings generate their own
electricity or pump their own water? And if a 1000-person apartment complex
begins pumping water from directly beneath themselves, what happens when the
water is gone? And where does the water go when it has been used? Where does
the runoff from the streets go? Is there a water treatment plant, and if so,
who resells that water? Or do we just keep pumping water from the ground in
one area and dumping it back in another, until the ground is dry under the
city?

How many solar panels would be on a building if everyone had to generate their
own power? How many wind turbines? How many generators? Where would this space
come from, and who would pay for it? What if those panels or turbines could
not generate enough on one specific day? Is there a contingency plan?

Even if you think the current market of ISPs and content distribution is bad,
don't delude yourself into thinking the Internet would exist without cities.
With cities comes a need for utility management. If everyone had enough land
to generate their own power and water, your Internet bills would be worlds
more expensive and your control over entertainment products would be far less
(what local bands will you see when your nearest neighbor is three miles away
and there's no centralized location to perform?)

Let me know if I've completely misunderstood your statement.

~~~
ilaksh
I think the technical realities might not be as impossible as you assume. I
don't know to what degree those ideals might be achieved, but I think those
should be the aims.

------
maeon3
I will raise holy hell for any ISP that blocks my transmission of avatar.MP4
across their ISP to my own device. If I own Avatar.mp4, the ISP's need to
understand that I am sending it to my own device, or a device of someone who
has "pair bought" avatar with me (we both split half the money to buy it).

If they get one thing wrong which they will, I'm going to piss and moan about
it to no end. On the plus side, net neutrality will be gone, and ownership of
the internet secured by the United States congress. I suppose it's better than
falling into the hands of some other country, which will also lay claim to it.
Let the Internet be divided into a million pieces with import duties for every
bit and byte transmitted across an infinite number of versions of the
internet.

This is how evolution works, a good idea grows too big, then it
compartmentalizes and specializes. Most will suck, but some will be better,
and the better ones will be on the receiving end of the goods and services of
the enlightened masses. If we can promote freedom to choose which internet to
live under, we should be ok to Stamp out the subnets that are used for
enslavement of man in favor of the "more free" versions.

~~~
AgentConundrum
> a device of someone who has "pair bought" avatar with me (we both split half
> the money to buy it)

Is this actually allowed though, or would the MPAA say you're breaking
copyright despite the fact that this other person spent his or her money on
it.

My understanding is that the license to view/use the file belongs to the
account of the person who actually bought the thing, regardless of who else
supplied cash for the undertaking. That could mean that while it seems obvious
to you that the two of you share the ability to use the file, the reality
might be much more gray (or you could just be outright wrong).

This is exactly the issue that keeps me from buying digital movies (other than
DRM issues), and it's why I don't own a kindle. From a legal perspective, it
seems like things that are easily and legally shareable with physical items,
such as DVDs and dead tree books, aren't easily or legally shareable at all.

I can't download a book from Amazon to my Kindle and then, if she decides she
also wants to read it, simply transfer the file it to my girlfriends Kindle as
well. At least not strictly legally. We could share accounts, sure, but people
break up, and even for married couples there is still a pretty high divorce
rate. If we split, one of the two of us (legally) loses everything we've
bought for ourselves on the shared account.

I wish that there were an easy way to manage multiple accounts on your
devices, so that each person could have a shared, yet separate, account to
maintain their own libraries. This is hard to do, I know, and it would require
some form of DRM, which is unacceptable for well documented reasons, but we
need to find some analog for the first sale doctrine and easy lending.

Even iTunes, with it's lack of DRM, bothers me. I could buy DRM-less music and
load it onto both mine and my girlfriends MP3 players, but iTunes still adds a
watermark of some kind to the file. That means that if something were to
happen to the file, and it got shared, it's traceable back to me. That's fine,
but I have no way to ensure that - if we were to break up - the traceable-to-
me file gets destroyed from her device. It's a severely paranoid worst case
scenario, and the odds against a negative result from a loose file like that
are astronomical, but they're not zero, and that bothers me.

I'm a reasonably techie guy. I'm a programmer, I hang out on Hacker News, I
keep up (more or less) with the latest trends, but the implementation details
of digital media are so counter-intuitive to me that I still buy DVDs and dead
tree books.

~~~
rabidsnail
> Is this actually allowed though, or would the MPAA say you're breaking
> copyright despite the fact that this other person spent his or her money on
> it.

Yes, it looks like it is actually allowed.

    
    
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartoon_Network,_LP_v._CSC_Holdings,_Inc.

~~~
mistercow
I don't see anything about "pair buying" in that article. I'm almost certain
that if you and your friend split the cost of a DVD and then make a copy so
that you can each have it, both the MPAA and the law see that as simple
copyright infringement.

------
gcb
So, no ATT? or does one of those mentioned in the article is the consumer name
for at&t and i'm clueless even though they get my money every month?

~~~
dangrossman
AT&T is participating.

> During a panel discussion held for U.S. publishers today, RIAA chairman Cary
> Sherman said his association and a number of ISPs—including AT&T,
> Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon—will begin policing
> traffic to crack down on piracy starting this summer.

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/03/riaa-and-
isp...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/03/riaa-and-isps-to-
police-your-traffic-starting-july-12.ars)

------
aklofas
Interesting. I'm just waiting for the ISP's to get sued for breach of contract
for throttling customers internet. If a neighbor (for example) logs onto
router and starts downloading, I can imagine there'll be lots of false
positives. And lawyers _love_ false positives.

------
MikeOnFire
sounds like a bullshit article, thought up to scare people. go fuck yourself
PR firms, i'll believe it when i see it

~~~
batista
So, you'll believe it when it's too late. Nice attitude, bro.

Also, PR firms? This is cnet. And it's not it talking about something obscure,
the program is common knowledge. How about doing your research?

