For the first time since Edward Snowden revealed the indiscriminate spying of the Five Eyes national intelligence alliance, everyone in the world has a chance to ask, what about me? Did they spy on my life? In a narrow but important decision, the UK Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) ruled that the sharing of NSA data with GCHQ was an illegal human rights violation up to December 2014, because there was no public legal rationale for the sharing. Now anyone can file a request seeking to learn whether their personal data was shared.
John Oliver calls it "cable company f*ckery" and we've all suspected it happens. Now on Steven Levy's new Backchannel publication on Medium, Susan Crawford delivers decisive proof, expertly dissecting the Comcast-Netflix network congestion controversy. Her source material is a detailed traffic measurement report released this week by Google-backed M-Lab — the first of its kind — showing severe degradation of service at interconnection points between Comcast, Verizon and other monopoly "eyeball networks" and "transit networks" such as Cogent, which was contracted by Netflix to deliver its bits. The report shows that interconnection points give monopoly ISPs all the leverage they need to discriminate against companies like Netflix, which compete with them in video services, simply by refusing to relieve network congestion caused by external traffic requested by their very own ISP customers. And the effects victimize not only companies targeted but ALL incoming traffic from the affected transit network. The report proves the problem is not technical, but rather a result of business decisions. This is not technically a Net neutrality problem, but it creates the very same headaches for consumers, and unfair business advantages for ISPs. In an accompanying article, Crawford makes a compelling case for FCC intervention.
The question people should be asking, how come in Eastern European countries internet access is so cheap and fast, yet barely regulated? It's so easy to argue for more regulation when things go wrong: trying to control businesses always sounds like a more noble idea than settings them free. And yet, in every possible example we see that where there's more freedom of enterprise, the customer always wins. And this is especially obvious with ISPs.
And the answer is simple: The local ISPs in the US are granted a monopoly by the local government, given special privileges, and given free money. These 3 issues make it hard for new competitors to enter the market.
