Nielsen, others to rate Internet, related RISKS [while the premise re MS may be faulty the issue of

[Dave Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>]

Date: Thu, 18 May 1995 17:05:20 -0700
From: Mark Seecof <marks@news.latimes.com>
Subject: Nielsen, others to rate Internet, related RISKS


In an article by Susan Carey headlined "Three Market Researchers Team Up to
Provide Data for On-Line Services" the Wall Street Journal reported on page
B7, Wednesday 17 May 1995, that ``Three of the nation's leading
market-research concerns have teamed up to develop research services for the
on-line world.''


(Errors in the following summary may be M. Seecof's fault.)  Since measuring
``hit rates'' on WWW pages and like resources isn't a very effective or very
informative method of measuring interest or usage (especially with large
ISP's planning to cache data from popular servers to improve response time
to their customers--effectively masking such usage from the real
providers--and, BTW, the copyright and other issues here deserve a separate
discussion to which I hope to contribute at another time), Neilsen Media
Research (yes, the TV ratings folks), Yankelovich Partners, and ASI Market
Research plan to develop and deploy means of measuring first WWW and later
other kinds of Internet resource usage and provide such information to
clients.  Their joint venture is called ANYwhere Online.


(The article did NOT say...) I think this is interesting.  Ideally, one
wants data not just from servers instrumented by ANYwhere Online
(hereinafter ANY-O) but from other servers as well.  In the TV world,
Neilsen measures usage of all servers (TV stations/videotape) by a sample of
the client population and extrapolates by statistical inference to usage by
the whole client population.  One could certainly do this in the Internet
world.  But consider another tactic.  One could instrument Internet routers
or links and measure traffic to various destinations.  I suspect that Bill
Gates intends to instrument UUNET/AlterNet's backbone to gather data on his
competitors.  For a fee, he could provide a digest of such information to
ANY-O (or anyone).  Other commercial ISP's could do likewise.  This kind of
traffic analysis could be exploited for commercial or other purposes.  I
look forward to learning from ANY-O whether they will use TV/
radio-measuring tactics, data from selected servers, data from backbone
traffic analysis, or some combination.


I would like to point out what I see as a big RISK for people who don't want
their traffic analyzed (whether for personal, or commercial-competitive
reasons): no current commercial ISP promises NOT to collect and sell
information about net usage by customers.  We can use end-to-end encryption
(e.g., PGP) to limit content snooping by ISP's but typical public-access or
commercial services, via e.g., WWW protocols use cleartext.  Even if we
expect the quantity of such traffic to hamper content-snoops, traffic
analysis by or with the cooperation of ISP's could have grave competitive or
privacy implications.  I think that commercial Internet users should demand
privacy clauses in their contracts with ISP's *NOW*, because tomorrow it'll
be too late.


Mark Seecof <marks@latimes.com>  My employer may not share my opinions.


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