Re: The Real Congressional Agenda? (was Re: [IP] The House of Representatives on campus downloading)

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Steven M. Bellovin" <smb@cs.columbia.edu>
Date: May 6, 2007 2:47:38 PM EDT
To: dave@farber.net
Subject: Re: The Real Congressional Agenda? (was Re: [IP] The House  
of Representatives on campus downloading)

On Fri, 4 May 2007 20:59:58 -0400
David Farber <dave@farber.net> wrote:

> In a sense, we are in the crosshairs now. Because we are in
> a university town, and our local university is cracking down
> on music and software piracy, people who engage in these
> activities are migrating off of the University network and
> asking us for service. They are also going to hotspots which
> we provide for businesses, attempting to monopolize the
> bandwidth at those locations. (We have been forced to employ
> anti-hogging and anti-piracy measures to keep them from doing
> so.)
>
> Abuses by these people and the software they host threaten to
> cripple our service. Ironically, the University, with its
> government-funded link to Internet2, could shoulder the load
> far better than we can with our more expensive bandwidth. We
> try to encourage these people to patronize our competitors
> (the cable and telephone monopolies) to avoid the problem.
> But ultimately, something must give. We can't afford to host
> illegal activity or to allow our networks to be monopolized
> by it when so many of our users have legal, important work
> to do.
I think you need to distinguish between bandwidth consumption -- or
overconsumption -- and illegality.  While I agree that most of the
bandwidth use you report is probably the result of illegal
file-sharing, there are many legitimate uses for the same technology.
Among the entities that use BitTorrent are NASA
(http://opensource.arc.nasa.gov/software.jsp?id=13), Red Hat Fedora
(http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/), NetBSD
(http://www.netbsd.org/mirrors/#bittorrent), and -- ironically --
Time-Warner
(http://www.timewarner.com/corp/newsroom/pr/0,20812,1192450,00.html).

To me, then, your note poses several questions.

	Does the Internet need deployed QoS?  (There's been a lot
	of work on general QoS, but this is a special case.)

	Is there an inherent problem with wireless, or at least
	with the type of wireless you use?  (You've stated elsewhere
	that you run a wireless ISP.)  Alternatively, is the problem
	that your network is underprovisioned for the load your
	customers?  In that case, is the problem economic -- the
	market won't let you charge enough to cover your costs?
	If there's a market problem, could there or should there
	be some intervention to correct it?  Or is there some
	technical shortcoming in your ability to do traffic-shaping
	or usage-sensitive pricing, in which case innovation may solve
	your problem?

	Should ISPs (including the university in its role as an
	ISP for faculty, staff, and students) have the responsbility
	for proactively blocking illegal traffic?  If so, how can
	they distinguish between, say, a stolen Time-Warner movie
	and the legitimate copy that's being redistributed via
	BitTorrent at Time-Warner's explicit request?

	Do we give up one of the fundamental tenets of the Internet
	architeture, the notion that endpoints determine what
	traffic flows, rather than the center?  In this regard,
	it is worth remembering that the three most radical Internet
	innovations -- the Web, Napster, and Skype -- came not from
	ISPs, "official" standards bodies (i.e., the IETF or the
	ITU), or major research labs or universities, but from the
	edges of the Net.  (Yes, I know that CERN is a major research
	lab, but for physics!)

These, I think, are the real questions we need to discuss.

		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb


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