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[ NNSquad ] Re: FCC Hearing tomorrow (Monday, 25-02-2008)

Hi, I think that we do still have different views on this, but I appreciate the professionalism of your response. It looks as though nnsquad@ was dropped from the CC list, I am re-including it as I am assuming that was an oversight (or maybe my MTA having excitement while passing it though some procmail -- long story), I hope that is OK with you.


On Feb 25, 2008, at 6:19 PM, Brett Glass wrote:

At 03:50 PM 2/25/2008, Warren Kumari wrote:

Can you please explain how Vuze is "attempting to take bandwidth from
me and other ISPs, without compensation, rather than paying for it."?


Simple. They are attempting to set up servers on our network without
permission or compensation. That's stealing.

Well, I guess that we see things a little differently -- they *do* have permission, your users granted them that permission when they installed their software. There is also compensation -- your users get to watch content in exchange for some of their upload bandwidth.

Your users are even aware of the fact that Vuze uses PtP stuff:
"The new commercial-grade platform is supported by powerful peer- sharing technology, enabling its vast global community the ability to browse, share, search and discover unique multimedia entertainment in a high-resolution format."

Now, seeing as you have explicitly denied your users the right to run servers in your TOS, it means that your users aren't allowed to grant it to Vuze -- this means that your users are violating your TOS (not Vuze), and you should be annoyed with your users, and not Vuze....


Your users *have* already paid you for their bandwidth, its theirs to
do with what they like (within the terms of the AUP that they
(presumably) agreed to when they signed up).


Our AUP (actually, we call the document our Terms of Service) for
residential users prohibits them from setting up servers. We set
prices based on those users' likely consumption. If we had to assume
that those users would be saturating their allocated bandwidth, we
would be forced to raise prices by at least 50%. In other words, it
would be no deal for those users.

If you have not
specifically excluded something like "servers",


We have.

and defined servers to
be something like "providing content to to others",


We have a better and clearer definition, since "providing content to
others" might be construed to include such things as e-mail.


Yup, that was going to be one of my examples, but I took it out...


then your users
are using their bits an a way that seems reasonable to them (and if
you have excluded them from providing content to others, you will have
had to write your contract in a very careful way, so that they can
still post photos to MySpace, video to YouTube and make phone- calls to
granny). 

Believe me, we've given it a lot of thought.

I am unclear how what Vuze is doing is any different to, for example,
one of your users automatically checking mail, other than the
direction and quantity of data.

They are setting up a server machine on our network.

Nope, your USERS are setting up a server on your network -- if Vuze snuck in with a 1U box and hooked it up to your Ethernet, installed some software (without your users permission, and without explaining that this would use your users upload capacity), etc, then I would agree with you.

Just like a
"spambot" or "zombie," which likewise does the bidding of a third
party using the ISP's bandwidth. Ironically, the users don't realize
that after they have done the download their machine will use
hundreds of times MORE bandwidth distributing the content on
behalf of the content provider.


Yup, explain to them that they are not allowed to do this, and why....


If you don't like this, you can:
A: Educate Anne on the  evils of her giving away something that she
has paid for

She hasn't paid for it.

Ok, if your TOS says that Anne cannot run servers, and you have defined servers to include Vuze, clearly explaining to Anne how her actions are violating the TOS, and that the TOS exists so that you can continue to provide her service is a reasonable way to start. If Anne continues to give away something that you have explicitly told her isn't hers, you can enforce your TOS by terminating her service. In all of the time that I worked for a smallish ISP, I only had one instance where clearly explaining the reasons behind our AUP / TOS didn't work nicely (and it turned out that that user was a evil spammer who had gone through 4 or 5 ISPs in the area). We were a small, community ISP, and had good relations with out customers -- explaining that we were doing the best we could to keep providing them service at the current price and explaining how they could help out made our users feel like part of a community.,,


B: Change you AUP to disallow this activity and enforce your AUP. 

We do that. The FCC is being urged, by Vuze and others, to strike
down those terms of our AUP, at which point we would have 3 choices:
Raise prices; go to metered billing; or quit business, leaving a
duopoly behind and many users suddenly without any service.

Ah, the other option is terminating the users who continue to violate your TOS -- they are the ones that are using all your bandwidth, and will presumably:
A: continue to do so, thereby costing your competitors more than they make (if they are not costing more then that pay, don't terminate them :-))
B: Realize that the other providers have done something to make it so that they cannot do PtP -- this will likely annoy them so much that the realize just how good they had it with you and wiull be happy to come back.


C: Impose bandwidth caps on your users and cut them off / charge them
for going over the limit.

We already do impose some caps. But because we want Web pages and other
legitimate content to be delivered in a timely way, imposing a flat
cap would not work. Anything that would stop P2P from costing us more than
the user is paying us would also slow Web browsing to a crawl. So, we'd
have to shape, and do it very cleverly. Of course, Vuze et al are asking
the FCC to ban this.

Depends on implementation -- I do not know how you are currently granting access to your network -- if you are doing something like RADIUS, you could use accounting to monitor each accounts usage and, depending on how exciting you want to get, punt them into a walled garden with a serious ratelimit until they agree to conform to your AUP, or just turn off their service until they do so (in exactly the same way you would if they stopped paying their bill, got infected with Slammer, etc). If you are not doing RADIUS, you should be able to, with some work, collect Netflow, correlate that with your user records and perform accounting that way... Having NO idea how your network is built, this may be trivial, it may be really hard.... I have done this in a previous life, and if you are interested in chatting about it, let me know.



D: Increase your pricing to cover the additional costs.

Anti-consumer. Why should we charge everyone more because a third party
company (Vuze) is abusing our network?

Ah, you don't. You explain to your users that they are buying a service that doesn't allow things like Vuze. If they want to do something like Vuze, you will upsell them to this other rate plan that provides them with the following features. You then set the rate for the upgraded service to be high enough to cover your costs, and, depending how philosophically opposed you are to you users doing something PtP like, high enough that your users will balk at it...

I also still do not view it as Vuze abusing your network. If Apache allows one of your users to download and install a webserver on their PC, are you going to be annoyed with Apache or with your user? Or, maybe a better example is if one of your users suddenly decided that they will be a CPAN mirror, who do you shout at? If your user claims that they didn't know that this is not acceptable, you would probably explain to them why your TOS prohibits such behavior, and if they continue ti violate your TOS, you would be forced to enforce it..



E: Block access to these services. 

We already have many colleagues who block or throttle P2P. But as you
can see, this isn't acceptable to Vuze et al, who are asking the FCC
to PROHIBIT measures that would keep them from taking our bandwidth.
That's the ironic thing. During the entire hearing, no one pointed out
the baldfaced GREED of Vuze and BitTorrent. They want a legal mandate
to take our bandwidth. I believe that there's a historical precedent
in which governments gave papers to pirates authorizing them to commit
piracy against ships of other countries. (I believe that the term for
these was "letters of marque.") But given that the government is
supposed to be in favor of broadband deployment, why would it want to
issue authorizations to third parties to prey on them?

I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be confrontational, but I still believe
that, once your customers have paid for bandwidth, they can sit there
trolling for pictures of kittens, set up a massive cluster if
Seti@home machines or trade some outgoing bandwidth for the ability to
watch streaming video...

They haven't paid for bandwidth for Vuze to use. If they want it, I suppose
that we could arrange a price -- but given how many resources P2P uses, it
would probably be more than the user would want to pay to subsidize an
already profitable company.

Yup, and that is fine -- if your TOS says that they cannot do Blah, and they continue to do Blah, you are free to sell them a service that will allow Blah at a prohibitive price point, or tell them to go to $OTHER_PROVIDER.

I fully understand that Vuze / PtP throws the standard model of a user out the window, but if it is not acceptable to you and your network (if I were running your network it would probably not be acceptable to me), and is denied by your TOS, then it is your USERS who are stealing, not Vuze.

Anyway, I respect your viewpoint (although I don't agree with it) and once again thank you for responding in a clear, rational and professional manner (this is mainly aimed at those who don't...)

W

--Brett Glass