[ NNSquad ] Re: Net Neutrality vs. Illegal Acts

[Robert Oliver <rlo-nnsquad@olivers.us>]

Brett Glass wrote:

At 09:30 PM 3/21/2008, Bob Frankston wrote:
 
  

C'mon -- what does P2P's legality matter then? Why do you mention it at all?
    

Because it emphasizes the fact that P2P IS NOT NECESSARY. It's not necessary
for free speech. It's not necessary to give users access to ANY service or
content. It is only SOMEWHAT useful to thieves who want to cover their tracks
(and if they knew better, they'd know that they can still be found). In short,
it is not necessary for ANY legal purpose; blocking it or prohibiting it would
only thwart illegal activities. And for that reason, it is not only perfectly 
reasonable but a good idea to block and prohibit it.

--Brett Glass

  

Wine is not necessary. Dancing is not necessary. Beautiful architecture is not necessary (witness the US in the 60s and 70s). Automobiles are not necessary (they are in the suburbs they created, but those suburbs are not necessary). In fact, humans existed perfectly well without the Internet at all, thank you, for thousands of years. The Internet is not necessary. If you were King, would you ban them since they are not necessary for free speech? (No, since you'd be banning your ISP business.)

Note that freedom of the press is not necessary for free speech either; one can stand on a street corner and talk. So how do you decide which methods of free speech are to be protected? Do you randomly choose one, such as standing on the street corner, then ban the rest, such as newspapers? Our founding fathers and our courts think not.

Now that we've established the fact that one does not simply ban things because they are not necessary, let's take a look at your premise that it is "only SOMEWHAT useful" and only "to thieves" and that blocking it would "only thwart illegal activities."

You seem to be assuming that the "things" you are talking about downloading with P2P are such things as large copyrighted files. Things like music files, commercial software or movies. P2P is not "necessary" to accomplish this; http or ftp can be used to accomplish the same thing.

First let's remember the case of public domain large files: remember that all of these large files will eventually have their copyrights expire and become public domain. It will be completely legal to download all Beatles tracks for free some day, unless the laws are changed (again). Second, using ftp or http to download from a site presumes that the "source" has a big enough bandwidth pipe to support all the downloads. "But wait," I hear you say, "all the legal sites like iTunes and Sony and CBS have plenty big pipes!" Ignoring possible congestion on specific backbone segments, the real problem with this is that it is flawed in assuming that legal downloads only occur from huge commercial sites.

What if I want to download the latest version of a Linux software distribution invented by a college student in East Timor? He doesn't have a high speed connection to the little server in his parent's house. Plus, there's been an undersea cable cut near Egypt, so the remaining (slow) links are even slower due to congestion. But he's put in such nifty features that the world wants to beat a path to his door. His connection is flooded -- and his local ISP is having fits at all the bandwidth use. So this college student fires up BitTorrent and makes the distribution available that way. Pieces of his software are stored on torrent servers around the world. People can now download more efficiently, locally. In fact, the latest version of Verizon P4P software (this is in the future, mind you; did I mention that?) prefers to download locally and save all the ISPs the cost of higher backbone traffic. Eventually, the student even shuts down his BitTorrent sever, since his software is replicated elsewhere. His local ISP is happy. All the other ISPs are happy (well, the ones that run DSL or fiber to the premises; shared media cable companies aren't happy, but most of them saw the err of their ways long ago and started re-architecting their networks; others fell on hard times are now considered the "cheap Internet" tier like dial-up used to be). The Internet is happy because the congested Internet backbone links aren't flooded anymore with people downloading ET Linux (the cables will be repaired soon, luckily).

As an unrelated ironic end-note, I'd say that this situation probably won't happen because this college student of the future in East Timor will have higher bandwidth than US citizens of the future, since the FCC here has done a horrible job compared to countries like Japan and South Korea. And the FCC shows no signs of changing, since it would mean eliminating the duopoly they've protected.