A Series of Tubes: Infrastructure, Broadband, and Baseline Content Control

February 11

The late Senator Ted Stevens famously said in a 2006 committee meeting that the “Internet is not something that you just dump something on; it’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes.” While he was ridiculed widely at the time, Senator Stevens’s remarks actually reveal an interesting hortatory description of what the Internet should be (though given the rest of his comments, apparently not one that he intended). What Stevens’s metaphor suggests is that the physical conduits of the Internet should act like nothing more than non-judgmental conduits of the rest of the world’s traffic. We will see this week, however, that this is not a true reflection of how the tubes work, and we have strong debates as to what the government's role should be in ensuring that large enough "tubes" reach all those who would like to be online. The big questions for this week: What are the “tubes” of the Internet? Should the tubes have a role in controlling the throughput content? What is the role of government when it comes to developing and regulating our Internet-tubes?

Readings

Comparing and measuring connectivity

• The Berkman Center, How Do We Connect To The Internet? (about 7 mins., watch all)

• Yochai Benkler, Next Generation Connectivity (executive summary and introduction only)

What is the role of government?

• Wikipedia, Net Neutrality

• Marvin Ammori, The Net Neutrality Battle Has Been Lost, But Now We Can Finally Win the War

• Berin Szoka and Geoffrey Manne, The Feds Lost on Net Neutrality, But Won Control of the Internet

• Daniel Solove, Interview with Dawn Nunziato on her book Virtual Freedom

• Susan Crawford, remarks at the 2013 National Conference on Media Reform

• Adam Thierer, More Confusion about Internet “Freedom” (Tech Liberation)

Optional Readings

• Sam Biddle, How to Destroy the Internet (Gizmodo)

• Ethan Zuckerman & Andrew McLaughlin, Introduction to Internet Architecture and Institutions

• Rob Faris and Rebekah Heacock, Measuring Internet Activity: a (Selective) Review of Methods and Metrics (pages 3-9)

• Ed Felten, Taking Ted Stevens Seriously

• Jim Cowie, The New Threat: Targeted Internet Traffic Misdirection

Assignment 1

Assignment 1 is due before class today (i.e., February 11th before 5:30pm ET). You can submit the assignment here.

Class Discussion

REMINDER

Your comments must be submitted before 4:00PM ET on the Tuesday we hold class in order to count for participation credit. Please see the participation policy for more information.

Please remember to sign your postings by adding four tildes (~~~~) to the end of your contribution. This will automatically add your username and the date/time of your post, like so: Andy 15:12, 7 November 2013 (EST)

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My personal opinions of net neutrality and connectivity became muddled as I read through this week’s reading. My initial viewpoint supported open access and little/no regulation. Data shows that the top countries that meet the benchmarks defined by Benkler (penetration, capacity, and price) establish an open access community and let competition be the harbinger of innovation. The US also got to its current internet state via open access and has since became the middle of the pack once it restricted open access when the FCC abandoned Telecommunications Act of 1996 in 2001 and 2002. If we restrict open access, and information/broadband companies hold monopolies (like Comcast), why should they improve their services since the end game always ends up being a question of efficient profits? However, my opinion on how the government should be involved once I watched Susan Crawford give her remarks at the 2013 National Conference on Media Reform. While her words seemed to agree with my formed opinions on open access and connectivity, her solution focused on using the power of the government to instate infrastructure similar to how highways and telecommunications became ubiquitous. This left me with the question (which everyone seems to have and why this is hotly debated) of how much regulation should be instituted by the government and other regulatory bodies? Although a n00b in this area, my take away thoughts are that some body must exisit to deliver open connectivity and access to the people. The only way to meet Benkler Benchmarks are to develop innovative strategies and technologies - new materials and information delivery systems - to drive down cost, which will increase capacity penetration. This will require that the government invest in science and engineering research and set benchmarks to ensure that the correct infrastructure is provided to achieve this benchmarks. Private funding is also an option, but private institutions usually have a mission that is company driven and not “we the people” driven.

Margorm 11:03, 9 February 2014 (EST)

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While working on Assignment One and doing the readings this week on Net neutrality, I have been left with a lot of confusion as to how much regulation I find appropriate. On one hand, I think the internet, as with the spoken word, should be unrestricted to allow freedom of speech and communication. In this age, there are forums for people to express themselves, learn extensively about every possible interest, exchange information and news immediately, and connect to others from around the world in a way never before seen in history. There are now outlets and communities for all-- no longer are people isolated. While that might be troublesome from a standpoint of privacy, in my opinion an issue just as pressing arises dealing with unrestricted hate language. With the internet providing a barrier between individuals, hateful language is easy to disperse as there is no immediate visible repercussion. People are allowed to hide behind their computers and anonymity, sometimes spewing shocking, racist, sexist or otherwise offensive language just to incite anger and controversy (this behavior is often referred to as "trolling"). With school systems and the like actively taking a stand against bullying, should internet bullying also be restricted? Whose responsibility is it to ensure the safety (mental, emotional, physical) of the public who use the internet-- the website itself? The government? Some other agency which is set up to police the internet? Or would things be more fair if a simple internet ID was implemented, which identified users so that they were held responsible for their postings? I would tend to go with the last option, so as not to actually implement a rule of neutrality, which would be restricting free speech and infringing upon basic human rights. Castille 00:14, 8 February 2014 (EST)

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I've been a Wikipedian for a long time, although not recently. One of the interesting things to look at in the context of Wikipedia is the deletionist/inclusionist divide (I think the deletionists have basically won). I wrote the original article on this subject on Wikipedia, and I thought some of you might find it interesting: Deletionism and Inclusionism in Wikipedia. I was the original author of this article (I'm Tarinth on Wikipedia) and it has an interesting history as an article, in that there was a fairly concerted attempt to have the article deleted as soon as I had created it. For further background on the subject, the following is an NPR interview I gave on the topic back in 2007: "Marked for Deletion"

My general feeling about Wikipedia: to move beyond casual editing, you need to become part of what amounts to a technological priesthood, and you have to fall in line with the prevailing philosophy to succeed at that. (Nevertheless, I do think Wikipedia is really awesome and super-useful, and it'll be fun to make some edits to an article again) Jradoff 10:31, 8 February 2014 (EST)

Thanks for sharing! As I'm sure you know, Wikimedia is trying to break down the technological barriers to entry, but the normative social order and its impact on edits is an interesting issue to explore more. Andy 14:15, 9 February 2014 (EST)

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In both the first and second lecture, someone had mentioned that Wikipedia isn't accepted by universities as an acceptable source. To be fair, this isn't a problem with Wikipedia, because universities will ordinarily not accept Britannia as a source either. This is because these are both "tertiary sources," and in academic writing, you need to use either primary sources (original documents, etc.) or secondary sources (peer-reviewed articles, journalistic articles, etc.). Jradoff 10:44, 8 February 2014 (EST)

As I mentioned during the last class, Wikipedia has a pretty good page detailing the various studies conducted to test the reliability of Wikipedia. I think your point about tertiary sources is exactly right, and at least with Wikipedia (if people are following the guidelines in articles) you should be able to drive to those primary and secondary sources. And, of course, if you find an issue with Wikipedia, fix it! :-) Andy 14:12, 9 February 2014 (EST)

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I had a discussion about Wikipedia with my wife and two sons while waiting for my flight from Changi Airport, Singapore, to Manila, Philippines, awhile ago. To my surprise, both my sons were aware of the problems with Wikipedia. They noted that while some of the citations were good, at least 50% was either crap or had broken links. They don't use Wikipedia seriously but scavenge its sites as a quick way of finding references from good citations.

Ichua 12:48, 9 February 2014 (EST)

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ROLE OF GOVERNMENT AND NEW TECHNOLOGIES IN INTERNET CONNECTIVITY CASE STUDY: SINGAPORE

The Ministry of Education and the Infocomm Development Authority had developed a set of specifications which e-learning vendors like my company must fulfill in terms of internet bandwidth, especially in national emergencies such as SARS, when schools are required to close to avoid spread of a virus, etc. In such cases, students are required to continue their studies online at home. To ensure requirements on internet access times are met, server load tests were carried out based on simulations for various numbers of concurrent users. We also had a contract with Oracle to work with our engineers and programmers to optimize the Php/MySQL coding. It was money well-spent.

In the past, the hardware was the major limitation. Video server vendors could only promise 50 concurrent users per server. This made connectivity into the internet broadband network too expensive because you need to pay for each server connection plus rack space....until I saw Steve Jobs on Youtube launching the new Mac G4 XServe demonstrating it can deliver video streams to 1000 iMacs. At that time I was working for the government and was the first person to order 2 units of G4 6 months ahead of its anticipated delivery. With 1000 concurrent users possible with the G4 XServe, I quit my job and started my e-learning company a year later in 2000.

Then, we found that the schools' internet bandwidth was the problem. The network in the school could only accomodate 3 classes of 40 students each, or a total of 120 students concurrently accessing our online videos. When there were more than 3 computer labs being used concurrently, all the PC's showed the online video had stalled. This happened to schools which subscribed for only 1 or 2 Mbps internet connectivity with their ISP. Schools using 5 or 10 Mbps had no issue. Over the years, the schools had upgraded their bandwidth connectivity to at least 5 or 10 Mbps. Today, almost all the secondary schools are using our online math program.

Two years ago, I was sourcing for better servers with fast solid-state drives (SSD's). The I/O with the storage devices could also significantly affect the access times, especially for connections to our database. But to our pleasant surprise IBM had produced new hard-disks that were even faster than SSD's! Subsequent server load tests we carried out showed significant improvement in access times with the new machines. Further improvement in access times were also obtained after modifying many segments of our code in consultation with Oracle.

But had the MOE and the schools not been pro-active in improving their internet infrastructure, online learning on a nation-wide scale in schools would not have been possible.

Ichua 14:03, 9 February 2014 (EST)

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WIKIPEDIA EDITING SYNTAX VS HTML

This may not be directly relevant to our coming lecture, but may be helpful for those who intend to add more than just texts to a Wikipedia page. I was wondering how a table or a URL might be added to a Wikipedia page and thought this could be done using HTML. To my pleasant surprise, there is a menu at the top of the edit page in edit mode which allows you to click to insert a table, etc., to minimize coding time. But it was a disappointment to find there is no math equation editor. Help for input of math expressions can be found in this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Displaying_a_formula.

Ichua 22:10, 9 February 2014 (EST)

I finally figured out how to edit special tables from this Wiki help link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Table#Alignment

Ichua 12:12, 10 February 2014 (EST)

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APPRECIATING LSTU-E120

I'm beginning to appreciate the information presented in this course. The guidelines about editing Wikipedia and Assignment 1 exercise can help make Wikipedia a better place. While checking out some Wikipedia sites to assess their use for Assignment 1, I found many places in need of citations. For Assignment 1, I would attempt to search for appropriate citations and add these but if not, I now know how to add the "Citation needed" tag. But I also found citations used that were inappropriate....how do I flag these if I could not find appropriate citations?

Ichua 22:30, 9 February 2014 (EST)

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ONLINE PRE-QUALIFICATION TEST FOR WOULD-BE WIKIPEDIA EDITORS

Perhaps Wikipedia should require would-be editors to thoroughly read its policy and guidelines and make them take a rigorous online test which they need to pass before allowing them to do any edits on Wikipedia.

Ichua 22:40, 9 February 2014 (EST)

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NET NEUTRALITY VS FAIR USE POLICY: BIG BUFFET VS HUNGER RATION

In countries like S. Korea, US, or Singapore, where there are lots of internet bandwidth to spare, it is convenient to implement a net neutrality policy. More than 90% of the population in Singapore live in public housing apartments and all units are now provided with fibre-optic cables. But in the Philippines, the ISPs are greedy corporations and charge high prices for very poor services. They also cheat customers by telling them that they get unlimited access and unlimited surfing but disconnect them when they hit an unspecified MB of data transfers or total access time on a daily basis. Connectivity is typically restored at midnight. This had been my experience with all the ISPs since I moved to Manila for medical school in June 2012. If you come to my condo in Sampaloc, you will see on my desk all variety of routers, modems, and so-called broadband sticks from Globe, Smart, and Sun. PLDT never showed up despite contacting them twice. One reason why internet connectivity was very bad was because users get deliberately disconnected without their knowledge. However, this was all indicated in fine print in contracts which customers signed without reading under a Fair Use Policy. The Fair Use Policy is used to discourage customers from using the internet too much! The amount of MB or total time accessed used to determine service disconnection depends on the computed average MB transferred and average total time accessed. Finally, I decided to return to Singapore every weekend so that I could view the recorded lectures online for my Harvard Extension School coursework. Subsequently, the situation got better when Smart offered a promo of truly free 10-day unlimited access for purchasing their new broadband stick. But after the 10-day period subscription to the service was very expensive. I found it so much cheaper to buy 3 new broadband sticks every month. To my great relief, in August 2013, Smart began to offer a new 4G device for Php 7,000 upfront plus Php 999 for every 30 days of truly unlimited access. I am one of the few lucky guys who got this device as Smart does not sell this in the university belt area. I had to travel more than an hour to Mandaluyong to buy it. This is all very hard to fathom, especially when Smart has a 4G antenna in front of my block.

Ichua 14:30, 10 February 2014 (EST)