If I Were King

Everything you do online gets logged. Every mail you send, every website you visit, every download, and every search. Nobody much cares most of the time, but the data is there. And by “most of the time” we’re talking about way beyond 99.999% of the time. Why do we keep logs? So we can figure out how well we’re doing, and figure out what happened when something goes wrong.

But the devil is in the details, and not everyone that logs is doing it for the betterment of mankind, or even to improve their service to mankind. More worrisome than that is when statist thugs get their hands on the data. There is at least one journalist in prison in China because Yahoo divulged information from their logs. Last year AOL released bulk search logs to researchers and several reporters quickly took a look and were able to track specific searches to specific searchers. The year before, the witlings in the Bush Justice Department demanded bulk data from AOL, Google, MSN, and Yahoo in hopes of justifying the need for their ineffective Child Online Protection Act, then under constitutional challenge by the ACLU. (AOL, MSN, and Yahoo all admitted turning over some data, allegedly purged of user identification of any kind, Google balked.) If you were searching for Viagra, or the history of nuclear explosives, would you want this known?

Plucky Ask.com, once known as Ask Jeeves, hoping to grow their fourth-place position in the search industry, is betting that you might not. As of today, there is a new item at the upper right corner of the ask.com search window, the text “AskEraser”. Click on it and you can turn the new feature on, which means your search will be deleted as soon as you finish it.

I’m so used to Google (my first choice since I switched from AltaVista years ago, and the choice of about 60% of all searchers) that I doubt I’ll switch. Google and Microsoft purge their search logs after 18 months, Yahoo after 13, I’d be a lot more comfortable if they all purged them after three.

In the meantime, maybe I’ll give Ask.com a spin. I don’t have anything to hide in my searches, but I’m not sure I’d want to have to explain them to anyone either. If I Were King, you can bet there are plenty of folks who would like to know what I was thinking, AskEraser might be a better solution than drawing and quartering those who got too nosy.

Over the last few years, the subject of “net neutrality” has waxed and waned in the media. Exactly what the phrase means seems to change at times.

Things came into focus when AT&T chairman Ed Whitacre, Jr said, “For a Google or a Yahoo or a Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes for free is nuts!” in a a Business Week interview in November of 2005. Gosh, Ed, what’s the matter? Did you think Google was connecting to the internet for free? In the same interview he said, “They don’t have any fiber out there. They don’t have any wires. They don’t have anything. They use my lines for free — and that’s bull.” Well Ed, what you said is bull. Google has fiber, they have wires, and it’s really unlikely that they don’t pay their bills. They don’t use your wires or your fiber, your paying clients use your wires and your fiber, and if they choose to use those connections to search the web with Google or Yahoo, so what? If you wanted to create the best search engine on earth back at the turn of the century, I never heard of it, and I certainly never heard that anyone stopped you.

So the telcos don’t like the fact that Google is making more money (or at least has a larger market cap) than they do. Poor babies!

Apparently they wish to come up with a system where they can double-dip when one of their clients, who is already paying the full price for their connection, chooses to connect to a really popular site. I guess I should be glad I don’t run any really popular sites!

But it doesn’t stop with just wanting to find a way to collect from certain big destinations online. They also want to control what flavor of bits you send back and forth, specifically which ports you use. In this context, “they” means the public-facing bandwidth providers, which includes notably-vocal bully AT&T but also other telcos and the cable companies.

When ISPs started blocking port 25, I actually agreed with them once I figured out how to deal with it. That’s the unsecured SMTP port, and leaving it open is an invitation to spam. The way to work around it is to, when possible, use an SMTP server on that network, as most users can easily do when at home, and to use a secured SMTP server on another port when traveling. Unfettered access to port 25 is part of the spam problem, and there are better solutions. For good and sufficient technical reasons, many operators are blocking port 25.

However, many ISPs are now blocking VOIP ports. There’s nothing dangerous or insecure about VOIP, and no benefit to the public in blocking it. No, here it’s simply a matter of the ISP selling you bandwidth, then telling you if you want to use VOIP you have to sign up and pay again to use their VOIP system, becuase they’re going to stop you from using any other. If I’m paying Comcast for a certain level of bandwidth, and I decide to start using VOIP to cut down on my phone bill, I fully intend to choose from all available VOIP providers to handle those calls. (Note: I don’t use VOIP, but my mother does.) If Comcast’s charges are higher than Vonage, I just might choose to use Vonage, and it’s none of Comcast’s business. Remember, in this hypothetical situation I’m already paying Comcast to carry my bits back and forth to the internet, there’s no reason for me to pay more because those bits represent phone calls and not dirty pictures.

Watch for the same thing to happen with video downloads. When a telco or cable provider offers a video download service, more power to them, as long as they don’t build that business by blocking their paying customers from choosing any other video download service.

So Here’s what I think needs to be done, two rules that should control this market:

1. Anyone selling internet access is selling capacity between their customer and the internet “cloud”. They should be able to sell this in any quantity at any price that is agreeable to both provider and customer. Slow, medium, fast, or headspinning. But they must understand that they only have one customer. Demanding cash from Google or Yahoo for bandwidth their clients have already paid for is extortion.

2. It’s none of their business what lawful use their clients use that capacity for. There are good technical reasons to block port 25, as mentioned, and port 22 is rarely used and carries some risks as well, so block those as long as that is clearly disclosed up front. But they must never block their clients’ access for marketing reasons or to block competitors.

If I were king, I’d like to think we wouldn’t even need to write that down, it’s common sense. The ISP that serves me now (the greatest ISP I know of, actually) doesn’t need me to tell them how to do their job, they get it right to start with. But there are some greedy cretins in the game that apparently need the obvious explained and legislated.

Early this week I got a message from John Hall, the congresscritter from New York’s 19th district. The subject line read, “The Hall Report: I Want to Hear From You”. John, I doubt that very much, you lowlife spamming weasel.

The message was addressed to one of my administrative accounts with the name Brian Guerra. For all I know, Brian is one of Hall’s constituents. I haven’t corresponded with Brian for years, the address that Hall sent his newsletter to was, in fact, once Brian’s address at Quotes of the Day. I bought that site from Brian in 2000. As Hall has only been in office for a year, there’s simply no way that he legitimately got that address with that name associated with it. There’s no way that he legitimately got that address at all.

So I went to Hall’s website to share a piece of my mind. The mailing was political speech, and I adamantly oppose any attempts to limit or censor such communication. I also think that any elected official that demonstrates his sense of ethics and concern for the electorate by sending spam to people 3,000 miles outside his district should be promptly defeated, and I told him that in a feedback form.

He wasn’t impressed. In fact, he didn’t get the message. Within two minutes I got this in my e-mail:

Thank you for contacting my office and/or subscribing to my e-newsletter. You have received this automatically generated reply because the House computer system has been unable to confirm that your address is in the 19th Congressional District of New York. Unfortunately, Congressional rules prohibit me from using official Congressional funds to initiate communications with anyone outside my district.

That compounds his sin. He not only feels he has the right to interrupt my day with his message, but he has a system that makes sure he doesn’t get interrupted by my message to him.

If I were king, there wouldn’t be any congress, but there’s no reason to wait for that happy day to get this loser out of any position of responsibility. If you’re in the 19th district of New York, come September you’ll have the chance to bounce him in the primary, and if that fails, come November you’ll have the chance to retire him in favor of someone from another party. I hope you do, it will give him time to pursue a career more in keeping with his intelligence. Something along the lines of stocking paper clips in an office-supply warehouse.