Use ‘Regulatory Restraint’ on Network Management, Rep. Bono Mack Says

Network managers need the “flexibility and agility” to take “lawful” steps to prevent infringement over their networks and reduce strain “before it starts,” by reducing P2P traffic, Bono Mack said. ISPs haven’t “suddenly found religion” on intellectual property in exploring the use of filtering, Bono Mack said. “A very small minority” of Internet users, less than 5 percent, are consuming the vast majority of bandwidth, which drags down Web surfing, e-mail and other network uses, she said. Networks should be “free to experiment with and develop” antipiracy technology to “recoup” bandwidth and piracy losses, and the federal government should show “regulatory restraint” on the issue -- likely a reference to the FCC’s investigation of “reasonable network management” policies. The “political populism” of critics must not force out the “practicality” of property rights and the growth of the Internet, she said.

Bono Mack rattled off several figures about losses to piracy, including $7 billion in the U.S. each year: “You talk about an economic stimulus package -- look at these numbers” and what eliminating them would mean. She blamed “euphoria” around companies that have benefited from not stopping users from sharing copyrighted content, and their venture capital backers, for making it “difficult” to explain piracy’s consequences. Failure to protect IP is what keeps “many of the world’s economies in poverty.” Turning around a complaint often made by fair-use advocates, Bono Mack said lawmakers often don’t understand the Internet, pointing to a former committee chairman’s failure to recognize the iPod carried by a peer. Microsoft and Amazon.com need to protect their IP in software and Web services the same as bands need to protect their songs, she said.

Mike Nelson, visiting professor of communication, culture and technology at Georgetown University, faulted Bono Mack from the audience as not taking into account fair use. “There seems to be no downside to increasing intellectual property protection as much as you want” in her view, he said. Nelson asked in rapid succession if she'd support a doubling or tripling of penalties for piracy, or even a factor of 10 increase, and each time Bono Mack said she supported the PRO-IP Act, which would dramatically raise statutory limits for infringement (WID Dec 14 p2). She defended her late husband’s copyright extension bill, often seen as a sop to the entertainment industry. “No, I do not support eternal copyright,” she told Nelson, but the extension bill was “fair.”

Bono Mack said her children have downloaded illegally through Kazaa, and she once “slammed on the brakes” during a car ride when her daughter said she was going to download a song they had heard on the radio. The girl eventually paid for the track. There is “plenty of blame to go around” for children’s thinking they don’t need to pay for content online, and it’s “shortsighted” to blame the government, she said. Congress should exert authority over evolving business models online through oversight, not legislation, Bono Mack said. -- Greg Piper

State of the Net Notebook…

Verizon won’t be following AT&T anytime soon into testing copyright filtering on its network, Tom Tauke, executive vice president of public affairs-policy and communications, told the State of the Net conference Wednesday. The company respects intellectual property rights but also customer privacy, and “we really don’t want to assume the role of… policemen,” he said, calling Verizon “wary” and “fearful” of filtering. Once it’s filtering for copyright, it may be asked to filter offshore Internet gambling and porn, he said. The notice and takedown regime under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act works “virtually all the time” for Verizon, he said. The carriers are working on a “conduct code” for broadband network management practices that could weed out “bad actors,” so the government shouldn’t usurp them with net neutrality legislation or regulations, Tauke said. The FCC can use its “moral authority” to press the carriers to adhere to earlier frameworks, such as ex-Chairman Michael Powell’s four freedoms, he said. -- GP

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NTT America demonstrated an IPv6-based Earthquake Early Warning System at Wednesday’s State of the Net Conference. The system, built for Japan, alerts people about tremors 10- 20 seconds before they strike. Twenty seconds doesn’t sound like much but studies show it makes a difference, said NTTA Vice President Kazuhiro Gomi in an interview. “If you are in the kitchen, you can shut down all the fires, and if you're in a dangerous zone you can quickly get away from that place and hide yourself from anything hazardous.” The technology works because data moves over fiber faster than an earthquake’s waves course through the ground, he said. In Japan, NTT detects quakes with Japan Meteorological Agency sensors and then sends IPv6 devices messages detailing the scale and timing of a tremor. The alert system can be used for disasters other than earthquakes, provided there are sensors to detect them, said Chris Davis, NTTA product marketing director. Such a wide scale alert system wouldn’t be practical in IPv4, Gomi said. IPv4 has multicast capabilities, but they were added on later and most ISPs haven’t turned them on, he said. “Even though you [can] send out the multicast packets on IP version 4, the chances are the packets are dropped all over the place.” Another problem is the network address translator (NAT) IPv4 requires to sustain the growing number of Internet capable devices, he said. “NAT is a good solution as long as you're just doing e-mailing or Web surfing,” he said, but it doesn’t let a central server reach out directly to an end point device, he said. NTTA is present at State of the Net to show IPv6 to government agencies that must implement the network protocol to satisfy a 2005 mandate requiring government agencies to implement the next-generation network protocol by June. NTT America sells a dual-stack IPv6 network that supports IPv4, Davis said. Offering backward compatibility is important, he said: “In the short term, I don’t think we see the U.S. government switching their networks to IP version 6 and all the sudden running up a whole different protocol,” Davis said. “There will be revenue from IPv6 transit,” but the government will keep legacy systems and applications that need the old version, he said.