As reported by Beet.tv on April 26, 2008, Eric Klinker, CTO of San Francisco-based BitTorrent explains how his company is working closely with Comcast and other ISP’s in solving network traffic issues.

Bandwagons are easy to jump onto. “Net neutrality” is one of them. The idea is that a neutral communications medium is essential to our society - that allowing broadband carriers to control what people see and do online will fundamentally undermine the principles that have made the Internet such a success. To broadband carriers this essentially means that rather than allowing them to manage their networks in order to handle enormous flows of certain types of bandwidth-hogging traffic, they should simply keep adding more network capacity to stay ahead of usage demands or let their networks run less efficiently -  and become clogged if necessary - to serve the higher purpose of equally-imperfect access to the Internet for all.

Many stakeholders on the Internet already have sided with net neutrality. For example, Google is a big proponent. According to Google,

Fundamentally, net neutrality is about equal access to the Internet. In our view, the broadband carriers should not be permitted to use their market power to discriminate against competing applications or content. Just as telephone companies are not permitted to tell consumers who they can call or what they can say, broadband carriers should not be allowed to use their market power to control activities online.

Not surprisingly, broadband carriers see the future of the Internet a bit differently. Here’s a flash animated video from the U.S. based advocacy group, Hands off The Internet, funded by major U.S. carriers, making the point that politicians should not replace network administrators and that government’s role here, properly understood, is not to tell them how to manage their networks - rather, it’s to make sure the customers have alternatives if they’re unhappy with their Internet service.

In a recent development to the ongoing net neutrality debates, the Canadian Association of Internet Providers (CAIP) has filed a formal Application with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), asking the CRTC to stop Bell Canada from rolling out traffic shaping technologies on the network space it sells to CAIP members. Traffic shaping identifies and slows down certain types of Internet packets - usually peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic used for large file transfers - giving priority to other types of data. This is because large file transfers clog the networks, leaving slower connection speeds for others. The CAIP argues, however,

Bell’s traffic shaping measures have impaired the speed and performance of the wholesale ASDL access services that it provides to independent ISPs and other competitors. Data transfer speed is an intrinsic characteristic of a high-speed Internet access service and at the speeds observed by CAIP and its ISP members since Bell’s implementation of traffic shaping measures that are at issue in this Application, [the Gateway Access Service] no longer serves its intended purpose of providing reliable, 24×7 high speed access to Internet content.

Smaller ISPs rightfully are concerned that they won’t be able to live up to promises they’ve made to their customers as resellers, because of the throttling being done by Bell. Plus they want to provide an alternative to Bell’s throttled service by having their networks remain unthrottled, in effect to maintain high speed havens for P2P traffic (n.b. the P2P platform is completely legal).

Nonetheless, the CRTC routinely has taken the position since 1999 that it does not regulate the Internet. The reason is that regulation of new media on the Internet is seen as an inhibitor for growth and likely to put Canada at a competitive disadvantage with the rest of the world. Therefore it seems unlikely that the CRTC is going to step forward now with a position that supports the concept of net neutrality. That type of initiative is going to have to come from parlaiment, not the CRTC.

The real crux of the matter seems to be one of competition and choice in the marketplace, to make sure customers have real alternatives if they are unhappy with their Internet services. In that sense, if Bell is unable or unwilling to work out a technical solution to get P2P traffic back up to speed (e.g. like the network management plan that the Wall Street Journal reports has been worked out between Comcast and BitTorrent regarding similar complaints of P2P traffic being throttled in the U.S.), it should be required to allow re-sellers the ability to obtain wholesale unthrottled access - i.e. to stop throttling what it sells to re-sellers - to let the customer decide the kind of Internet access the customer wishes to use, rather than having that decision entirely “shaped” by Bell.

Thought I would post the Copyright and Trademark FAQ I will be handing out when I speak on “Intellectual Property Rights and Remedies” at the Canadian Special Events and Meetings Expo on April 1, 2008, at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre:

“This session, which is taught at Ryerson University is a veritable guide to copyrights & trademarks in the digital age when you have no idea who is being forwarded or who is cutting and pasting your idea. You will learn about the protection of rights vs. fair dealings; what you need to know to when you create or use intellectual property; practical methods of protecting proposals and ideas and remedies when your rights are violated.”

One of the promises of the Internet is the ability to speak directly to people, thousands or millions at a time, and for them to speak right back. With that in mind, Nine Inch Nails join the growing wave of established recording artists who see record companies as irrelevant. No longer stuck in a conventional record deal, NIN recently have released a 36 track instrumental album called Ghosts, available in various configurations over the Internet, from totally free downloads of nine (of course) sample tracks, to paid downloads of the entire album, to totally expensive box sets fulfilled offline. This is not a promotion. This is a business model. And it doesn’t stop there. Wrapping the project in a Creative Commons license, NIN are inviting fans to collaborate in the creative process and virally promote the music by submitting video interpretations of the music for a YouTube film festival. Here is a sample (by dust062):

Cool. This is what the audience is contributing. What does a record company do exactly? Well, it provides marketing and distribution. Typically that takes the form of radio promotion, video production for television, and getting CD’s and other physical products manufactured and shipped into stores. The record company of course oversees things online as well, but usually more as a gatekeeper than as an authentic force that’s driving sales. Record companies largely are not taste makers any more.

As more and more buzz is created and consumed online, and more and more people want their music loaded onto their iPods and mobile phones, and more and more social networking sites like MySpace give the ability of anyone to post music and videos online and maintain a fan base, this makes record companies irrelevant.

Failover shortcomings seem to be the Achilles heel in the efforts of Research in Motion Ltd. to win the battle with Apple Inc. over whether the BlackBerry or the iPhone will be the smart phone of choice as business and personal applications converge in the mobile device market.

Failover is the capability to switch over automatically to redundant or standby servers or networks when failure hits without warning. Ideally this happens so seamlessly that users are not affected and don’t even notice. Networks with failover capability have their servers running in high-availability clusters located in different geographic locations. The concept of server farms has been used for years by powerhouse computing platforms like Google, where literally thousands of servers are spread all over the world on separate grids. This speeds up the delivery of search results as users access Google worldwide via the most efficient telecommunications backbone (i.e. the closest, fattest pipe). It also makes Google much less likely ever to go down unexpectedly.

RIM has experienced several system-wide failures over the last couple of years. The most recent occurred just a few weeks ago. While no doubt RIM has plenty of failover capabilities within its data centre at Waterloo, Ontario, the problem is that it only has one data centre. With a slew of patent infringement problems hitting RIM from the United States, at one point it might have seemed wise to keep its servers out of the U.S. But aiming at the North American market, it could still expand its platform into clusters running on separate grids inside Canada.

This issue needs to be addressed by RIM more and more urgently as it expands its user base beyond a core of “CrackBerry” business users into the area that Apple previously has dominated with its iPod, being music and pop culture. To be the platform of choice for the masses, RIM must listen closely to what they are saying and what they are being told. Entertainment wars tend to be decided by public opinion, represented by a huge number of small voices over the Internet on blogs and social networks, which together can be overwhelming forces of change.

Coming out of the iPhone corner of the ring, with a lot of credibility in the area of consumer technology, Steve Jobs of Apple recently has gone on the attack and his comments seem valid. As reported by the Globe & Mail today,

“Every e-mail message that’s sent to a RIM device or from a RIM device goes through a NOC [Network Operations Centre] up in Canada,” Mr. Jobs said, according to a report by Bloomberg news service. “That provides a single point of failure, but also provides a very interesting security situation.”

RIM’s response, reported in the same article, seems muted, refusing to acknowledge Apple by name when asked. Full disclosure - I own and use a BlackBerry - and I think it’s got great potential to expand into an all-purpose mobile communications and content-delivery device. However, as RIM lines up content providers in talks about partnering for its network, RIM needs to bear in mind the strong culture of exclusivity in the entertainment world. Everyone likes to line up with a winner. A winner needs to anticipate the market. The market is the people. They are passionate and opinionated and don’t like the idea of their entertainment being unavailable, unexpectedly, ever.