Category Archives: The Industry

The Downside of Big Data

DARPA_Big_DataBig tech companies have been crowing about some of the amazing things that can be done using big data. For example, in the area of interacting with people, retailers are working hard to create personalized shopping experiences aimed at individual shoppers. Specials will pop up on cell phones as someone walks by a display that are aimed at them specifically. While many will feel this is an invasion of privacy, others are looking forward to an enhanced shopping experience. Big data promises to also personalize things like health care so that every doctor you ever see will truly understand your health history and they can guard against conflicting medicines and other things detrimental to your health.

But there are already downsides to big data. Big data is being used to put together a detailed portrait of everybody. And that leads to various degrees of profiling. The very same data that can be used to make your shopping experience better can also be used for many negative purposes. Consider some of the following examples:

  • The Chicago Police department apparently used big data to create a list of the 400 people in the community that they think are most likely to commit a murder. But then they went so far as to contact these people to tell them they were watching them. If anybody remembers the movie Minority Report, this feels like we are already reaching that time where the police convict people for crimes they are going to commit in the future.
  • Big data contains a lot of information about us – our age, race, sexual orientation, religion, weight, general health, number of kids or pets, state of our finances, etc. That kind of data can be easily used to discriminate against people in a variety of settings. We start entering a scary societal place when we use this kind of data to profile people for consideration for housing, employment, etc. There is already an industry of firms who sell this kind of profiling data to anybody for a fee. Where a prospective landlord used to check your credit report they can now find out everything about you. Let’s face it – people are bigoted or just biased and the availability of this kind of data makes it easy to redline or discriminate.
  • There is a big uptick in scams against the elderly who are being found through big data. The scams themselves are as old as the hills, but it’s the use of big data to identify the most vulnerable among us that is disturbing.
  • It was reported in 2012 that Staples displays different on-line prices to different customers based upon where they live. For example, customers who live close to a competitor might get cheaper prices than somebody who does not. But this same ability makes it easy to price differently based upon other factors and again can lead to redlining.
  • I have read where it is fairly easy to buy databases of people who have something in common – such as having diabetes, having tried to quit smoking, or nameless other traits. These lists can be used to market products specific to an ailment, but they also have been used for scams, blackmail and other nefarious purposes. It’s not hard to picture being able to take advantage of people with a gambling addiction or some other such problem.
  • The FAA’s Do Not Fly list is another result of big data and is notorious for containing names of toddlers and others who are obviously not a threat to national security. The list even ended up including several US Congressmen.

This all points to the need for some sort of legal protection of people from the misuse of big data. This is a hot topic in Europe right now but is not yet commonly debated here. Several civil rights groups have identified big data as a big threat and a new source for discrimination. But misuse of big data can go far beyond discrimination based upon race, religion or sexual orientation. Unfortunately it’s now possible to discriminate based upon a whole lot of other reasons as well.

The Broken Cable Industry

Fatty_watching_himself_on_TVLast week Mediacom filed a petition asking the FCC asking to open a rulemaking about regulating programmers. The FCC is under no obligation to act on this request, but I hope that they do.

Mediacom makes a point that I totally agree with, which is that the relationship between programmers and distributors is broken. The industry has evolved to the point where the programmers dictate all of the terms for carrying their content. In the early days of the industry the power was mostly with the cable companies. The FCC changed that with the Cable Act of 1992 that required that cable companies to carry local networks. But over time since then the industry has tilted nearly 100% in favor of the programmers.

The power of the programmers is due in a large part because the ownership of content has become concentrated in the hands of a few companies. There are six corporations that together own most of the programming that people think of as part of the cable TV experience. This has happened through mergers and acquisitions, and the situation might get even worse if Rupert Murdock and New Corp is successful in buying Time Warner.

Condensed media power has resulted in the following:

  • Programmers dictate what content cable companies must buy. Each of the six major programmers owns some ‘must see’ channels but each also owns many other channels. Most programming contracts require a cable company to take everything offered by a programmer in order to get the must see channels.
  • Additionally, the programmers dictate where many of the channels must be placed in the line-up. This is why the line-ups of different cable companies look so eerily alike – they don’t have a lot of options about how to create packages from the content they buy. I have one client who recently got into the cable business. They hoped to have a basic lineup of around 60 channels, but the programming contracts instead forced them into carrying nearly 85 channels.
  • The programming rate increases are accelerating. Some of the recent rate increases I have seen are mindboggling. Earlier this year Viacom forced a nearly 100% rate increase over five years upon several cable providers. But the largest rate increases have been for local network channels. Five or six years ago these channels (ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC) were free or nearly free for cable companies. Now most of my clients are paying between $8 and $10 per customer per month just for these networks.
  • To make matters worse for cable companies, the programmers turn around and make a lot of their content available online on a delayed basis to companies other than the cable companies. This means the cable companies pay to carry the content and then see customers watching it somewhere else (with somebody else’s ads).

All of this translates into runaway inflation in cable rates. I’ve seen various industry estimates that the average cable rates by 2020 could be around $200 per month. The high cost of cable is obviously is affecting households and is starting to drive people to find an alternative to the big cable packages.

This is not to say that the cable companies don’t also have policies that are making cable too expensive. For example, they keep increasing rates on settop box rentals and cable modem while also introducing other mysterious charges onto cable bills.

Mediacom has asked the FCC to explore this issue and to find a fix. They call this a broken industry and they are right. The constant large rate increases cannot be sustained and every rate increase is driving more customers away from traditional cable TV.

Mediacom is asking for common sense fixes. They are asking to be allowed to unbundle the programming packages and buy only those channels they want and to then be able to package content to customers in ways that they want to buy it. These changes will require FCC intervention, because right now all of the terms are being dictated by the programmers. Every company that offers cable would benefit by these changes and if the FCC opens a docket I will be making comments.

If the FCC fails to act, I predict that within a few years that the industry will implode. There will become a point where households will abandon cable in sufficient numbers to put that part of the industry into a death spiral. It’s a tricky set of issues and one wonders how much authority the FCC has to make drastic changes without some assistance from Congress. But if nothing is done then the industry is headed over a cliff in the not too distant future.

The Future According to CenturyLink

telephone cablesRecently the CFO of CenturyLink, Stewart Ewing, spoke at the Bank of America / Merrill Lynch 2014 Global Telecom and Media Conference. He had some interesting things to say about the future of CenturyLink that contrasts with some of the things that other large carriers like AT&T and Verizon have been saying.

The most interesting thing he had to say is that CenturyLink sees the future of broadband in the landline link to a home. He cannot foresee 4G wireless as a substitute for a landline wireless connection. He doesn’t see wireless delivering enough bandwidth in coming years as demand at homes keeps growing. Already today the average CenturyLink residence uses slightly less than 50 Gigabits of data per month and that is far above the data caps for 4G plans. He doesn’t think cellular can deliver the needed speeds, and unless the cellular model is drastically changed, it’s too expensive and capped at really low levels.

So CenturyLink plans to continue to upgrade its rural plant. About two thirds of CenturyLink’s customers can get 10 Mbps or higher today and the company is working to make that available everywhere. Contrast this to AT&T and Verizon. They have both told the FCC that they have plans to convert millions of rural lines to 4G LTE. I have written about this many times and see it as one of the biggest threats on the horizon to rural broadband. LTE is a great product when you want a burst of fast data to your cell phone. But the LTE network is not designed to serve multiple video streams to large numbers of households. 4G is also capable of some fairly impressive speeds that are significantly in excess of 10 Mbps, but those speeds drop quickly as you move away from a cell site.

It’s fairly obvious that AT&T and Verizon favor LTE since it is their own best economic benefit – their wireless operations dwarf their landline businesses. Nobody can argue with a straight face that LTE is the best way to provide data for customers from either a a performance or a cost basis. Cellular coverage is still poor in a lot of rural America and so forcing people off of copper and onto wireless will  degrade the ability of many rural households to get broadband. But these two companies have a big financial incentive to move people from low-priced landlines to expensive cellular connections. It makes me think that if the FCC really cares about rural America that they ought to be divesting the landline business from AT&T and Verizon to remove the wireless bias.

CenturyLink says they are worried about the FCC changing the definition of rural broadband to be higher than 10 Mbps. They say that speed is difficult to achieve in their DSL plant and that they are far more comfortable with a definition of around 6 Mbps. It’s honestly refreshing to hear a telco executive tell people the truth for a change. The other big telcos spew a lot of rhetoric to sway the FCC or to assuage the public and it’s unusual to hear somebody tell the unvarnished truth to the public.

Those who follow my blog know that I promote a high definition of broadband. Households want the ability to stream multiple videos simultaneously. And you can expect in just a few years for there to be a much greater demand for HD quality video and a climbing demand for 4K video. The average urban household that has choice is already finding 10 Mbps to be far too slow. Just this week Verizon increased its minimum FiOS speeds to a symmetrical 35 Mbps. I know this is a really big technological expectation for CenturyLink and other rural telcos still using copper, but the definition of broadband needs to keep pace with what the normal household wants to buy, and that number is going to keep climbing year after year. If we don’t set the bar high then rural places are going to fall further behind the speeds available in cities.

CenturyLink does expect to continue to expand the footprint of its Prism TV product. This is a paired and bonded DSL product that can deliver up to 50 Mbps for customers somewhat close to a central office. CenturyLink has made this available to over 2 million customers and plans to make it available to 300,000 more in 2015.

Interestingly, CenturyLink does not plan to expand WiFi hotspots. Some other carriers seem to be in a race to put in hot spots but CenturyLink cannot see a way to monetize the effort. Of course, CenturyLink will put a hotspot in for a business that asks for one, but they don’t intend to build hotspots of their own. I have also written about this topic several times. Nobody who is not serving a captive audience like at an airport or in an airplane has been able to get much money from selling Internet by the hour. And while the giant cellular carriers benefit greatly by more WiFi, I have yet to hear of a deal where they are paying somebody to install public hot spots. Comcast says they have installed hundreds of thousands of hot spots and they recently announced that they are turning the wireless modems of all of their residential customers into hot spots. But to me that seems more like a move that is going to antagonize the public greatly with little obvious monetary benefit. I think CenturyLink is being prudent to stay away from this business until somebody shows a way to make money with it.

CenturyLink and the Cloud

Cloud_computing_icon_svgI don’t write many positive articles about the largest US telcos. This is mostly because these are the competitors for most of my ISP clients, but also because the big companies are on the wrong side of issues like net neutrality and privacy. It’s generally pretty easy to find things to dislike about any one of the big carriers.

But I have to say that I am impressed with CenturyLink’s foray into cloud computing. They got into it early and they have carved out a decent market niche. Cloud services is already a huge business and will grow much bigger. I read a recent statistic that says that only about 13% of US corporate data today is stored in the cloud. That leaves a lot of room for industry growth.

The two big giants of the cloud storage industry are Amazon and Google. In fact, Amazon is so large that I read that Amazon has five times more data center capacity today than the next 14 competitors combined, including Google. But I also have read reviews that talk about Amazon as the ‘Walmart of cloud storage’. They are cheap – they have lowered cloud data storage prices 42 times since they started. But they are also somewhat generic and this comes from having a suite of products that tries to satisfy everybody.

But companies like CenturyLink and Peak 10 have created a niche in the cloud computing market by offering customized services. For example, Peak 10 has concentrated on the medical and the gaming industries. CenturyLink cut its teeth on providing services to governments and other large businesses.

There are several components to cloud computing – data storage, transport, computing power and software centralization. Amazon has clearly moved ahead of everybody else in storage capacity, but one has to wonder if this is a long-term advantage. It appears that data storage is moving towards being free, or nearly free. Obviously with the upcoming Internet of Things there is going to be more pressure put onto storage capacity, but the dropping prices for data storage is what has led to the repeated Amazon price cuts

CenturyLink competes much better in the transport arena. They were born out of the merger of Qwest and US West, with Qwest having significant fiber assets throughout the US and the hemisphere. They continued to expand their fiber post-merger and most of the US is close to a CenturyLink fiber. While transport prices have dropped, particularly on the major intercity routes, transport to smaller markets is still a very lucrative business, and having fiber in those markets gives CenturyLink an advantage in many regions.

Amazon also has the edge today in computing power by virtue of owning so many data center assets. Amazon is not ahead only by virtue of sheer number of data center computing assets, but they have also been working feverishly on building faster and more energy efficient servers and switches. This gives them a temporary market advantage, but these kind of advantages usually don’t last too long. There is a major industry shift towards software defined networking and this is going to result in cheap data center routers and switches for everybody.

I wrote this blog as an example that it’s possible for a company to reinvent itself. I don’t think anybody has been thought to be stodgier than CenturyLink for the last decade. While Verizon and AT&T have been adding data customers, CenturyLink struggled with old copper. But CenturyLink is now a player in cloud products and they have recently launched credible new business lines by building fiber-to-the-home networks and also launching their Prism DSL product that is similar to AT&T’s U-verse. I hold CenturyLink out as an example to my clients. If they are able to take the steps needed to make sure that they will be relevant decades from now, then so can any other ISP.

How Many Internets Are There?

chinese internetOne of the premises of net neutrality is that we treat all bits the same. But this supposes that the Internet is a ubiquitous network, the same everywhere. It doesn’t take much digging to see that the Internet is not the same everywhere and that there are already some big differences all throughout the on-line world in how and what people use on the Internet.

At the highest level there are three distinct Internets today – the Internet of people, the Internet of servers and the Internet of things. We are all familiar with the Internet of people, but we forget that a huge portion of web traffic data is machine-to-machine traffic. And soon, this is going to be swamped by the traffic from the Internet of things. Each of these three Internets coincide with each other only in the most basic levels of sharing the same system of IP addresses and similar web protocols. But other than that the three Internets are very different in how they function.

And of course, there is huge diversity within the Internet of people. For example, my Internet and that of my teenage daughter are very different. My Internet is PC-based and largely browser-based and that drives my web experience. Her Internet is smartphone and tablet based and is largely applications-based and she has a drastically different web experience than mine. She doesn’t even use email except very begrudgingly. We do cross paths on Facebook a little where she reluctantly posts a few pictures occasionally to keep the old folks satisfied.

But there are much larger degrees of separation within the Internet of people. For instance, people in the US tend to think that our version of the Internet is the same as what others around the world use. But it’s not. First, there are a handful of countries that have firewalled themselves off from the rest of the world, with the most extreme example being China. There are hordes of Chinese censors who scrub the web there constantly to keep out influences that the government doesn’t approve

There are also somewhat differrent Internets for any country that has a unique language such as Japanese, Norwegian or Bantu. The Internet for each foreign language is unique in that the speakers of that language will have migrated towards a set of websites and services that cater to their language. Over time, the web experience in each country becomes unique and very much separate from the rest of the world.

And then one must consider the new worldwide initiative to store data locally within each country. This is from the fallout of the NSA spying where other countries are upset that they are being spied upon by the US and other spy agencies. Many countries are considering laws that will require local data to be stored on servers physically located in their own country as a way to be able to build a firewall around such data. This means that the cloud is not going to be a worldwide phenomenon, but rather will be handled differently in each part of the world.

There is also an international push by different governments to change some of the basic rules for the Internet locally, and if this occurs then the communications between different global parts of the Internet will not be as seamless as it is today. There is even a movement of some countries who want to have their own naming conventions, leading to the possibility that there could be more than once site in the world with the same name (although with different IP addresses).

Until now the Internet has been a fairly coherent network with the US clearly driving the direction of the web both by being the maker of the rules, but also by virtue of having spawned Facebook, YouTube, Google, Yahoo and a host of other world-wide companies. But as the Internet becomes more regional and data is kept locally, the influence of these firms will diminish in various parts of the world. Which is just what much the rest of the world is hoping for.

The Battle for the Integrated Car

Tribrid_CarGoogle is expected to unveil a smart car operating system later this month at its upcoming developer’s conference. This follows upon an announcement at the beginning of this year of the creation of the Open Automotive Alliance which consists of Google, chipmaker Nvidia along with General Motors, Honda, Audi and Hyundai.

This system would be obviously Android based and would allow for the full integration between an android phone and your car. The car software would automatically recognize and integrate with your smart phone so that you could perform phone functions without having to look away from the dashboard.

This is direct competition with Apple’s CarPlay which is also supposed to be available sometime this year. Apple has said that their software for IoS phones would let your car do things like send and receive emails and texts and use GPS navigation from applications on the phone. Apple has allied with Ferrari, Honda, Mercedes Benz and Hyundai.

A lot of cars already have software that allows the same basic functions. For example, my wife’s Toyota has a Bluetooth system that lets her sync with her music or to sync with Siri and do all of the things Siri can do. And my Ford truck has something similar, although it has reset itself three times in six months and leaves a bit to be desired in terms of ease of use.

Today’s platforms are largely proprietary and both industry groups are trying to bring a standard platform to the industry, because the real end game and the big dollars come from the ability to develop and sell apps that can be used specifically for driving. For instance, today my wife can use her Siri for navigation, but she cannot activate a separate navigation app should she choose to use something different. For example, I can envision specialty navigation apps that might be used by vacationers, truckers or business travelers, all who have different travel goals.

So these two industry giants are going to battle it out, mostly with car manufacturers, to become the de facto smart phone integration platform. Google has the early lead, just due to having signed up General Motors, but the battle is far from over. And as can be seen by noticing that Honda and Hyundai are working with both groups, perhaps they both win and cars can come equipped with one or both systems.

This is very different than Google’s self-driving car project which is still moving steadily forward. Earlier this year Google described how they make this work, and it is a solution that only Google could pull off.

Today Google’s cars are driving successfully around Mountain View California. The company has put in hundreds of thousands of miles of driving on those City streets. I always thought that Google would make self-driving cars work by having them learn all of the little nuances of what it takes to drive a car. But as it turns out, that is going to require something very akin to self-aware artificial intelligence and nobody is very close yet to having achieved that.

Instead Google has done the brute force solution where they have thoroughly mapped every inch of Mountain View. Thus, the car already knows what to expect. The car is not completely dumb, of course and is very good at recognizing other cars, and bicyclists and pedestrians. But by taking away the need for it to understand the streets, Google has vastly reduced the computational need of the system.

So a Google car in Mountain View already knows every inch of the streets. If it comes across something unexpected, say construction, it will alert the driver to take over the driving task if it feels unable to navigate the unexpected phenomenon. This is a solution only Google could do, because to take this technology outside of Mountain View they will have to completely map other towns. And that doesn’t scare Google. They would look at the project of mapping all of the streets in major towns in the country as an opportunity to update their maps and to learn more about the world.

One can envision Google cars that are really good at getting back and forth to work, to the grocery store and to a friend’s house. But if you wanted to visit your mother in the country the car would hand the driving back to you. Google sees this as an economically feasible product up until the point one day when cars really can learn the streets on the fly.

How Do You Handle Cyber-Harassment?

isp--w299h202This blog asks the question of how ISPs respond to claims of cyber-harassment. What do you do when one of your customers is accused of harassing somebody else? We’ve all heard of terrible cases where cyber-harassment has led to suicide or other terrible results. But there are many degrees of harassment and I am curious how different ISPs respond to claims of harassment.

Are there any legal requirements that you do anything? Obviously ISPs all will respond to subpoenas or court orders that order somebody to end harassing another person. But this is the end result of a legal action and most harassment never makes it the whole way through the legal system.

There are only a few other legal requirements to consider. First is the Communication Decency Act which the US Congress passed in 1996 that was the first attempt to legislate the Internet. The Act had provisions that tried to outlaw pornography, but the Supreme Court knocked out these parts of that law. But other provisions of the law are still in effect. The one that matters in this instance is the determination that ISPs are not the ‘publishers’ of content posted by your users, and thus you are immune from prosecution for things said and done by your customers on-line.

But most ISPs have a document that you have generated that self-imposes some obligations on you. This is your terms of service that you have customers sign as they connect to your Internet service. It’s pretty routine in those documents to have language that gives you the right to cut off service from customers who use the Internet for nefarious purposes. Sometimes the language in these documents is very generic and sometimes it says very specifically that you will not tolerate customers who harass others on the Internet.

So you should review the TOS occasionally to remind yourself what specific obligations you might have created for yourself. In this document you have not only defined what customers cannot do on your network, but you have also implied that you will react in some way to customers who violate your rules.

Beyond these very minimal obligations there are no other specific external rules. Your customers are generally free to publish all sorts of thing that you or the public might find repugnant. They might post white supremacist or neo-Nazi pages that spew hate at other races. They might bash gays, or bash Muslims, or bash Christians. They might bash the band the Grateful Dead (my own version of intolerable behavior!). But generally, as long as these postings don’t cross a legal line your customers are within their first amendment rights to post all sorts of disagreeable things.

It’s hard to define it exactly, but there is some point where a customer has crossed the line if what they say is aimed at an individual and not at the wider world. There are many forms of cyber-harassment that include: sending harassing emails, creating false web pages to defame somebody, disseminating false or private information online, uploading unauthorized pictures or videos, impersonating another in a public forum, spreading false rumors through social media sites and many other things.

The chances are that if you don’t hear about this from law enforcement that you will be contacted by the person being harassed. It’s likely that they will show you examples of what your customer has been doing. And this is when you have the hard decision to make. Has your customer clearly violated your terms of service? If so, what are you willing to do about it? Do you warn them? Do you ask them to cease the bad behavior? Do you just toss them off your network?

Let’s face it. Most of the people who run ISPs are pretty good guys. Nobody wants to be running a service that is contributing to other people being harmed. But it is very uncomfortable being asked to be judge and jury. We have all written our terms of service to be somewhat murky on purpose. And that means that there are going to be many instances when you will agree that something is unsavory without necessarily being able to say it is a clear-cut violation of your terms of service. And even if it violates your TOS, there are always degrees of violation.

It’s not an easy question and every ISP I talked to about this felt really uncomfortable with this part of being an ISP. Almost all of them have had troublesome customers where this sort of behavior occurred. But the responses range from doing nothing, to warning the customer to cease the bad behavior, to cutting them off the network. One protection that most of you have is that your Internet service is not considered a utility service and so you have the legal right to choose who is (or in this case who is not) your customer. But that still does not make this easy.

More Trouble for Google and the Internet

120310censorshipI find myself feeling a bit sorry for Google, and that is not easy to do. One tends to think of them as a very powerful corporation. But as powerful as they might be in some ways, they just got another absurd court ruling that has to have them scratching their heads.

I wrote about another absurd court ruling over a month ago when a Spanish court ordered Google to let people expunge embarrassing things from the Internet. The facts behind that ruling was that a man was embarrassed that he had been listed years ago in a newspaper as delinquent on the tax payments on his home. It was never disputed that he hadn’t paid his taxes on time. But the court still ruled that he has the right to ask Google to expunge the embarrassing material from the web.

Now comes a judge in Canada who is ordering Google to take more content off the Internet. The facts this time center around Equustek Solutions that claims that a rival company stole their technology for an Ethernet gateway and is illegally profiting from their intellectual property. The courts agreed it is theft, but rather than go after the normal commercial solutions the judge turned to Google and told them to remove all ads by the competition from the web.

Google offered to remove all references from Google.ca which is where most Canadians use Google. But the Supreme Court of British Columbia said that was not good enough and ordered Google to remove the references world-wide. At first glance one might say that this is good justice. Assuming that the court is right and that the intellectual property was stolen this provides justice of a sort for Equustek Solutions. But once you think more about it, this is an absurd ruling for a whole lot of different reasons.

First, there are already mechanisms in place to deal with international theft of goods and ideas. Countries have treaties, trade agreements and diplomats to deal with this kind of theft – something that happens all of the time. These mechanisms may not always work the best, but they are how the world as a whole deals with these things. It’s very questionable if any one court anywhere has the jurisdiction to override trade treaties agreed to by their own government and other governments

Further, Google is not the only web source for the stolen gateways and there are other ways for people to continue to find the illegal devices. People who shop at a favorite supply house are still going to find them. People using other search engines like Bing are still going to find them. People who shop at Amazon are likely to still find them

This may not sound like a bad precedent, but it allows a court in one country to order Google, or any web company to remove content that they find offensive. I don’t think there will be many people defending the right of a company to sell stolen patented devices. But little legal precedents grow into big rights.

This ruling could quickly get escalated once other judges hear about it. The judge in Canada said that the ruling was based in part on what had happened in Spain. But what’s next? What if a court in Iran asks Google to remove references to all books by Salman Rushdie from the web since he is an infidel? What if a court in some conservative American state asks Google to remove all content related to abortion and birth control? What if the Syrian government asks to remove any news about their fight with other factions in the country?

At the end of the day this ruling condones censorship, plain and simple. It puts Google into the huge bind of agreeing to be the world’s censor. I am sure that Google is appealing this to higher courts in Canada, but in the meantime do they comply with the order? A part of me hopes that they simply ignore the order and ignore any fines associated with the order. This is a rogue ruling by a rogue court and in the end will probably be struck down within Canada.

But the much bigger issue is what Google is going to do when they are confronted with a bigger moral dilemma? What do they do with one of the absurd orders that comes out of the Supreme Court of a major country and can’t be appealed? Does Google comply and censor the whole world or do they pull out of the country making the request? In both cases the world loses and the Internet gets diminished.

I guess it was inevitable that this had to happen. The Spanish ruling was pure insanity. They guy didn’t pay his taxes on time and all Google did was to scan a database from a newspaper that reported it. The newspaper had the right to publish this and so Google had the right to scan it. Facts are facts and we are starting down a slippery slope when we start picking and choosing which facts are allowed on the Internet. We already know where censorship leads – look at China where hordes of people ride herd every day on what the Chinese people are allowed to read or say on the web. Let’s please not let that system get foisted onto the rest of us.

Cisco’s View of 2018

Alexander_Crystal_SeerFor many years Cisco has been providing future-looking forecasts of the trends in data and networking to help prepare their clients for the future. Like anybody who predicts the future they aren’t always right, but they are often as right as not and they do a good job of spotting trends and of estimating where those trends will take us. They just released a new Visual Networking Index that makes dozens of predictions. Let me highlight a few of them along with my comments on what I think it means to my readers.

Global IP traffic will triple by 2018. Some of this growth will come from new people joining the web through ventures like Google and their data satellites. But every ISP ought to expect at least a doubling in traffic volumes over this time period, much as has been happening historically. Be prepared to buy more backbone bandwidth and to also have to beef up the electronics that get to neighborhoods.

Busy hour Internet traffic is growing faster than overall traffic. For example, in 2013 the traffic experienced by ISPs in the busiest hour of the day increased 32% while total traffic increased 25%. Since ISPs have to buy backbone services to support the busiest times on the network, expect those costs to climb.

IP Video will be 79% of all traffic by 2018, up from 66% in 2013. Not only is NetFlix and AmazonPrime here to stay, the OTT providers will continue to sell more video programming. This is going to continue to put great pressure on cable TV and should result in a lot of people becoming cord cutters (something Cisco did not predict since their prediction only looks at network traffic). UltraHD video will account for 11% of all video traffic by 2018, up from 0.1% today. HD video will account for 52% of all video traffic, up from 36% today. The desire for UltraHD is going to be a lot of pressure on ISPs since a single transmission will require at least 15 Mbps

There will be as many machine-to-machine connections as there are people on earth by 2018. The Internet of Things will have made big strides by 2018 but will still be in its infancy. What this means for network providers is that there will be a steady volume of data traffic generated by M2M traffic that will not vary by time of day like residential or business data usage. Cisco predicts nearly 21 billion global network connections by 2018, up from 12.4 billion in 2013.

Speeds will continue to increase. Cisco predicts that the average global broadband speed will be 42 Mbps by 2018, up from 16 Mbps at the end of 2013. Within that average speed they predict that 55% of worldwide broadband connections will be faster than 10 Mbps. This has a lot of policy implications since the FCC is looking at changing the definition of broadband. If they only increase the definition modestly to 10 Mbps it will be obsolete almost before it is adopted. If the FCC wants the US to keep up with the rest of the world they need to push the industry rather than trail it.

The US will still generate the most data. They predict that in 2018 that the US will still be the largest data producer at 37 exabytes, with China second at 18 exabytes. The fastest growing continent will be Africa with the fastest growing individual countries being India and Indonesia.

WiFi Traffic will exceed Wireline traffic by 2018. WiFi and mobile devices will generate 61% of global IP traffic by 2018 (WiFi 49% and cellular 12%). This is up from 41% and 3% today. This is a bit misleading since most WiFi traffic ultimately feeds into a landline network, but indicates more the first link that is used to reach the Internet.

Another Hassle for ISPs – Policing Pirated Music

Louis_Armstrong_restored_(color_version)You probably remember the attempts of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) last decade when they tried to stop file sharing of music by randomly suing those who shared music files on line. They would go after college students and others and sue them for $750 to $12,000 per song shared and made the cases public to scare other people from sharing music. They stopped this practice in 2008 and instead went after ISPS, asking them to deny service to people who violated their copyrights more than three times.

But now the issue is back in play and ISPs are going to find themselves routinely asked to chase file sharers. Some of the music industry has made a deal with a new company called Rightscorp which is now chasing file sharers instead of the RIAA. Rightscorp asks file sharers to settle for $20 per song violation instead of being sued, and any collected proceeds are shared 50/50 with the recording labels like BMG and Warner Brothers.

The company started in 2012. In 2013 they collected around $750,000 in settlements, but they have a technology that could let them pursue these violations by the millions. And that is where the new hassle for ISPs will come in.

Rightscorp monitors file uploads and downloads at file sharing sites like BitTorrent. They are capturing the IP address of people sharing songs illegally. While they don’t know the identity of the violator they know the ISP involved, and they are asking ISPs to forward their demands for settlements on to violators.

Rightscorp is relying on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) which they believe requires ISPs to forward on their notices. They claim to be working now with 70 ISPs, but there are many ISPs who either do not think they are required to pass on settlement offers, or who pass on only an abbreviated version of the Rightscorp demand for payment. But one would expect with the technology they are using that they are going to be asking every ISP to help them.

There are existing alternatives to what Rightscorp is doing. There is already a process under development among ISPs that is creating a ‘six strike’ system that will deny Internet access to people who violate copy rights multiple times. But Rightscorp and others believe that this system will not have teeth since the ISPS are not heavily invested in kicking out paying customers.

Rightscorp has developed a technology that lets them track file sharing across multiple IP addresses. This is needed since ISPs issue a new IP address to a user any time they initiate a new connection to their server. Rightcorp believes that their audit trail showing multiple violations gives them the leverage to get ISPs to help them. Certainly that is the kind of evidence that could be used in court against an ISP who refuses to help them. They have not sued an ISP yet, but the threat is there. And obviously some ISPs are helping them since they have collected so far from over 70,000 violators.

As an ISP you need to decide what to do when you get one of these demands from Rightscorp. Do you do nothing, do you pass on the full demand to your customers or do you somehow edit the demand before forwarding it? Do you share your customer’s identity with Rightscorp? These are not easy questions to answer. But one thing is for sure and this is just one more of the little hassles that keep getting loaded onto being an ISP today.