CircleID

Digital Download Laws Force Users to Become Pirates, Says European Commissioner

2009-07-10T14:10:00-08:00

European laws governing the digitization of content such as books, movies and music need a major re-working in order to keep Europe relevant in the digital age, said the European Commissioner for the information society and telecoms Viviane Reding on Thursday.

Laying out her manifesto for a renewed five-year term in the job, Reding said in a speech that she shares the frustrations of Internet companies including Google, which would like to offer interesting business models in the field of online book publishing,"but cannot do so because of the fragmented regulatory system in Europe."

Read full story: PC World

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More under: Law, P2P, Policy & Regulation

Australian Government Opposed to Creation of Adult-Themed TLDs

2009-07-10T13:34:00-08:00

Andrew Colley of Australian IT reports the AusRegistry, the operator of Australia's Top-Level Domain (.au), has revealed that it has been approached by various groups planning to submit applications to ICANN for the creation of adult-themed generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs) such as .xxx and .sex. According to the report, the Australian Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has opposed the idea syaing: "The government does not support the creation of the .xxx TLD." As it has been reported extensively on CircleID, previous attempts to create adult related TLDs (such as .xxx) have so far been rejected by ICANN.

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More under: Internet Governance, Top-Level Domains

Internet Connection Speeds Up by 11% Globally Since Last Quarter of 2008

2009-07-10T12:14:01-08:00

In the "Sate of the Internet Report" released by Akamai for the first quarter of 2009, the company reports that, on a global basis, the average connection speed increased by approximately 11% and more than 120 countries had average connection speeds under 1 Mbps (report based on date Q4 2008 through Q1 2009).

Through Akamai's view of the Internet traffic (reported at approximately 1 billion users per day), the company also notes that in the first quarter of 2009, Japan had the highest percentage of connections (57%) at speeds above 5 Mbps while South Korea fell to second place for high broadband connectivity in the first quarter.

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More under: Access Providers, Broadband, Telecom

Comcast Unleashes Trial DNS Redirection in Select States

2009-07-09T12:33:00-08:00

In a post today on Comcast's blog, Chris Griffiths, DNS Engineering Manger, has informed customers that they have begun to role a DNS redirection service—a controversial service offered by several other ISPs over the years to redirect mistyped URLs to ad-based pages instead of a typical 404 error page. The service called "Domain Name Helper Service" is being launched as a market trial in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon, Texas, Utah, and Washington according to the company.

Customers are given the option to opt-out of the service—Griffiths writes: "We also understand that sometimes customers want to surf their own way, without the assistance of services like Domain Helper, so we offer an easy way to opt-out right on the Domain Helper search page. This is a feature we feel is a best practice and is a key part of a white paper we submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force, an open international community of experts concerned with the evolution, architecture and operation of the Internet, for comment and review."

Related Links:
Domain Helper service: Here to help you Chris Griffiths, Comcast, Jul.9.2009
Comcast Finally Launches DNS Redirection DSLReports, Jul.9.2009

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More under: Access Providers, DNS, Domain Names

New CEO Stresses ICANN's Role in Cybersecurity

2009-07-09T10:37:01-08:00

One summer sport in Internet governance is speculating on what direction ICANN's new CEO will take it in. Making the media rounds yesterday on Fox and Lehrer News Hour to talk about the recent DDoS attacks on US and S. Korea government and commercial websites, new CEO Rod Beckstrom pushed how the response to cyber attacks is a coordinated effort, he also alluded to ICANN's role in similar attacks. Responding to a question on the News Hour about the USG policy response to dealing with cyber attacks, Beckstrom highlighted the critical role of ISP filtering, and identified the "organic" as well as "somewhat structured" coordination which occurs during a typical response. More interestingly, he plugged ICANN's facilitating role.

ICANN, as the global Internet corporation that handles the naming and address for every mailbox in the Internet globally, over 200 million, we have relationships with every single country in the world and play somewhat of a diplomatic role when these things occur, particularly if they affect the naming and addressing system, which this one doesn't yet, but it involves multiple countries.

While there are some technical inaccuracies in his statement (domains are not "mailboxes" and ICANN doesn't actually have formal relations with every country in the world) producing accurate television sound bites is really tough. But Beckstrom correctly points out the limitations of ICANN's role in resolving cyber attacks.

So far, ICANN's role has largely been as a facilitator. E.g., in the ongoing cooperative effort against the Conficker worm, the security community determined preemptive barring of domain transfers and registrations in affected TLD registries as a mitigation tactic. ICANN's role was largely to communicate this to Top-Level Domain (TLD) operators. It took the agreement of ccTLD operators to put the response in place, because in reality, ICANN has very little authority over the ccTLDs business and operational practices. (with gTLDs it has almost complete contractual governance and can even take away the assignment after a period of time) Because of "national sovereignty" claims most ccTLDs have very limited contracts with ICANN, and there are clear limitations to using ICANN's authority to enforce stability and security on the Internet.

View the News Hour interview:

And the Fox interview (which dutifully follows the First Law of Cyberwarfare):

Written by Brenden Kuerbis

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More under: Cyberattack, Internet Governance, Security

640 Million Broadband Households Worldwide by 2013

2009-07-08T13:30:00-08:00

According to a recent report by research firm, Parks Associates, the demand for high-bandwidth applications will rapidly increase in the next few years as the number of households worldwide with broadband will reach close to 650 million by 2013.

Parks Associates reports the number of broadband households worldwide grew by over 18% in 2008 to exceed 400 million. Asia-Pacific is the largest market, accounting for over 160 million subscribers, and it will have over 49% of the global market share by 2013.

Read full story: InformationWeek

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More under: Access Providers, Broadband, Telecom

Google to Release Chrome Operating System in 2010

2009-07-08T07:43:00-08:00

Last night, Google's VP of Product Management, Sundar Pichai and Engineering Director, Linus Upson announced via the company's official blog that it is planning to launch it's own operating system called Google Chrome OS.

In the blog post the authors write: "It's been an exciting nine months since we launched the Google Chrome browser. Already, over 30 million people use it regularly. We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web—searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we're announcing a new project that's a natural extension of Google Chrome—the Google Chrome Operating System. It's our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be."

According to the company the new operating system will initially be targeted at netbooks and planned to be available for consumers in the second half of 2010.

Other sources: (UPDATED Jul 09, 2009 10:49 AM PDT)
Google Lists HP, Acer Among Chrome OS Partners PCWorld, Jul.8.2009

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More under: Web

US and South Korea Government Websites Attacked, North Korea Suspected

2009-07-08T07:22:00-08:00

South Korea's intelligence agency suspects that North Korea may have been behind an Internet attack that on Tuesday and Wednesday targeted government web sites in South Korea and the United States, lawmakers in Seoul told news agencies.

Twenty-six Web sites in the two countries, including the office of South Korea's president and the defense ministry, were targeted, the South Korean National Intelligence Service said in a statement. In the United States, the attack targeted Web sites operated by major government agencies, including the departments of Homeland Security and Defense…

Read full story: Washington Post

Other sources: (UPDATED Jul 10, 2009 1:11 PM PDT)
Korean/U.S. DDoS Attacks: Perplexing, Disruptive, and Destructive Analysis by Shadowserver, Jul.10.2009
Gillibrand Responds to Cyber Attacks, Introduces New Legislation to Foster Global Response U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Jul.9.2009
New CEO Stresses ICANN's Role in Cybersecurity Brenden Kuerbis, CircleID, Jul.9.2009
US State Department still under cyberattack AFP, Jul.8.2009

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More under: Cyberattack, Security

ARIN's New CEO: IPv6 One of the Most Critical Internet Issues Today

2009-07-08T07:08:00-08:00

The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) named John Curran as president and chief executive officer, effective July 1, 2009. Since January 1, 2009, Curran has served as acting president and CEO of ARIN. He is a founding member of the ARIN Board of Trustees and served as chairman from August 1997 to December 2008. Curran has also been a valuable participant on CircleID where he has shared his views on a number key issues such as IPv6.

In an interview by CIO, Curran said: "IPv4 address depletion is the most pressing issue facing the Internet community today and for many years to come. The fact that we've been ready for this for a decade doesn't make the transition that we will be going through over the next five years all that much easier. The fact that we've been ready for 10 years adds to the complacency. Rather than averting a sense of crisis, it's caused a lot of people to question: Is this going to happen? Yes, we are going to run out of free IPv4 addresses, and organizations that want to be able to make use of the Internet will need to support IPv6."

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More under: IP Addressing, IPv6

Beyond Telco 2.0 and Quadruple Play

2009-07-07T15:20:00-08:00

One of the great challenges has been to conceive a business model for next generation telephone companies. This is constrained by their limited core competences which do not match well with many of the opportunities that lie in entertainment and complex/customised bundles for consumers.

Frost & Sullivan, a leading firm of industry analysts, notes the enthusiasm of service providers to offer connectivity, entertainment and information services, within a digitally connected world. It identifies Orange (a.k.a. France Telecom) as a "good example" of the benefits of alliances, which has "deepened" consumption of television and media. Orange has a multiplatform strategy, with plans to increase interactivity. Ultimate, Frost believes Orange is well placed to generate third party revenue streams. However, successful transformation requires collaboration to offer services which consumers need and for which they are willing to pay.

Frost & Sullican noted the "desperate need" of service providers to secure a sustainable revenue source from their existing consumers. Beyond quadruple play, service providers will require significantly more alliances and a richer eco-system for connected homes. For the present, all that has been seen are the first steps in this direction.

See the press release: Opportunities Beyond Quad Play Depend on Successful Cross Industry Alliances, Says Frost & Sullivan

Written by Ewan Sutherland, Telecommunications Policy Analyst

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More under: Access Providers, Broadband, IPTV, Mobile, Net Neutrality, Policy & Regulation, Telecom

Global Recession Appears to Have Also Hit the Malware Industry

2009-07-07T15:16:00-08:00

According to reports by German software security company G Data, since the beginning of summer, the malware community appears to have been scaling back its activities. This considerable reduction is, according to the estimates of G Data security expert Ralf Benzmüller, not solely due to the forthcoming holiday season. The global recession appears to have also hit the eCrime economy.

"This phenomenon emerges every year as something new. At the start of the holiday season, the number of malware programs falls. One reason for this is the worldwide onset of the travel season, which, based on experience, causes a drop in the number of active Internet users. However, this does not explain a collapse of more than 30 percent," says Ralf Benzmüller. According to expert opinion, it seems much more likely that the global economic crisis has also hit the eCrime industry. "The black economy operates according to demanding economic criteria: supply and demand define business. The global economic crisis has not left the eCrime economy untouched. “Following on from dumping prices for the sending of spam, the downturn has now reached the writers of malware code. Order books for this particular branch of the industry seem currently to be falling back. Therefore we expect a stagnation in new malware figures for the current month. However there will definitely still be individual peaks. The latest global events and catastrophes constantly provide the online criminals with new ways of targeting their victims."

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More under: Cybercrime, Malware, Security

A Review of Broadband Over Power Lines (BPL) or Power Line Telecommunication (PLT)

2009-07-07T10:06:00-08:00

The OECD has published a detailed report, Broadband over Powerlines: Developments and Policy Issues, on what was once considered a potentially interesting and disruptive technology that might have rivaled DSL. It notes that having largely failed in that, it is instead being applied to "smart grid" applications.

Extracted from the report are the "Main Points" below:

At first glance Broadband Power Line (BPL) technology seems to have a high potential to provide ubiquitous broadband access to households and businesses across a country. The fact that electricity is provided on a nationwide basis seemingly gives BPL an advantage. The commercialisation of BPL could also be important from a competition perspective providing a second or third wire to the home in competition with digital subscriber line technology and cable modem technology. It also has the potential to be a shared technology, given its use in developing smart grids and monitoring consumption of electric power to share costs. BPL also has unique features such as the possibility of in-home access for broadband from any power socket in the room without the need for further in-house wiring.

Thus, while BPL has all the features of a promising technology, it has not, as yet, fulfilled earlier expectations. The extremely slow growth in the number of BPL service providers, and customer base, and the fact that a number of BPL service providers have been withdrawing from the market concentrating instead on developing smart-grid technology to monitor energy consumption, seems to indicate that service providers face problems.

There are a number of technological and, to a lesser extent, regulatory issues which need to beovercome in order to facilitate the take-off of BPL technology in the market. The electrical grid provides a harsh environment for data transmission, issues regarding radio frequency interference are both technological and regulatory, and international standardisation is incomplete. BPL requires investment, in particular where power grids are old, and BPL also requires investment to send data over long distances.

Furthermore as broadband over DSL migrates to fibre and cable modem speeds increase as a result of new technology, the competitive environment facing BPL becomes more difficult.

In short, while there may be a potential for BPL to further competition in the broadband market, there is little evidence to indicate that this will take place soon and that it can be counted on to provide a competitive alternative in the near term to xDSL (or fibre to the home) and cable modem technologies. Nevertheless, a technology neutral policy would argue in favour of regulators ensuring that no unnecessary barriers are in place for the eventual commercial diffusion of this technology as well as ensuring that interference with other licensed wireless services is minimised.

Written by Ewan Sutherland, Telecommunications Policy Analyst

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More under: Access Providers, Broadband, Policy & Regulation, Telecom

US Antitrust Enforcement in Telecommunication Being Ramped Up

2009-07-07T07:39:00-08:00

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that antitrust enforcement in telecommunication is being ramped up by the Obama Administration, after relatively lax times.

In a piece entitled Telecoms Face Antitrust Threat it indicates that investigators are weighing up the roles of the large carriers and whether they are abusing the market power amassed under the Bush Administration.

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More under: Access Providers, Broadband, Policy & Regulation, Telecom

ICANN Regime Change: Exit Twomey, Enter Beckstrom

2009-07-07T07:22:00-08:00

On July 1st 2009, Rod Beckstrom succeeded Paul Twomey as the fourth CEO of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Rod assumes this important leadership role at a critical juncture in ICANN's ongoing evolution. Saying that he is jumping into the deep end of a pool would not do justice to the magnitude of the tasks before him. The more appropriate analogy might be parachuting from a plane above the Mariana Trench during a typhoon. However, after reading some of his writings, reviewing his biography, and having met with him one-on-one during ICANN's recent Sydney meeting, I am confident that the ICANN Board made the right decision in selecting Rod to lead the organization at this defining moment in Internet governance.

Fourth Down and Goal from the 1 Yard Line

Besides the normal organizational and staff review that any new CEO undertakes, the immediate challenges confronting Rod on Day 1 include:

The pending expiration of ICANN's Joint Project Agreement (JPA) with the US Government;
The introduction of internationalized country code top-level domains (IDNs) such as (例子.测试); and
Introduction of new generic top-level domains such as .WEB and .BLOG.

Together, these challenges create a unique opportunity for Rod to "punch the ball across the goal line" and bring to conclusion the hard work of ICANN's three previous CEOs over the last decade in "moving the ball down the field" on these issues. If Rod helps in scoring this critical "touchdown" early in his tenure as ICANN's next CEO, it will be a team accomplishment that the entire ICANN community could celebrate.

The Catalyst

Listening to Rod's speech to the ICANN community that Friday morning in Sydney inspired a sense of community that had been missing in recent years. He reminded me of my early days in ICANN when people like Mike Roberts, Louis Touton, and Andrew McLaughlin truly made me believe in a model of Internet governance to which I have devoted over a decade of my life. Over the last several years, that sense of community has been lost as ICANN has become more about expanding its own global reach and budget. While there is no doubt that ICANN's humble budget during its first couple of years of existence was insufficient to meet the herculean tasks confronting the organization, it is unacceptable that over the last several years of institutional growth, ICANN has let deteriorate that sense of community that was so critical to its creation. That's why I was so encouraged to hear Rod talk about "community" and his intention "to serve as a catalyst."

Prior to his speech, I looked over at Rod, who was sitting in the audience and he had his eyes closed. He appeared to be in a Zen-like state, rehearsing the speech he was about to give. In addition to inspiring me, Rod ticked all the necessary boxes in his speech that an incoming ICANN CEO should: recognition of Internet pioneers such as Jon Postel and Steve Crocker, acknowledging the various stakeholders within the ICANN process, and embracing the inherent "noise" (music) within the ICANN process. Rod's speech, given without notes, was not only inspiring and inclusive, but humble in his acknowledgment that he is not an expert on ICANN and that he would need the "help and support" of the community in accomplishing his job.

While Paul Twomey, his predecessor, had the benefit of being involved in ICANN since its creation, Rod does not come with that institutional knowledge. While some may view that as a liability, given the important tasks confronting the organization in the short-term, I see that as an opportunity for someone with his management and leadership skill-set to take a fresh 360° perspective of the entire ICANN organization. Through this review, Rod could serve as a catalyst to inspire the next billion Internet users to take a more active role in the ICANN community.

Additional Data Points

I look forward to working with Rod, the ICANN staff and the rest of the global ICANN Community in ensuring that ICANN continues to serve as a global trustee of the Internet's unique identifiers. Rod is sure to hear an endless number of suggestions as to what's wrong with ICANN or how it could be made better. But I will leave it to him to discern the symphony of genuine consensus and wisdom from the cacophony of strongly held beliefs and opinions of the many stakeholders across the ICANN community.

While Rod likely has no shortage of assigned reading, hopefully he might find the time to speak to the following four people that were not in attendance in Sydney but who were instrumental in helping shape my views of ICANN as a unique global community: Mike Roberts (ICANN's original CEO); Louis Touton (ICANN's first General Counsel); David Johnson (Attorney) and Sharil Tarmizi (former Chair of the GAC). He might start by listening to the audio or reading the transcript—of the PFF discussion I recently moderated on Capitol Hill with two of these four sages (Roberts and Johnson), as well as Milton Muller and ICANN's then-CEO Paul Twomey.

Written by Michael D. Palage

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More under: Internet Governance

Tinkering Without Tampering: Wrestling With Convergence and Communications Policy (Transcript)

2009-07-06T18:11:01-08:00

Our world finds itself at a critical juncture. Both trillions of dollars and the future of human communications including fundamental access to it are at stake. For telecom operators and media outlets there is not a migratory way from where we are to the future. There is a clear consumer shift underway that runs in the opposite direction to that of telecom and media incumbents; emergent social practice is increasingly clashing with the very structure and desires of incumbent players.

A battle is unfolding which is taking place across three related planes; between industries that were previously clearly demarcated (telecom, cellular, Internet and media); between distributed, peer-to-peer ecosystems enabled by the Internet versus centralized, command-and-control ways of organizing to deliver services and content; and between opportunistic infrastructure versus tolled infrastructure.

It was for these reasons that one of the six keynote speakers invited to Spring 2009 Emerging Communications Conference (eComm) in San Francisco was Richard Whitt, Google's Washington Telecom and Media Counsel. His keynote was entitled "Tinkering without Tampering: Wrestling with Convergence and Communications Policy."

I'd like to remind readers that the next Emerging Communications Conference & Awards (eComm), will take place this Fall in Amsterdam. I can promise that the event will be very worthwhile attending and many of the larger reasons why will become public over the coming months. In the meantime, the Super Early Bird registration is still on and ends on 21st July. To receive a further 20% off use the promotion code 'CircleID' during registration.

* * *

Richard Whitt, Washington Telecom and Media Counsel, Google on stage at 2009 Emerging Communications Conference (eComm) in San Francisco — Photo © James Duncan DavidsonTranscript of "Tinkering without Tampering: Wrestling with Convergence and Communications Policy"
March 5, 2009, by Richard Whitt, Washington Telecom and Media Counsel, Google — 2009 Emerging Communications Conference (eComm) in San Francisco

I see Google can coexist with the broadcasters; that's pretty impressive. I know it's been a long three days. I wanted to do something a little different, a little more conceptual, pulling together some technology and economic thinking to try to guide our next set of policymakers, particularly in Washington, as they grapple with broadband related issues.

Maura Corbett and Sascha Meinrath, and Michael Calabrese, and a bunch of other people here have talked about some of the policy issues in D.C. This is my attempt to take a little bit of a step back and ask some more fundamental questions about whether and why we actually want policymakers involved in technology areas, particularly the broadband market.

First off, I want to talk a little bit about this notion of convergence that everybody has been discussing seemingly forever, except strangely enough, in Washington. The notion of the "virtuous hourglass," there is still an awful lot of people on Capitol Hill and at the FCC who don't quite understand what that means. I do believe it's a misleading term. I came up on the panel, earlier today; the idea that everything in the telecom space is moving down to a single service or single concept; of course, that's not true. The point is that we are more or less moving to a single platform IP, at least for the foreseeable future; on top we have all the different applications and devices; and on the bottom, different kinds of network platforms, thus, the virtuous hourglass.

We are also converging on some of the key elements of Internet architecture, including modularity, the smart edges, interconnection of networks and ubiquitous IP. One of the end results is that services in our application software on the platforms and the core moves to the edges. Again, a lot of this, while it is probably old hat to many of you as kind of a truism, it's not so much the case in Washington.

One of the challenges is trying to have policymakers really understand how networks function and how these realities take place. At the same time, we've got emergence, convergence leading to emergence, the Internet, and if you go back to complexity sites—the net like many large complex systems is a complex-adaptive system, which means the whole is greater than the parts. It has all these amazing emergent properties, like feedback mechanisms.

The Internet, in the terms of The Economist, is also a general platform technology, or GPT, which means it acts as a ubiquitous bearer for all kinds of all growth and innovation happening on top of it, and in particular, there is this concept of spillovers. GPTs generate these things that, again, The Economist calls "positive externalities," that are not captured by the platform owners.

This really becomes one of the key issues in that old debate around network neutrality. These network effects include all kinds of economic activities by innovators and entrepreneurs, and also include all kinds of non-economic effects. Yochai Benkler has written an entire book on peer production, and on social production, where the user stands in the shoes of the traditional producer of services and outside the traditional producer/consumer relationship. Professor Susan Crawford has talked about what she calls the "social layer of the Internet," which is all the human interaction in communications—diversity, freedom of expression, democracy, and all the values that don't typically show up in neoclassical formulas.

These spillovers actually create the value we see in the Internet, and in turn, in broadband networks. The implications—again, this is not entirely new to you all but many people in D.C. have not fully grappled with this—the battles are now shaping up between the networks and their users. Network neutrality can be seen as the latest, but it's part of a long string that have happened over decades and is not reaching culmination because of these technological changes and market changes.

Blaire Levin, who is an analyst for Stifel Nicholas, calls it "the value chain tug-of-war." The networks of course, in the past, held much of the value and now because the services are no longer inextricably bound to the network, that value is moving to the edges. Naturally, the network owners are not particularly happy with that happening.

Why are we involved in this stuff in D.C.? That question is asked to me with some regularity. Our corporate mission statement is to "Organize the world's information to make it universally accessible and easy to use." The organizing and usefulness aspects of that are more or less what our software engineers are responsible for and all of our various vendors, partners, product teams, etc., but the middle concept of universal accessibility is actually the one thing that is not under our control. In fact, it's largely outside our control because unlike our ability to create a new algorithm or tweak a software application, we have very little say over whether and how our users can reach us; that's the network layer that we're talking about here.

We do believe very much in the ecosystem of the Internet. When network neutrality first came out as an issue three or four years ago, there was actually an internal debate at Google about what the position of the company would be. The management actually did a lot of the pros and cons talking about it, and at the end of that discussion they said, "We were a company born of the internet. We were raised there. We found our success there. It is this concept of innovation without permission, as Vint Cerf has described it, and we really believe in it. The competition that arises from the net makes us better as a company. It makes us sharper, quicker, move with more agility, so we actually believe in those elements of the net and we want to see them preserved and maintained going forward." That's been a large part of my role at Google, for the past several years.

For policymakers in D.C. and particularly for communications policy, one of the challenges is looking at the market and the technology without using the old telecom ways of thinking. Being here at the Emerging Communications Conference, it's a great platform for all the new thinking around communications, which frankly is just not being heard as much in D.C.

They're still using all the same old tools, the same old concepts; they still have very much this urge to tamper in the marketplace. The first instinct is to regulate something. There is this issue that is very much an old issue but still one that is with us, and that's the role of network infrastructure and society. What are the ways we should be looking at this as a legal construct; what are the ways we should be thinking about this as a society?

One of the answers that I suggest is that we need to see the market and the government with fresh eyes, not just as standalone or antagonistic entities but as linked co-evolving agents in the larger ecosystem. There is a whole school in economics called New Institutional Economics, which talks about the institutions that make up the marketplace and how that engenders the ability for market agents to get together and buy and sell and barter and trade, and to do all the things of commerce.

We've seen in the financial meltdown, unfortunately, institutions that have seriously broken down both in the government side and on the market side. I think the problem is sometimes we look at the government as it's always evil, it's always there to cause problems. In fact, we need government there in some cases to make sure that the markets run smoothly.

At the same time, we don't want the government to be there just for any old purpose. The policymaker first and foremost, in acting as an adaptive agent in that marketplace, needs to be sensitive to its own cognitive constraints and to the dynamism and unpredictability of the marketplace itself.

The first principle should really be for the policymaker to take great caution; to tinker and not to tamper. That's one of the formulas I'll get back to in a second. It also means the policymakers are ill equipped to deal with the numerous issues stemming from convergence and the value shifts in these complex markets.

Here is an example of one conceptual tool that I think is better equipped to deal with the converged networks. The Communications Act of 1934 and the way the FCC is set up today is based on the so called silos approach. You have telephone companies and cable companies. You have TV and radio broadcasters and satellite companies, etc. In fact, that is increasingly no longer the case. It's no longer accurate to describe the industries in that way.

Instead, we should be looking more towards the old OSI layered stack or some variance on that. It actually mirrors the market economy we have today and it allows policymakers to focus on the right issues at the right level. I wrote a paper about this a few years ago, and I still think this remains a viable way for the FCC to reorganize itself, reorganize its way of thinking around networks.

I want to be a little provocative and talk for a few minutes about network neutrality and broadband. I hope to kind of bring some new perspectives on it for you guys today. I think there are some misnomers about net neutrality, as it's been called.

First, I think about it not as the "net" or I call it more "network neutrality." The network we're talking about is the last mile of the broadband on ramps to and from the Internet. There is this misnomer, of course, that the net is somehow completely neutral in architecture and that we should be mirroring the neutrality of the Internet.

We know that's not true; the end-to-end principle still abides as a fundamental characteristic of the Internet, but there are many exceptions to that. We all know that there are many non-neutral structural and business activities taking place every day on the net, which is fine. The point is the net is a robustly competitive place and those kind of non-neutral activities are acceptable in that context. The concern around broadband is that because it's in relatively scarce supply, the concerns around neutrality there are heightened.

It's also about the outcome and not the path. Every time you hear someone say "net neutrality" the next word is usually regulation. Again, we've heard that several times today. My observation is that you can have a network neutrality environment without the regulation to get you there.

I would submit that we actually have net neutrality right now. We don't have a law, we don't have legislation in place that is passed by Congress and signed by the President, we don't have regulations adopted by the FCC that says, "Thou shalt have a net neutral world," but in fact, because of largely the bully pulpit of the FCC over the past five or six years, and some principles that were adopted, which I believe are unenforceable—we'll find out from the D.C. circuit shortly, in the Comcast vs. BitTorrent case. We still have a world where, by and large, the broadband providers have been hesitant to go forth and do non-neutral type things.

It really is about the outcome. It's the environment we want and not necessarily the path. There are many ways to get there. This may be one of them, frankly, or other ways like self-regulating organizations, standards, bodies, and the like.

Also, it's this notion of the openness norm. We have relied on it to this point, but it's unclear whether market forces will allow that to stay in place. There are a number of folks who are confident that the notion of openness is now so deeply embedded within the user community, within consumers, that we can't go back. We can't turn back the clock. We're not going to be in a situation where somehow those norms break down and broadband providers start doing various things on the network that we're not happy about. That may be true, but the incentives and the ability to discriminate are very much there. I think the real challenge going forward is how do you essentially discipline the market behavior where you think there are problems of concentration in a minimally intrusive way and a narrowly tailored way that still allows for the flexibility and the adaptability of the broadband providers, going forward?

Broadband also, again, there are many misnomers around this, and particularly now, we are at the height of the season in Washington, with the broadband stimulus portions of the stimulus package. Broadband, in and of itself, is simply transportation and communication put together. Its transporting bits, communication between people, creating interactivity, the always on aspect of it. We value broadband for what it enables, not for what it is.

For one thing, it's not the Internet, as I've mentioned. It's the on ramps to the net to regulate some aspect of broadband provider behaviors, not necessarily to regulate the Internet. There could be that there, but it's not necessarily the case.

It's also not a content delivery system. It can be, but that's one of many things it could do. It could provide Internet access, but that's one of the things it does. The social value we see in broadband seems to be around online connectivity. That seems to be the element that really sticks with us, and yet, at the same time, we talk about broadband in a way that focuses much more on the infrastructure and much less on the Internet access part of that, or the online connectivity part of that.

It's also not your vegetables or a box of widgets. The economics of broadband include very high, fixed upfront costs which as a general platform technology, which is unique in economics; there aren't a whole lot of other types of industries you can point to that have the similar characteristics. That actually dictates the way we think about broadband.

Here is a suggestion on what I call "three dimensions of broadband as an optimal Internet platform." Folks have traditionally looked at one or two of these. I think it actually makes more sense to talk about all three of them together.

First of course, you need to have the infrastructure itself, and that's the IP transmission and broadband component on the bottom, there. That is kind of obvious; that's where the national broadband policy—this will be put in place by the FCC—that is the broadband stimulus plan; you want more and bigger pipes to more people.
There is also this idea of sufficiency of net carriage. You could have a broadband platform that is uniquely tuned for the Internet but if 90% to 95% of the capacity goes to traditional video, cable video, proprietary content, that kind of thing that is actually the case today with some cable systems; that's not optimal for the Internet or for connectivity, if that's something that is really driving our policy interests.
The third part of it is what I call "integrity of net access," which is what others would call the "open Internet" or "network neutrality." I think you need to have all three of these dimensions working in some way together, in order to have the right kind of mix for Internet access.

I'm not saying you need to regulate to get there, I'm saying these are the things that I think policymakers should be thinking about as they look at the various options.

Real quickly, one way of translating some of these economic technology considerations into some more concrete policy goals and objectives, one suggests a policy goal, borrowing from Susan Crawford, she talks about this idea of "cognitive diversity." My thought here is to have more good ideas. That's the thing that we actually want to come out of all of this work with the broadband networks, with the Internet. We want to generate more good ideas and that is something that should be—the end user is ultimately the one who decides what those ideas are. They fuel innovation and economic growth. They also are just things we talk about. It doesn't necessarily have to be any kind of economic benefit to them whatsoever. The market kind of provides the fodder for these ideas. The mechanism I suggest is the policy objectives that helps us get there is to look at broadband as an optimal Internet platform, with those three dimensions that I suggested.

What holds back the broadband companies from providing optimal Internet access over their networks? What are the things that they look to that might create less of an incentive rather than more of an incentive to get to that place? Here are four examples I can think of:

One is ruinous competition. Rob Atkinson has written about this in D.C. in some detail; the idea that we may want to have three, four, five, or ten "pipes" coming to the home but in fact the economics may not support it. Because you're talking about these really expensive, high fixed upfront cost networks, if you start dividing a limited pie based on the number of facilities there, you can get to a place where competition actually becomes harmful.
Again, there have been some studies on this. People don't know exactly what the right numbers are; could that be two networks, three networks, four networks? Somewhere along the way there, you get to a place where ruinous competition can set in. That should be something policymakers are aware of. This notion that we're all waiting for competition to arrive—it may never arrive, just because of the sheer economics of it.
Positive externalities, as I mentioned before, this wedge between the public benefit we get from the net and the private costs of building broadband networks.
The incentives to prioritize traffic, in terms of the idea of two-sided markets, the desire of broadband providers to get additional revenue to support their networks.
Finally, existing mindsets—there remains today, at least in the policy debates in Washington, a divide between the "bell heads" and the "net heads"; that is still the case, even if the bell heads are cable companies. The value chain tug of war is very much alive.

I wanted to show this last slide here; throw out some thoughts about the legal conundrum we're in. The FCC has done, in my view, a poor job of figuring out what is the right regulatory regime in this situation. I suggest we go back and look at the common law of common carriage.

Common carriage is the basis of the Communications Act, that goes back hundreds and hundreds of year, to Britain and even before that, to the Roman Empire. There were three reasons why government got involved in the first place in imposing any kind of oversight over a common carriage.

The first was market concentration. That is kind of the obvious one. It is the one most people point to today. The evidence, of course, is mixed. I would like to think there is room for more competition, particularly from spectrum-based offerings, but I think we're still not entirely sure if that is going to happen.
The other two strands are much more interesting; public callings—that was the idea that public infrastructure uniquely is important to society, whether it's roads, bridges, railroads, or anything that transports things or in this case, communications, is of unique value and of unique interest to government policymakers because it enables so much on top of it.
There is also this idea that you are using public resources. When you're talking about wireless networks, of course, it's spectrum. When you are talking about the wireline side, it's rights of way, access to conduit, etc. Together that creates a public interest in broadband or in broadband infrastructure.

Again, not to say what that interest should look like, in terms of a regulatory outcome, but just to say we have a policy view that says, "We need to look at this; it's important to us."
It's the idea of bailment, which is voluntarily holding yourself out as providing something. You had a duty of care if you called yourself an innkeeper. Once you assumed that role, the duty of care was assigned to you. One could say the same thing in the case of a broadband provider. Once you voluntarily agree to provide Internet access to your customer, you have to provide it and perhaps in a certain way and in a certain manner.

Finally, competition law is necessary but not sufficient. It doesn't account for many of these positive spillovers or this notion of infrastructure being given unique value to policy makers.

Written by Lee S Dryburgh, Founder of eComm Media, Inc

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More under: Access Providers, Broadband, Net Neutrality, P2P, Policy & Regulation, Telecom, VoIP, White Space, Wireless

Carlton and Kende's Narrow Understanding of Corporate Domain Registrations

2009-07-06T07:31:00-08:00

Professor Denis Carlton was asked by the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to submit a report on (or justify!) the impact of new top-level domains (TLDs) on industry competition. After he did so, Dr. Michael Kende posted an elaborate comment on the report on behalf of AT&T, to which Professor Carlton published a rebuttal. This essay outlines some of the errors in Professor Carlton's rebuttal and Dr. Kende's comments. It outlines the difference between offensive and defensive domain name registrations, and it questions ICANN's decision to select only one comment for rebuttal.

Professor Carlton and Dr. Kende missed the broader role of branded corporate domain name registrations. Professor Carlton correctly points out that corporate use of a domain name as a traffic door to a company's main site creates value for the owner. However, they both ignore the fact that the value, in addition to the benefit of "preventing cybersquatting," is driven by TLD signaling, reduction in counterfeiting and phishing. In addition, they both fail to distinguish between defensive and offensive registrations. The distinction is important as it has implications for shareholder value creation.

Defensive Registrations

A registration is defensive when both of two circumstances apply:

ICANN fails to adopt an effective mechanism (see, for example, Toward A Three-Regime Domain Registration: Generic, Idea, IP) to disallow domain name registrations that include third-party brand names; i.e., a mechanism that prevents an entity from illegally siphoning revenue away from the rightful owner.
A trademark owner fails to convince a registrant to participate in a cooperative brand network of domain names.

Defensive registrations protect brand names against losses to brand owners from lost sales, potential damage to the brand, and legal costs to enforce the right or acquisition price above registration cost. (For details on the sources, see Value-Loss Sources Mitigated by Defensive Registrations.)

Thus, the motivation behind a defensive registration is to stop transferring value, with no shareholder value creation, from legitimate owners to illegal users of branded domain names.

Offensive Registrations

A registration is offensive when it is brand enhancing and traffic generating, and therefore creates shareholder value. There are three ways of creating value: by using brand networks, enhancing Internet users' experiences, and signaling with TLDs.

To create value, trademark owners should either register branded domain names to lease them to selected third parties or form a cooperative brand network using already registered domain names. Thus, although defensive domains have value, they fail to enhance brand value. Nevertheless, corporate acquisition can destroy shareholder value when not used in an offensive capacity.

To enhance online user experience, brand owners must decrease irritation of users by making them less likely to land on a site that poses as one belonging to the brand owner, especially on a sterile parking page. This can be achieved by registering typo domains. Thus, unlike defensive registrations, typo registrations add value.

Signaling with TLDs is a third way to create value, in that the TLD provides useful information that would help the customer. New TLDs can play such a role if companies need to signal, say, presence in a city.

Beyond Redirect

Dr. Kende lacks a full understanding of the sources of corporate domain name value. He says defensive registrations have no value because they are "not being unique, in that they redirect traffic back to a core registration, or do not contain unique content."

As noted earlier, Professor Carlton has already pointed out the value in traffic domain names. However, they both overlook other sources of value. Although Dr. Kende is correct that generic traffic doorways are not individually unique, he overlooks the fact that they are substitutes for directing key word—related traffic. But substitutes have value; otherwise their market price would be driven to zero. Nevertheless, not having unique content does not imply an absence of value. The market value (benefits) of each Web site is equal to the expected additional income that the benefits generate to the best target site (owner) over their useful life. When such domain names are put into best use, value of benefits and market value converge.

Questionable ICANN Intentions

ICANN's decision to ask for a rebuttal of only one of the numerous comments submitted directly to the ICANN site, not to mention blogs, adds more fuel to the argument that the group wanted to support their own views irrespective of the truth.

Professor Carlton tells us, "Alternative mechanisms exist, and others are actively being studied by ICANN, to protect trademark holders while preserving the procompetitive benefits of entry." This is cheap talk! He fails to give any details of what such a mechanism might be. Thus, it is impossible to determine the impact of a new TLD trademark regime on costs to trademark holders.

Concluding Remarks

1. A branded domain name that directs traffic to a core site can be defensive or offensive and has a market value irrespective of whether it has unique content. It is defensive when all traffic is forwarded to a core site. Such action has suboptimal shareholder value. On the other hand, traffic generated through a cooperative brand network regime and by the registering of typo domain names is value adding, and, thus, offensive.

2. Defensive registrations and acquisitions can be turned into offensive registrations, and new registrations can be offensive.

3. Non-uniqueness of traffic domain names and lack of Web site content do not imply lack of value.

Written by Alex Tajirian, CEO

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More under: Domain Names, Domain Registries, Top-Level Domains

Three Myths About DKIM

2009-07-06T07:04:01-08:00

The DKIM standard has been out for two years now, and we're starting to see some adoption by large mail systems, but there's still a lot of misunderstanding about what DKIM does and doesn't do.

A DKIM signature means a message isn't spam

Any a mail system can add a signatures to the messages it handles, and spammers can sign their mail, too. A DKIM signature contains, stripped down to its basics, the domain of the signer and a checksum of the message. If you get a message with a valid DKIM signature, all you know is that the the message you got was the same one that the signer signed, since the checksum validates, and that the domain's management authorized the signature, since there was a validation key in the domain's DNS. The value of DKIM comes when you have a stream of messages signed by the same domain. If a domain has earned a reputation for signing good messages, for any version of "good" you like, it's reasonable to expect subsequent signed messages to be good, too, and vice versa. The signature is only useful as a handle to recognize a message as part of a group of signed mail.

A DKIM signature means the header information is "real"

Nope, it just means that the message you got was the message they signed. Once again, signers can sign anything they want. Even if the signing domain is the same as the domain part of the From: address, sometimes called a "first party" signature, there's still no guarantee about the From: line other than that the one you see is the one they signed.

Some signing domains may make a policy of only signing mail where the From: address is verified, perhaps by knowing that the original sender logged in with credentials linked to that address, but signing policy is deliberately outside the scope of the DKIM spec.

DKIM doesn't work with mailing lists

There's two kinds of lists, announcement lists where all the mail is from one sender, and discussion lists where subscribers send in messages that are resent to all of the list members. In both cases, the sensible thing for the list manager to do is to sign the mail from the list.

The confusion arises from the possibility that mail sent to a discussion list could already have a DKIM signature applied by the original sender's system. In most cases, mailing list software makes enough changes to messages that the original DKIM signature won't validate any more. Common changes such as adding the list name to the subject line, or adding headers or footers to the mail, particularly if they're edited into the HTML code of formatted mail, would break any existing signature. A few old-fashioned list management programs (often used for technical discussion lists, and hence disproportionately popular among the members of the DKIM group) sometimes change messages so little that list recipients could still verify the incoming signature as well as the signature applied by the list, so a few people have claimed that this is how to tell if mail sent to the list is "forged", and that list software should all stop modifying messages so all signatures pass through.

This shows a fairly basic misunderstanding of what mailing lists do. As opposed to forwarders, which blindly forward incoming mail from one address to another and are just a transit point, a mailing list is really both a destination for mail submitted to the list, and the sender of list mail. During the 40 years that there have been e-mail discussion lists, list managers have developed a wide variety of mechanical and manual means to decide what submitted mail is passed through to the list, forged mail to mailing lists has never been a significant problem, and there's no reason to think that will change just because some of the mail has signatures.

People subscribe to mailing lists because they want mail from the list, and nobody I know does spam filtering on mail that they already know is from lists they've subscribed to. (We may filter out mail from chronic bozos, but that's not spam filtering, that's just looking for their addresses on the From: line.) DKIM can be useful to list managers using incoming signatures as one of the criteria to recognize mail from subscribers and help decide what gets passed through to the list. It's also useful to list recipients to help recognize mail from the list using the list's signature. Both ways, far from not working with lists, DKIM makes list management and use easier and more reliable.

Written by John Levine, Author, Consultant & Speaker

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More under: Spam

Back to the Future for Broadband in America

2009-07-04T11:59:00-08:00

With countries like Australia and New Zealand implementing infrastructure that can deliver 100Mb/s for their next generation broadband—and with most Europeans not too far behind this—it is quite shocking to see that the $7.2 billion economic stimulus package in the USA (under the RUS Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP) and the NTIA Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP)) requires nothing more than 768 kilobits per second (kb/s) downstream and 200 kb/s upstream.

I am sure that some of you will think that I have misread this but, no, that is indeed the case.

In 2003 Hong Kong decided not to classify as broadband any service that didn't provide 2Mb/s!

The sad part of the story is that, as this money will mainly be deployed in rural America, this guarantees an enormous digital divide in the USA. AT&T and Verizon already offer FttH services in some of the more affluent suburbs, and they are currently extending these services guaranteeing a progressive increase in the quality of broadband services provided to these markets; however, for the foreseeable future there is little hope of seeing such service quality increase (speed) beyond the major cities.

Google's Vint Cerf comment is lethal:

The definition of broadband sucks so badly we should use it to sequester carbon dioxide.

With little government leadership it will now depend on the competitive process of the allocations of funds to see if there are some good, willing providers who will offer a better service for the same money they receive from the funds. This might happen in the upper end of the target areas but those communities further down the list might be stuck for a decade or longer with what can only be described as one of the worst broadband services available anywhere in the world.

My colleague Susan Estrada, on her blog, made further mention:

Cost-effectiveness for the BTOP local loop projects is based on the ratio of the total cost of the project to households passed. That just seems dumb. Lots of cities with urban density will be very happy to see that.

For some unknown reason it is not seen as one single infrastructure project and this is beyond the understanding of most people in the industry. The plan places artificial breaks between last mile, middle mile, public computing and innovative programs. This makes the production of integrated programs, which the Department of Commerce says it wants to see implemented, very difficult.

Susan comments on this as follows:

The money chunks (available funds) are oddly constructed. It's not very clear why. The BIPpers have made all of their $2.4B available, chunked out as $1.2B for last mile projects—remote or non-remote areas. Middle mile projects are allotted $.8B. The BTOPers set aside $1.6B in this round out of their $4.3B. $1.2B goes to infrastructure but only $50M to public computer centers and $150M to sustainable broadband adoption in this round. Kinda cheesy.

But the bad news doesn't end there. The documentation of underserved by census block is totally inadequate and is going to cause endless discussions and delays.

Susan:

Underserved and unserved definitions require more study and a deep knowledge of Census blocks, last calculated in 2000. There is also a strange and weird condition of funding where, after an organization has jumped through all the stage 1 and 2 hoops, the BIPpers and BTOPers will post their planned awards so the masses can object to funding if there is already service in the area awarded. This needs much further cogitation and I can see a potential of some very bad outcomes due to this rule.

On the more positive side—because of certain other parts in the rules—there are indications that most of the RUS & BTOP money could be going to fibre deployments, and this would provide higher speed services, despite the low requirements. With the government paying for most of the build the carriers hopefully will in general choose fibre (for landlines) and more than 3Mb/s for wireless. The real exception would be in poor areas.

The extremely low speed the policies have prescribed is a way of ensuring that there will be very limited exceptions, thus avoiding the politics.

So far, however, our interpretation, and the comments that I have received from my American colleagues, raises very serious concerns, and represents a massive setback for the deployment of broadband in regional and rural America.

Written by Paul Budde, Managing Director of Paul Budde Communication

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More under: Access Providers, Broadband, Telecom

What are TLDs Good For?

2009-07-03T12:45:01-08:00

Yesterday I said that the original motivations for adding new TLDs were to break VeriSign's monopoly on .COM, and to use domain names as directories [links: here and blog]. Competitive registrars broke the monopoly more effectively than any new domains, and the new domains that tried to be directories have failed. So what could a new TLD do?

Get rich quick: the new domains with the most registrations are .BIZ and .INFO, clones of .COM and .ORG for people who missed out the first time. Despite vigorous marketing and, for .INFO, price cutting, neither is more than a pale shadow of the original, and both are plagued with sleazy registrants. Nonetheless, we can expect a few more clones like .WEB, who will make their money from defensive trademark registrations, domain squatters, speculators, and a few suckers who think that SAUERKRAUT.WEB can be the gateway to a mail-order fortune.

Idealists: Another unpersuasive theory says that a TLD enables communities. The best example to date is .CAT for Catalonia, which is modestly successful but doesn't tell us much since Barcelona is a rich sophisticated city that would be awash in Internet content with or without a domain. On the other hand .MUSEUM is a noble failure, with only about 200 registrants, a lot of dead links, and negligible visibility. Two pleasant young men have been trying to get .BERLIN through ICANN for years, and there are other candidates like .ECO, but it's hard to see why anyone would switch from their existing domain in .DE or .ORG or whatever since they haven't for any of the community domains we have now. I've heard claims that tiny language groups in danger of dying out need their own TLD, but it seems to me that if they could raise the $185K that a TLD application costs, they'd be a lot better off hiring linguists and programmers to compile dictionaries and adapt text and web tools to work in the language.

Certification: sponsored TLDs are supposed to ensure that all of their registrants meet specific requirements, so you know that a domain in, say, .COOP is an actual co-operative. The flaw in this theory so far is that none of the sponsored TLDs so far have been in areas where there's a problem with fakes, nor do they have any process to verify that registrants remain eligible. The little poultry packer that registered CHICKEN.COOP sold out to a larger company, but nobody noticed they weren't a co-op any more until I wrote to .COOP management and told them. They thanked me and encouraged me to report any more violations I saw, so I guess I volunteered to be the compliance department. The number of registrations in .COOP is on the order of 1% of the co-ops in the world, so it appears that the other 99% of co-ops are getting along fine without a special domain.

The .PRO domain is supposed to be just for licensed doctors, lawyers, accountants and maybe other licensed professionals (the web site is a bit vague), who have to present their licenses to register, but a combination of mismanagement and financial problems have allowed in large numbers of speculators and other registrants who clearly don't meet the criteria, so it doesn't tell us anything useful. I could imagine that a .BANK domain that carefully vetted its registrants to be sure they were real banks with government banking licenses might help tell real from fake bank web sites and mail, but that certification niche seems to be taken already by green bar SSL certificates.

Branding: The new rules allow single owner domains, so we can expect Apple to get .MAC and probably other companies will register their name like .IBM or brand names. Marketers are doubtless salivating, but for regular users, it's hard to see why you'd want to be BOB.MAC and rent your identity to your computer vendor.

Non-English languages: This is the only one that has any urgency at all. China really wants .中国 in addition to .CN, and a lot of other countries with non-Roman writing would also like localized domains. ICANN has a separate process for non-ASCII TLDs, so I'll ignore them for now.

So running down this list, where's the compelling argument? Does anyone (ignoring those with vested interests) really think that more TLDs will break the .COM monopoly? That more "community" TLDs will be any more of a success than the failures to date? That anyone will use a TLD rather than a search engine as a directory?

The only unambigous beneficiary of new TLDs is ICANN, whose cash flow will increase by $185,000 per application, and all of the consultants they've hired to do the evaluations because ICANN's many highly paid staff evidently can't do it themselves. Since a lot of the new TLDs will be run by organizations with little or no experience as a registry, we can expect them to learn slowly and painfully about all the sleazy tricks that crooked registrants pull.

In sum, neither of the two classic arguments for new domains, competition and directories, have worked in the past decade, and there's no reason to think they will in the future. Other than support for non-English languages, all of the other rationales strike me as wishful thinking, not business models. So I look forward to .中国 and its ilk, but other than that, they're all going to fail, very expensively.

Written by John Levine, Author, Consultant & Speaker

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More under: Domain Registries, Internet Governance, Top-Level Domains

Turn the Table on Content Filtering

2009-07-03T12:07:00-08:00

The diagram below depicts two mail transmitters relaying mail on behalf of two users each, and a target MX receiving that mail for four recipients. The difference between the two transmitters is how they deal with content filtering.

Why do we run content filters at the recipient's side? Paul Graham's Plan for Spam introduced them that way. After several years, we can say that plan doesn't work very well. Email has become much less reliable. One way to recover reliability, at least between trusted parties, is to run filters at the sender's side. Let's look at the diagram in more detail.

Users are connected through authenticated and possibly encrypted connections, both senders and recipients. Some users are connected through the Internet, some directly to the relevant server.

The first MSA (?) relays according to current SMTP standards. The receiving server runs content filtering, but doesn't know what to do in case an accepted message turns out to be spam. The amount of mumbo jumbo required for effective spam filtering is high, and may involve delays. If the message is considered spam, most times it will be silently dropped. This is where unreliability stems from.

The second MSA (!) relays according to the VHLO proposed SMTP extension. The sender knows how to handle spam, because it knows any required detail about the authenticated sender. The recipient trusts the sender, not because they have specific arrangements, but because the sender identifies itself, e.g. providing its domain registration reference, and relays for its own users only, at least for the illustrated session.

VHLO, Verified Hello, provides a reliable channel that can be used in parallel with existing EHLO traffic. It employs the authentication, authorization, and vouching techniques that have been developed during the past years, and allows postmasters to manage them, e.g. getting aware of what conditions a receiver MTA requires… But I'm not going to describe protocol's details, that are being discussed. I want to ask: Are you ready to turn the table on spam?

Written by Ale, Tiny ISP and freelance programmer

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More under: Spam