33 Years of the Digest ... founded August 21, 1981Copyright © 2014 E. William Horne. All Rights Reserved.The Telecom Digest for Dec 30, 2014
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| The Senate of the United States has been both extravagantly praised and unreasonably disparaged, according to the predisposition and temper of its various critics... The truth is, in this case as in so many others, something quite commonplace and practical. The Senate is just what the mode of its election and the conditions of public life in this country make it. - Woodrow Wilson |
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| Date: 28 Dec 2014 18:38:11 -0000 From: "John Levine" <johnl@iecc.com> To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Re: Verizon says it will charge NetFlix no matter what the FCC decides Message-ID: <20141228183811.63487.qmail@ary.lan> >Netflix is already paying various ISPs to ensure that its customers >get a decent streaming experience, including Verizon, Time Warner >Cable, Comcast and AT&T, but the company has voiced its concerns more >than once regarding these payments, urging the FCC to look into these >agreements. Why is that bad? I am not a Netflix customer. Why should I subsidize my neighbors who all want to watch Game of Thrones at the same time? R's, John |
| Date: Mon, 29 Dec 2014 17:26:31 +0000 (UTC) From: David Scheidt <dscheidt@panix.com> To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Re: Verizon says it will charge NetFlix no matter what the FCC decides Message-ID: <m7s2s6$q2a$1@reader1.panix.com> John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote: :>Netflix is already paying various ISPs to ensure that its customers :>get a decent streaming experience, including Verizon, Time Warner :>Cable, Comcast and AT&T, but the company has voiced its concerns more :>than once regarding these payments, urging the FCC to look into these :>agreements. :Why is that bad? I am not a Netflix customer. Why should I subsidize :my neighbors who all want to watch Game of Thrones at the same time? You already do. Verizon, Comcast, et al. have the internal network capacity to deliver the content to their customers. What they lack is the interconnect with the networks of content provider. They simply want to be paid twice for doing one job. They want their customers to pay them for being able to use the internet, and then they want content providers to pay them for being able to deliver that content to ISP's customers. Nice work, if you can get it, but not exactly honest. -- There's nothing sadder than an ontologist without an ontogenesis. -- some guy with a beard |
| Date: 28 Dec 2014 18:36:44 -0000 From: "John Levine" <johnl@iecc.com> To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Re: The Slow Death of 'Do Not Track' Message-ID: <20141228183644.62770.qmail@ary.lan> In article <90D87244-9075-492F-9E5F-852AB5990D1B@roscom.com> you write: >The Slow Death of "Do Not Track" > >The F.T.C. outsourced its job to industry. The victim: Your privacy. This article makes the common mistake of imagining that do not track is even vaguely similar to do not call. It is not. Web browsers do not have phone numbers, so there's no way to create a list of people to track. And unlike DNC, violations are invisible. A DNC violation is obvious, a junk call. A DNT violation is an oddly relevant ad on a web site, or perhaps an insurance company turning you down because an illegal tracker told them you've been searching for info on diabetes (which was for your dog, but they guessed wrong.) >The "Do Not Call" list also turned out to be a dud: as with most >things that claim to protect orginary people these days, the >"watchdog" has no teeth. Actually, the FTC whacks DNC violators all the time, and has an active program coordinating DNC actions with peer agencies in other countries.* The problem is that in the past decade the price of making long distance phone calls has dropped to effectively zero, courtesy of VoIP, so junk callers are as likely to be in Bangalore as Baltimore. Much worse, the SS7 network that transmits control info including caller ID was designed for a world in which there were a small number of large trustworthy phone companies who all knew each other. These days any little VoIP operator can and does inject arbitrary crud making junk calls nearly impossible to trace. It's a harder problem than you might think -- when I make a VoIP call from a phone in my house in NY, the caller ID shows up as my Canadian cell phone. Is that "false"? If you call the number and the phone is turned on, the person who answers it is me. The regulators understand that and have been beating on the telcos hard enough that they're starting to work on legal and technical changes to make SS7 data reasonably true. But it'll take a while. R's, John * - I help them schedule the conference calls, and could listen in if there were any chance I might say something useful. |
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