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Re: The Real Congressional Agenda? (was Re: The House of Representatives on campus downloading)
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sun, 6 May 2007 20:44:19 -0400
Begin forwarded message:
From: "Steven M. Bellovin" <smb () cs columbia edu>
Date: May 6, 2007 2:47:38 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Re: The Real Congressional Agenda? (was Re: [IP] The House
of Representatives on campus downloading)
On Fri, 4 May 2007 20:59:58 -0400
David Farber <dave () farber net> wrote:
In a sense, we are in the crosshairs now. Because we are in
a university town, and our local university is cracking down
on music and software piracy, people who engage in these
activities are migrating off of the University network and
asking us for service. They are also going to hotspots which
we provide for businesses, attempting to monopolize the
bandwidth at those locations. (We have been forced to employ
anti-hogging and anti-piracy measures to keep them from doing
so.)
Abuses by these people and the software they host threaten to
cripple our service. Ironically, the University, with its
government-funded link to Internet2, could shoulder the load
far better than we can with our more expensive bandwidth. We
try to encourage these people to patronize our competitors
(the cable and telephone monopolies) to avoid the problem.
But ultimately, something must give. We can't afford to host
illegal activity or to allow our networks to be monopolized
by it when so many of our users have legal, important work
to do.
I think you need to distinguish between bandwidth consumption -- or
overconsumption -- and illegality. While I agree that most of the
bandwidth use you report is probably the result of illegal
file-sharing, there are many legitimate uses for the same technology.
Among the entities that use BitTorrent are NASA
(http://opensource.arc.nasa.gov/software.jsp?id=13), Red Hat Fedora
(http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/), NetBSD
(http://www.netbsd.org/mirrors/#bittorrent), and -- ironically --
Time-Warner
(http://www.timewarner.com/corp/newsroom/pr/0,20812,1192450,00.html).
To me, then, your note poses several questions.
Does the Internet need deployed QoS? (There's been a lot
of work on general QoS, but this is a special case.)
Is there an inherent problem with wireless, or at least
with the type of wireless you use? (You've stated elsewhere
that you run a wireless ISP.) Alternatively, is the problem
that your network is underprovisioned for the load your
customers? In that case, is the problem economic -- the
market won't let you charge enough to cover your costs?
If there's a market problem, could there or should there
be some intervention to correct it? Or is there some
technical shortcoming in your ability to do traffic-shaping
or usage-sensitive pricing, in which case innovation may solve
your problem?
Should ISPs (including the university in its role as an
ISP for faculty, staff, and students) have the responsbility
for proactively blocking illegal traffic? If so, how can
they distinguish between, say, a stolen Time-Warner movie
and the legitimate copy that's being redistributed via
BitTorrent at Time-Warner's explicit request?
Do we give up one of the fundamental tenets of the Internet
architeture, the notion that endpoints determine what
traffic flows, rather than the center? In this regard,
it is worth remembering that the three most radical Internet
innovations -- the Web, Napster, and Skype -- came not from
ISPs, "official" standards bodies (i.e., the IETF or the
ITU), or major research labs or universities, but from the
edges of the Net. (Yes, I know that CERN is a major research
lab, but for physics!)
These, I think, are the real questions we need to discuss.
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
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