Oh, sure, you could always deny them your business -- there's UPS and DHL and the U.S. Postal Service. But imagine if they were all proposing that because people make money based on the contents of packages, it should see some of that money. Imagine if the company implied that if you or your company did not pay a reception fee ... well, things might happen. Packages might get lost, you see.
Now imagine if carriers informed you that they were going to deploy equipment that could analyze the contents of the packages they shipped. A six-ounce letter might contain a multimillion-dollar contract, while a 20-pound box might just have some intern's new laptop. Suppose their equipment could tell the difference. Would you pay to not have that contract "lost" in a sorting facility?
Of course you'd pay. You'd also pay not to have your knees broken. But kneecap integrity should not be a business expense.
This is, of course, an oversimplification. Nowadays, that contract could be transmitted over the Internet instead, and work would continue to flow. But something very strange has been proposed for the Net: Broadband providers have suggested that, like FedEx charging to receive packages, certain receivers should have to pay to receive packets. Though they've been coy about what it would mean to not pay, broadband providers have indeed proposed deploying an entire network of monitoring and censoring agents that could examine network traffic and suppress it unless a "business arrangement" had been made with the receiving parties.
FedEx would never suggest intentionally losing your packages. But Verizon and Comcast and a number of other broadband providers are gleefully declaring their intent to drop traffic, starting with whatever you consider most valuable. They call this "innovation."
We've got a problem here.
The status quo on the Internet is something referred to as network neutrality. This basic idea -- that it's the Internet's job to move data, not to inspect and select and ultimately reject it -- has worked quite well. What members of one particular sector of the Internet are suggesting is something rather different: Internet isolationism. They wish to redefine their customers as a captive audience, suppressing the free trade of packets to them unless as-yet undefined tariffs are paid. They propose to isolate their customers behind an ever-shifting web of favored providers, special partners and mutually beneficial arrangements.
This was, of course, the model of both America Online and Minitel. Neither achieved anything close to the explosive growth that the Internet did.
The broadband providers have said this is about creating an Internet that can move video faster. But if this was what the providers wanted, why not deploy reliable multicast technology, which is actually designed to allow millions of users to efficiently consume video, next-generation games, and security patches? They've said this is about allowing Web sites to compete. Imagine if China's Baidu.com paid dearly to be the only search engine that could be accessed at broadband rates. Can anyone imagine the trade war that would erupt? No, these efforts must be about something else entirely.
Internet isolationism is actually about holding telecommuters ransom from the companies that employ them. According to Broadband Week, the size of the U.S. telecommuting market in 2004 was 40 million people. As commutes increase and oil becomes scarcer, the ability for knowledge workers to have full access to corporate resources no matter where they happen to be is critical to the success of U.S. business. If telecommunications providers could extract just US$100 more a year -- under $10 a month! -- from each of the 40 million users, that'd be $4 billion of additional revenue per year.
Would you pay a quarter to check your work e-mail from home? Would your office pay a quarter to make sure you could? Broadband providers want that quarter and have essentially stated they'll alter and degrade the network more and more until they get it. But why do they deserve that quarter? They're not the only providers involved with getting a packet from home to work; they're just the branch with the least competition. This is a logistical thing -- only a couple of broadband providers can physically serve each region. In this regard, they're like airports. You might have dozens of airlines, but only a few runways for them to land on.
Imagine for a moment that salespeople had to give a chunk of their commissions to the airports they flew out of, and you'd have an idea of why the Internet community is horrified by Internet isolationism.
It gets worse. According to Metcalfe's Law, the value of a network increases substantially with the number of other people you can connect to. On isolated networks, your connectivity is reduced, and therefore the value of your link plummets. But the real Internet is still out there; there's just a "fog bank" placed in front of it by your broadband provider. Therefore, the first thing you have to do when connecting to the Internet is to escape your broadband provider and get to network-neutral territory. This involves setting up a session, possibly one that's encrypted, and making your way out to a node that will give you genuine access to the Internet.
Citizens of countries outside the U.S. are quite familiar with the need to find "proxies" with greater freedom than their state providers are willing to allow. Imagine if Americans needed to live under the same restrictions!
Consider the proxy problem from the broadband provider side, though. You want to create an isolated network, where nonpayment of access fees by a receiver leads to suppressed access for a telecommuting employee. You have to thus suppress any mechanism by which traffic can escape your network that has not gone through the correct toll check. As a security engineer, I am nervous that this effort will make it increasingly difficult for businesses and organizations to deploy secure systems. If the underlying network actively discourages encrypted communication, communication will simply not be encrypted -- to the delight of identity thieves everywhere.
I also find myself concerned about the geopolitical implications of making telecommuting more difficult: With depressed oil stocks, is now the best time to be throwing into question whether the network will be there for telecommuters to operate? Furthermore, won't regions that have free and neutral broadband have a significant advantage over those suffer the yoke of isolation?
We can do better than what Internet isolationism suggests. In fact, we have done better. Network neutrality has been the "secret sauce" behind a decade of business transformation. The simple fact that negotiations between two businesses can be conducted over e-mail, without any special networking arrangements made beforehand, is impossible without net neutrality. Broadband providers that suggest we abandon this massively successful status quo in return for a radical philosophical departure that has failed everywhere else its been tried, do so at not just their peril, but at ours.
Dan Kaminsky is a security researcher who's been presenting research into interesting mechanisms within TCP/IP for several years. He spent two years at Cisco Systems Inc. and two more as a senior security consultant at Avaya Inc., before starting consulting under his own DoxPara Research brand. He is best known for his work accurately estimating and visualizing the number of hosts infected by Sony Corp.'s DRM rootkit, using a quirk of the Internet's Domain Name System infrastructure. Kaminsky has also done extensive work with high-speed network analysis, data tunnelling across inclement networks, and shortcomings in the MD5 hashing algorithm. He is based in Seattle.