AT&T’s Masquerade over Paid Discrimination
By Chris Riley, September 3, 2010
There have been quite a few punches thrown recently over the concept of “paid prioritization.” Free Press and AT&T have each taken swings over the subject, arguing over the meaning of current standards for network management, and which practices would violate the Net Neutrality framework supported by Free Press and other organizations.
Free Press and others, including the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Open Technology Initiative of New America Foundation, are calling AT&T out for its masquerading and attempts to capture and legitimize the term “paid prioritization” by lumping together harmful discrimination and standard business practices related to quality of service. The chair of IETF, an organization of network designers, operators, vendors and researchers integrally involved in establishing standards for Internet architecture, weighed in, saying “AT&T’s characterization is misleading,” and emphasizing that IETF has never endorsed systems of payment for prioritization, rather, IETF standards are designed to allow network users to signal the priority their traffic needs.
According to OTI, AT&T uses broad language to describe its practices, including statements like “hundreds of customers… purchase paid prioritization today from AT&T.” In doing so, AT&T is effectively talking past the rest of the world, by using the term “paid prioritization” to refer not to third-party payments for discriminatory treatment, but to quality of service activities occurring in business-grade direct Internet access connections pursuant to IETF standards.
Practices that involve end users of the Internet requesting specific priority for some traffic are vastly different from network operators setting priority levels for users against their will, particularly when the operators are giving preference to their own traffic or to the traffic of third party content providers who have paid for special treatment.
Imagine a business with a connection that is shared between business customer communications and employees’ personal work computers. The business may wish to have its customer communications receive priority over employees’ personal Internet usage, such as viewing ESPN.com over lunch or coffee breaks, to minimize any delays for the customer. To implement that priority, the business would attach “DiffServ” flags to its traffic to differentiate higher priority business communications from lower priority personal ones. Under the terms of its contract with AT&T or another business ISP, those priority flags will be maintained.
The practices that are “paid prioritization” in the intended sense are those where an operator is giving preference to its own traffic or third party content providers who have paid for special treatment, and it’s these practices that undermine choice, expression, innovation and competition on the open Internet. We’ve written before about this, and contrary to AT&T’s assertions, we have not been hypocritical in our policy approach.
We do not believe that prioritization can make up for recent reductions in investment into network capacity - including in wireless networks, where we have identified a substantial reduction in capital expenditures as a percentage of revenue. We also have our doubts as to whether even end user prioritization is needed, particularly in residential end user Internet access services which continue to grow in capacity as technology develops.
But we don’t have a vendetta against prioritization. Our fight is over discrimination - network operators choosing, on behalf of their own subscribers, what gets priority and what doesn’t, or what traffic gets through and what doesn‘t. Paid prioritization, allowing a third party to pay for better access to an Internet user’s home connection, is a major violation of the principle of nondiscrimination. Paid prioritization undermines open and unrestricted expression, choice, innovation and competition - the hallmarks of the open Internet. Even network operators trying solely to be helpful, without anti-competitive motive, can and will generate harm if they assign priority themselves, particularly for innovative new products yet to be adopted by a substantial number of Internet users.
AT&T’s hope in this latest round is to capture the frame of “paid prioritization.” AT&T wants to convince the public, through sheer volume and ambiguity of language, that “paid prioritization” is not a bugaboo, but a legitimate practice, regardless of whether the term refers to business connection service level agreements or to network operator-imposed restrictions on Internet user choice and expression. Don’t be fooled: Paid prioritization cannot, and must not, be taken so lightly.
As an aside: We’re giving AT&T the benefit of the doubt here. AT&T was subject to strong conditions against discrimination for years as a result of their merger with BellSouth, as OTI notes. In fact, as Free Press has pointed out before, AT&T invested substantially under these conditions and flourished. We choose not to believe that AT&T has made a complete about-face since the expiration of these conditions, nor that AT&T was violating the conditions all along and just never got caught. We choose to believe that a company flourishing under nondiscrimination conditions does not now need to begin rampant discrimination through paid prioritization in order to survive and grow. But we wish AT&T would be a little bit more up front and honest with its subscribers, the Commission, and the public at large.
Free Press is a national, nonpartisan organization working to reform the media. Free Press does not support or oppose any candidate for public office. Through education, organizing and advocacy, we promote diverse and independent media ownership, strong public media and universal access to communications.
Chris Riley
Policy Counsel M. Chris Riley advises Free Press on legal matters related to our policy, research and campaign work, and represents Free Press on our issues before the FCC and Congress. Prior to joining Free Press, Chris worked as an Honors Program Attorney at the FCC, as a summer associate at Ropes & Gray, LLP, and as a legal intern at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Read Chris's full bio »
Comments
i don't like the concept of
i don't like the concept of paid prioritization
it's just discrimination
Alex
Prestiti Personali
AT&T’s Masquerade over Paid Discrimination
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Its heating up, Jimmy Wales in the mix
This is a critcal time for the internet and ensuring it operates on a fair basis and uses fair econonomic that involve inclusive access. Jimmy Wales may have recently made some pro ad comments or its possible that he was just intentionally taken out of context by a shill site: [url]http://www.kpic.com/news/tech/102229029.html#IDCThread[/url] This article is also taking about using wireless bills to keep consolidated disfunctional medial in business.
In this article which seems like it may be a shill article, Mr. Wales is supposed to have equated ads with commerce. Well there has been a connection but commerce certainly does not imply ads, even if ads are dependent on commmerce and do imply commerce. There is also an attempt to say that the so called news media (worthless propaganda at this point- especially WJS if its in there its false.) might make money from micro payments involving a few cents per click to be billed to a wireless phone bill. That's completly wrong- maybe nano payments a few millionth of a cent billed at an absolutely generic rate based on generic instances of attention that can never ad to the overall bill...
Ads clearly aren't good for Wikipaedia but they are obsolete and worse in other contexts.
1. Ads are obsolte: search makes them obsolete and contrary the size of Google's search centers search absolutely does not need ad revenue to function- the technology has gotten that good.
2. Ads are not just annoyances that amount to a theft of your time and attention and an invitation to engage in puffing and fraud at all levels of society- they also destroy your political representation by making lobbying possible. They make lobbying possible by making it possible to capture and lock out politcians. They make sponsorship, which in practices is alway about censorship and suppression of speech through drowning out, the keep element in society. We end up with disenfranchisment and socially useless toll road style entities and people who act against their own political and economic interests because they confuse propaganda for knowledge.
We simply don't want parasites in the mix. Our capitalists leisure class is a welfare class that can stop hiding behind loss leaders (ie celebrities like Jobs) and apply for the real thing at the customary rate of return. Instead of pork they can have food stamps.
Keep the Commons, don't Allow an Enclosure Movement
What telecom, cable and big propaganda want is to be able to charge people coming and going and to say who gets to use vital public infrastructure that’s been converted into over priced toll roads. They also want an enclosure movement that will make them better able to protect the interests of a capitalist class that is feeling quite threatened and quite useless. We should remember how awful the loss of the commons to enclosure can be.
Round up the cattle for the slaughter, that’s kind of what enclosure is about. Its also about nostalgia for the good ole days. If I remember correctly…the enclosure movement was a movement to drive people off the commons. In places like England, inbred mafioso thug types (nobles) and their co conspirators the merchants wondered why it was that the noble after something innocent, like raping someone’s child, had to go hide in prison (his castle.) Wouldn’t it be better if he could reverse this leaving the prison when there was trouble and only visiting it when he was interested in buggery or some such thing. So it came to be that the commons was shut down and people were only allowed to be born in prisons referred to as towns. Never mind that the noble was only interested in marrying the enemy or ‘terrorist,’ the towns folk needed protecting and needed to be born in the prison towns.
People born in these prisons (English citizens) could not own anything or leave the prison. They had to work from sun up to sun down from early childhood to early death. They had to put one hundred thousand heads on pins per day or be gang raped and lashed - they had to produce like machines and they had to compete with machines. If they were pregnant they were likely naked from the waist up in the bowels of a coal mine- if nursing they were still in the pit of a coal mine with babies strapped to chest sucking down opium to keep them doped into submission.
On dank cold nights eighteen people would be forced to huddle together on the floor of a dark flat, falling to sleep from exhaustion in the midst of rat infested bedlam. The stank from human dung piled to the second story just outside the back wall wafting in. The brilliant nobles thought water made one weak and drink was often the ferment from a cesspool as fermentation made polluted water a lean but drinkable proposition.
If a former commoner was late to work or caught outside during sun light hours without a chit from a noble thug or useless merchant the first such offense was the on the spot loss of a finger, the second the on the spot gouging out of a sensate organ and the third was death on the spot.
The commons was a place for people who were willing to brave the highwaymen and not seek the protection of a drunken dishonorable noble. Of course, the existence of such a place eventually proved unacceptable to the murderous noble class. After all, a Noble would want first crack at your spouse on your wedding night, as his absolute god given right, one word of complaint and you’d lose a hand for ingratitude. If a Noble wanted to mark his property he took your child to each boundary marker and beat the child half to death so the child would never forget the spot or the boundaries and be a ‘fair’ witness. Even as a commoner if you had a dispute and brought it before a Noble court only two remedies were available. Wager of battle where the court entertained itself watching the disputants forced into a fight to the death or trial by ordeal where the entertainment was had by seeing if you could survive an ordeal that usually resulted in death- let that be a lessen that that the only grievance is a grievance.
In Russian it was more animal husbandry applied to humans, it wasn’t just that the tablet wasn’t blank and the King owned the father and therefore the son, animal breeding techniques were applied to humans and serf families were bred to be good breeds for service. Serfs were the equivalent of human dogs and expected to behave as such. This fit with the Devine Right of Kings. Somehow nobles were the relatives of the holies and no one else was, giving way to Social Darwinism where the test of history placed ‘us’ on top and proves ‘our’ right to absolute power.
In England again, the brilliant nobles came to fear that the tricky (defective) human chattel would multiply like rabbits and outstrip their food making capabilities and sought to keep them down, deeming them to be an evil virus, they inoculating the prison (town) by introducing pestilence, vermin and plague into its streets. It backfired and the nobles were over run by peasants. Deprived of any education, people were still aware of their plight. Even as the Navy could mean freedom (if you were an iron man,) such men had to be roused out of sleep at point of a knife and kidnapped into the night to get them to enter a slave based Navy, such was their hatred of the nobility and its rule.
Tibetan religion says the primary obstacle to be over come in the human realm is jealousy. In France even the rules of jealousy, were overcome, man servants were reduced to human dildos. The master of the house was not threatened when ladies had token serf men. Naked from the waist down uniformed from the waist up with cow bells strung from their genitals to announce their coming, jack hats on their heads- such men often self emasculated or self castrated to cease the humiliation and or cease to be of interest. This was s an improvement over leprous spiked chastity and belts bull mastiffs that kept noble women chaste.
Even as contemporary Sweden and Norway are now very liberal its thought that they once embodied the very worst of the above. It’s conceivable that they or a place like the US could regress fully so we can’t even afford the first step. This is conservatism, this is the spirit of mercantilism, this is the tradition which in practice has often been no better than the concentration camps or possibly worse, the possibility or threat (i.e. torture etc) of which they want to keep alive. They want to have the option to define the acceptable boundaries of society with this. They want society the equivalent of battered women syndrome as the norm. But as Neil Gabler recently pointed out in the LA Times during the US’s most progressive, stable and prosperous period the capitalist class was taxed at %92 percent disincentivizing greed and foolish appropriations of power.