Net Neutrality

From the readings, what exactly is Net Neutrality? Explain in your own words the arguments for and against Net Neutrality. After examining the topic, where do you stand on the issues surrounding Net Neutrality?

If you are in favor of Net Neutrality, explain how you would implement or enforce it. How would you respond to concerns about possible over-regulation, burdening corporations, or preventing innovation?

If you are against Net Neutrality, explain why it is unnecessary or undesirable. How would you respond to concerns about providing level playing fields or preventing unfair discrimination by service provides?

In either case, discuss whether or not you consider that “the Internet is a public service and fair access should be a basic right”.

The debate surrounding Net Neutrality is framed by the analogies used to describe it, all of which attempt to paint the underlying economics in a specific way. The core argument is centered around the concept of data being “treated equally.” In essence, Net Neutrality protections prevent internet service providers from granting preferential speeds to data from certain sources, and the removal of those protections legalizes the practice. The most common analogy is one of “fast lanes” and “slow lanes:” without Net Neutrality protections, ISPs can place data from certain sources into the slow lane while leaving their own data in the fast lane. In order to ensure that their data remains in the fast lane, corporations need to pay ISPs for access to the fast lane.

This is problematic, from certain perspectives, for a few reasons. The largest is that some data, such as streaming video and online gaming, drastically loses value to the customer if not delivered in a speedy fashion. If Netflix loads a movie at a snail’s pace, then the Netflix customer experience is substantially depreciated. This is especially alarming when many ISPs offer their own streaming video services that compete with Netflix but are delivered in the aforementioned “fast lane,” thus ensuring a better user experience.

On its own, this is not a singularly disturbing phenomenon: after all, corporations often strive to differentiate products on their “home turf,” such as Apple with Apple Music, Facebook with Messenger, and even grocery stores with integrated gas stations. Such synergy between services is often a boon to users, as it results in a superior product. The issue arises when competition is not present. According to broadband.gov, 96% of Americans do not have access to more than 2 ISP options to choose from. This means that, if both of your potential ISPs decide to place Netflix in the slow lane, you have no alternative but to switch from Netflix to an alternative service. Netflix knows this, which is why they were extorted into entering into an expensive deal with Comcast to ensure that speeds remained strong (http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/after-netflix-pays-comcast-speeds-improve-65/).

In an ideal world, Net Neutrality protections would not be needed, because there would be a multitude of ISPs to choose from, and they could differentiate on service speeds, i.e. “Join WebNet for the fastest Netflix speeds around!” The pretense of Netflix is felt as a market force driving the product toward user satisfaction, and users win as a result. Without competition, the situation flips, and instead Netflix and other streaming services must compete for the favor of the ISP, who often offers a competing service as well. As a result, the ISPs get rich off of deals with services such as Netflix without needing to improve the product for the end user. To many economists, this is an example of rent seeking, since the monopoly (or duopoly) ISPs hold prevents the end consumer from access to a better product.

Typically, the government should seek to eliminate situations of rent seeking, since they reflect specific market situations, reduce the overall efficiency of the economy, and concentrate the flow of wealth artificially. Rent seeking also reduces the ability for new entrants into the market: a competitor to Netflix that can’t afford the fast lane is artificially excluded from entering the market by the rent-seeking efforts of the ISP. This, of course, hurts consumers.

There is an economic counter-argument to Net Neutrality protections, however. It begins with the understanding that, if ISPs need to treat all data equally and some services (such as Netflix) send a lot of data, infrastructure improvements will be necessary. The cost of implementing these improvements will be passed on to end consumers, since Net Neutrality protections prevent ISPs from charging data services companies for faster speeds. Thus, as Net Neutrality protections set specifications for how an ISP can use its network, they end up raising the cost of an Internet connection for every user, and not only those who subscribe to Netflix or other data-hungry services. This ends up having the opposite effect than the ideal goal of providing an egalitarian Internet for all, since fewer people can afford a more expensive connection.

Then, further government intervention might be offered as a solution: if the government dictates the price of an Internet connection, then everyone can have an affordably-priced, equal-footing connection. However, this solution drastically reduces the ability for new entrants into the ISP market. Large ISPs with entrenched infrastructures may be able to handle the revenue loss from dictated prices, but smaller ISPs may not. These large ISPs would become de facto government utility providers. This is a dangerous consequence, because it suppresses further innovation in the ISP space. A new ISP that relies on a nascent technology may be more expensive but offer other benefits (such as connectivity flexibility), but in a price-dictated market, such a business would be precluded from being profitable. For example, it is argued that the progress of solar technology has been artificially hampered by price regulations on electricity: if the price of electricity were not as low as the government makes it, solar panels would be a far more attractive option, and research into the field would have been more substantially funded (by both revenue and investors seeking to disrupt the market.) For this reason, society should only dictate price on those goods that we are confident cannot be improved upon, because otherwise we halt the progress of innovation. I am not confident the Internet qualifies as such a mature good.

Project 3 Reflection

Is encryption a fundamental right? Should citizens of the US be allowed to have a technology that completely locks out the government?

How important of an issue is encryption to you? Does it affect who you support politically? financially? socially? Should it?

In the struggle between national security and personal privacy, who will win? Are you resigned to a particular future or will you fight for it?

George Orwell’s 1984 described a dystopian society within which nothing was private. Rooms were mic’ed, televisions watched viewers, and even thoughts were policed. There is a reason that Orwell’s society and other fictional societies with similar qualities are met with almost universal repulsion: there is something deeply unsettling about a world in which one cannot keep secrets. The content of the secret is irrelevant; it is the loss of the ability to protect private matters from outside exposure that is intrinsically felt as wrong. I believe that visceral, primal opposition to societies like the one depicted in 1984 reveals that, at some level, all humans appreciate a right to keep things hidden.

The Constitution acknowledges this right to a degree, as the 5th Amendment protects “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” In today’s age, I would consider the digital records people keep on their phones to be their “papers” or “effects.” I also believe that weakening the encryption of all iPhones (or other electronic device) in order to access data is “unreasonable” and violates the rights of citizens. When the government claims it has a right to all information, we take steps toward Orwell’s vision.

The issue of encryption, while important unto itself, represents a larger struggle between personal liberties and government intervention that technology has brought to the surface. An individual’s stance on encryption indicates either a misunderstanding of how the technology work or an interventionist, often conservative stance on other issues, such as foreign troop deployment, marriage equality, and religious freedom. These are all issues I care deeply about. I am incredibly proud to be working for a company at the forefront of this debate, and I believe that Apple’s involvement in this discourse elevates the work I do for them.

It’s difficult to predict who will “win” the debate between national security and privacy, because I doubt that our society will ever reach an extreme of 1984 or a privacy-oriented counterpart. I do think it is possible to hold back the advance of government: the FBI just announced that it wishes to vacate its case against Apple, proving that fighting back can stem the tide. I am proud to be part of that fight.

Project 3: A Letter to the Editor on Encryption

By Shuyang Li, Meghan Pfeifer, Andrew Russell, and Zach Waterson

It has been a showdown for the ages: Apple, the most valuable company in the world, stands in the way of an FBI terrorist investigation. What an incredible marketing ploy! Or so it would seem, at least. Today’s debate surrounding encryption is often positioned around specific situations in an attempt to make the conflict easier to understand for outside parties. Indeed, in the national polls used to gauge the degree of support Apple has in its case against the FBI, the following question was posed by Pew:

“As you may know, the FBI has said that accessing the iPhone is an important part of their ongoing investigation into the San Bernardino attacks while Apple has said that unlocking the iPhone could compromise the security of other users’ information.

Do you think Apple:

(1) Should unlock the iPhone

(2) Should not unlock the iPhone?”

This is a biased framing of the debate, for the conflict at heart is far larger than that of a single phone. To recognize why, it is important to have a working understanding of the underpinnings of encryption and how it protects information.

Encryption is an umbrella term for how we keep all our data and communications secure and private in the digital age. It is similar to how militaries used secret codes and machines to secure their communications from their enemies in the past, but in the modern era, it is far more ubiquitous: all major online service providers and device manufacturers now adopt some encryption scheme. When you browse Facebook, your Facebook feed is encrypted, so nobody can snoop on your friends’ updates; when you send an iMessage on your iPhone, your message is encrypted, so no one can read your messages; when you transfer money between bank accounts, your instruction is encrypted too, so hackers cannot modify your instructions to move your money to their accounts.

Another important property of encryption is that all secure encryption algorithms today are based on mathematical principles and can be performed by any computer instead of specially designed machines. This means that it is not possible to weaken the algorithm for just one device or one service: for encryption algorithms to work, every computer must agree on how they can decrypt the code and understand the actual message, otherwise it is impossible to communicate at all. It works exactly like mathematics: we cannot say that 1+1 equals 2 on these devices but equals 3 on this one specific device.

Now that the concept of encryption has been introduced, one can turn to the conflict between Apple and the FBI and evaluate it within a larger context. All iPhones encrypt the data stored on the device using the passcode of the phone as a secret key. Without the passcode, it is impossible (practically speaking) to access the data. So, the FBI is asking Apple to build a custom version of its iPhone software, known as iOS, that has weakened security restrictions, allowing the FBI to guess the passcode of the phone at an artificially accelerated rate without consequence. Apple has multiple objections to this request, but one of its greatest fears is that this custom version of iOS, which it calls GovtOS, could escape into the wild. If that happens, then anyone who steals an iPhone can load GovtOS onto that phone, enabling it to be hacked using the same tool that the FBI wants for itself. No such tool currently exists. The security of the iPhone, which protects user information such as passwords, payment information, and personal data, would be compromised, and users could no longer trust the iPhone to serve as the nexus of their digital lives.

This is the fundamental issue with requests to weaken encryption “only for the good guys:” encryption works by taking advantage of fundamental mathematical principles to obscure data, and one cannot weaken the principles of encryption without compromising them equally for all parties. There is no way to ensure that, if Apple were to secretly build a backdoor for the government to use to unlock iPhones, that only the government would use it. A hole in security is open for both good and evil, and opening a hole should be done with the knowledge that such holes make hacking by criminals easier as well. In an age where hackers already compromise companies and users regularly, is it responsible to make it even easier to hack into personal information?

Unlocking iPhones for the FBI would accomplish nothing more than the weakening of American-designed phones. Criminals and terrorists will still find a way to encrypt their information and communications by purchasing different phones or services (or building their own) that provide stronger encryption. Weakening customer-level encryption would only further increase the risk that your personal information is hacked, which is irresponsible and near-sighted. Imagine a world in which you cannot be sure that your digital information is secure; the implications for the future of technology are outrageous. There are better ways to defend national security; compromising the security of every iPhone user should not be one of them.

THE DMCA AND PIRACY

From the readings, what exactly the DMCA say about piracy? What provisions does it have for dealing with infringement? What exactly are the safe-harbor provisions?

Is it ethical or moral for users to download or share copyrighted material? What if they already own a version in another format? What if they were just “sampling” or “testing” the material?

Have you participated in the sharing of copyrighted material? If so, how did you justify your actions (or did you not care)? Moreover, why do you think so many people (regardless of whether or not you do) engage in this behavior even though it is against the law?

Does the emergence of streaming services such as Netflix or Spotify address the problem of piracy, or will are these services not sufficient? Is piracy a solvable problem? Is it a real problem?

 

At its heart, the DMCA is about protecting economic interests. Similarly to patent laws, which in part help to incentivize inventors into creating and publishing their creations, the DMCA applies the notion of copyright to digital data in an attempt to secure economic benefit for content creators. The DMCA is seen as necessary because the extreme ease with which digital data can be copied requires that such copying be regulated to ensure that digital data can in fact be sold. Without any restrictions, a single copy of a media could be distributed to all of the Internet for free, which is a uniquely digital problem.

However, digital copyright restrictions are often cumbersome, overly restrictive, and almost always alienate customers. Such restrictions have no analog in the physical world: no one expects that when you buy one chair, you will get unlimited duplicates of that chair. In many ways, digital data is more malleable than a physical object, and digital copyright restrictions aim to reel those malleabilities in, often with disastrous results. Due to the seemingly alien nature of digital restrictions (applying physical rules to a digital notion), many users fail to believe that circumventing them is against the law. For example, purchasing a DVD of a film allows you to play that DVD to play on any television, lend it to a friend, fast-forward and rewind, etc. Some digital film distribution systems eliminate all of those abilities, shocking users who expect the same levels of freedom that exist in the physical world, often because digital media comes at the same price as physical media.

I do believe that accessing media that you have not purchased for free is illegal: it is stealing like any other. The trouble comes with the notion of copying data you have legally acquired. Personally, I believe that if you purchase a piece of media, you should have the ability to access and manipulate that media in a personal context without restriction. It would not be out of character for me to torrent a film I legally purchased in order to get around overly cumbersome digital copyright restrictions (for example, to watch it offline.)

The counterargument to my stance is that the creator of the media has exclusive rights to its distribution, and so they can levy any restrictions they want on it. I don’t necessarily disagree with this claim, but if that is the case, then I do not believe that it should be illegal to circumvent those restrictions. The content and distribution restrictions should be viewed as one product that the customer can use in whatever way he or she wishes. If content creators want to engage in an arms race with their consumers to alternatively create and crack restrictions, that is an acceptable pattern of behavior that a laissez-faire stance can acknowledge. Market forces allow content creators to compete not only on content but also on the restrictions surrounding its distribution, and customers win in such a competitive environment.

The logical alternative is to have the government regulate and enforce the distribution of digital material. In this scenario, the people have a say in the restrictions on digital content, and market forces are eliminated entirely. What is not acceptable, in my opinion, is when content creators try to have the best of both worlds: to decide upon their own copyright restrictions and get the government to enforce them. This is a difficult scenario for me to morally accept, and so piracy enters the scene as a pressure-release mechanism.

There are already examples of the first scenario being plausible: in the music industry, it has been shown that people are willing to pay for music that is conveniently accessible and will turn away from piracy to do so. At the launch of Apple Music, it was estimated that 7 million people paid for a music subscription service and 20 million pirated music (http://www.latimes.com/business/la-et-ct-state-of-stealing-music-20150620-story.html). This past February, however, Apple announced that Apple Music had over 11 million paying subscribers (Spotify’s numbers also went up), indicating that piracy has not eviscerated the market for music (http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/12/apple-music-tops-11-million-subscribers-icloud-reaches-782-million/). The government regulation scenario exists in monopolized markets in several industries, proving its plausibility.

Piracy helps inform content creators that their restrictions are imposing an economic cost on them, and it should either not be illegal for that cost to be felt by content creators, or the notion of the market should be removed entirely.