New (?) tric(k) for Internet Partitioning

[Ken Brown]

Let's get this straight.

The user pays the ISP.

The ISP pays the content providers, according to some deal they work out
between them. 

And they claim to have *patented* this not exactly earth-shattering and
not all new in the slightest idea? 

When are they going to sue the satellite TV providers?

This is just the same old big media company crap to try to take control
of the Net.  Some where in Stan Robinson's Red/Green/Blue Mars trilogy,
one of the Martian colonists says "We didn't come all this way just to
recreate Canada". Well *we* didn't come all this way just to recreate
cable TV.


"Mats O. Bergstrom" wrote:
> 
> This Swedish entity believes it has found the solution
> (patented) to the long standing problem of effortless
> micropayments for web content. The solution is -
> skip micropayments! - but let the ISP4s pay tax to
> the content providers, the amount calculated from
> the size of the ISP's customer base, regardless of
> which sites the particular ISP customers actually
> visit. So you need a World Association of Approved
> Content Providers (WAACP) to share the tax profits.
> 
> The tric(k) seems to be a method of technically
> denying access to sites in the  WADCP domain
> to users who's ISP is not paying the taxes.

Encryption, just like satellite TV, (supported in the USA by the
Dubiously Moral Corporations Act), the police and the courts will be the
agents of the content providers in defending their intellectual
property.

This raises the idea of Singapore and other strong-censorship states
trying to stop *UN*encrypted net traffic at the border.

Only approved content providers (who pay their taxes) are to be allowed
to pass bits in front of the people's eyes. All ACPs will use approved
encryption techniques, and the data will have digital signatures
decryptable by Them (there is always a Them). They will take random
samples of packets from the datastream, any originating IP address found
to be sending significant numbers of unauthorised packets will be
blocked. So inbound traffic from MSN or Murdoch or whoever will be fine,
but traffic originating at an unapproved source will be filtered out
even if it is coming in through proxies, blacknets, mixmasters or
whatever, because sooner or later all those sites will be blocked.
 
> One big problem is that providers of Not PC Content
> naturally will be barred from the WADCP.

The TV experience is the opposite of course. It is broadcast TV that is
tightly regulated by governments, satellite & cable get away with more. 

Different governments and corporations have different ideas as to what
is pukka. There was a time when Saudi Arabia would have blocked the BBC,
and Singapore and even Malaysia have fallen out with the Economist in
the past. (Actually the Economist has sometimes had a good laugh by
publishing pictures of their paper as censored by the Saudis)
 
So we have different kinds of protected digital signature, proclaiming
content to be suitable for Tennessee or Trincomalee.

The whole thing depends on strong encryption of course - but the ACPs
will have to use methods approved by both telecoms providers and
governments who will block anyone sending anything they don't recognise.
It is still the case that the Net depends on hardware run  by a
relatively small number of international telecoms providers who are by
their very nature hand-in-glove with government. They can't, AFAIK,
filter all packets, Echelon or no Echelon, but they could bar ISPs who
allowed naughty packets on (end of dial-up spam...)

In Singapore and China it would be simple government fiat. In the USA it
would be done by businesses who will say they are doing it to protect
their customers, or to defend themselves against civil law suits, or to
make their content internationally acceptable (there is going to be a
lot of money in the Chinese market).  But the end effect would be the
same - a closed-off pay-per-view child-friendly government-friendly
Rupert-Murdoch-friendly Cable-TV-alike Net carrying only DCMA-approved
corporately-signed encrypted packets. Free exchange of information might
take place within individual countries, or between subscribers to the
same ISP, but would tend to be blocked at national or corporate
boundaries.

I don't think it will happen.

If it does the cypherpunkly action will shift to Q-encryption, spoofing
origins and cloaking content, making your packets look like someone
else's from somewhere else.

Such things will get harder to implement the more international routes
there are and the more opportunities for routing around 
censorship-friendly states or telcos. Cable-laying ships are the
vanguard of freedom :-)


Ken Brown