Internet2: Orchestrating the End of theInternet?

—— Forwarded Message
From: "Jon Ippolito" <[email protected]>
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 16:20:10 -0500
To: "Jon Ippolito" <[email protected]>
Subject: [MARCEL-members] Internet2: Orchestrating the End of the Internet?

Internet2: Orchestrating the End of the Internet?

Anyone who wonders how the Internet will die will find one possible scenario
in the recent decision by the Internet2 consortium to bring Hollywood into
the design process for our next-generation Internet.

Hollywood is on a roll. In a fraction of the time that it took the music
industry to emasculate Napster, the Motion Picture Association of America
has managed to shut down the highest profile file-sharing sites (Suprnova
and LokiTorrent) and begun
to sue its own share of college students. More importantly, the MPAA
recently persuaded Congress to legislate something their fellow lobbyists in
the music industry never managed to achieve: a copyright control device in
every player. By this July,
every DVD player and TiVo box will sniff for a "broadcast flag" that
prevents it from copying digital TV broadcasts. This hardware intervention
effectively destroys even the possibility of fair use, since artists and
educators cannot transform,
parody, or criticize what they cannot record.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is mounting a noble campaign to
grandfather a compliant tuner before the legislation takes effect [1]–but
in the meantime the MPAA has set its sights on its next acquisition: the
ultra-high bandwidth Internet2,
which runs on the 10 gigabit per second Abilene backbone:

"We've been working with Internet2 for a while to explore ways we can take
advantage of delivering content at these extremely high speeds, and
basically manage illegitimate content distribution at the same time," said
Chris Russell, the MPAA's vice
president of Internet standards and technology. "Those would go hand in
hand." [2]

To judge from the statements of Internet2 bigwigs, their technologists have
already capitulated before the battle has even begun:

"This wraps together the broad interest we have in working with our members
and potential members on advanced content delivery," said Internet2 Vice
President Gary Bachula. "Obviously we're interested in making sure that's
legal and safe." [2]

The presentations I've seen to date from the Internet2 consortium, from
music classes taught by "master" conductors [3] to biometric and
authentication applications for "managing identity" [4], suggest that
Internet2 is a broadcast organization in
network clothing. While it's doubtful that everyone at work on Internet2
shares this vision, the consortium's choice to "collaborate" with the MPAA
could give media conglomerates a chokehold on the 21st-century Internet.

The stated goal of this collaboration–to investigate new business models
for streaming movies–sounds reasonable until you read that Internet2 is
already capable of transmitting a DVD movie from Switzerland to Tokyo in
under 5 seconds. (Cut to Jack
Valenti choking on a bagel as he reads this in the morning paper. [5])

No Hollywood exec is going to sanction a business model that lets Joe User
download a movie onto a hard drive faster than the time it takes to launch
his Web browser. Forget streaming video on demand. Hell, that isn't even
enough time to watch a BMW
ad.

The technology behind Internet2 *breaks* anything remotely resembling a
broadcast business model, which is why the MPAA will do its best to disarm
the technology by installing Digital Rights Management directly in its
routers to stop interesting
content from ever getting into the pipeline.

Now, the idea of "intelligent routers" may sound appealing to the average
Congressperson, but the technologists of Internet2 should know better.
Internet 1 was able to adapt so quickly to new uses–from email to the Web
to IM–because its routers
are fundamentally *dumb*. As engineer David Reed and others argued in the
late 1970s [6], an indiscriminate "end-to-end" network would allow its users
to hook up ever faster and more capable computers to its endpoints, without
locking out uses that
the network's architects could not have foreseen. Broadway was built for
horse-drawn carriages, but since then its level pavement and wide footprint
has accommodated Model Ts and Toyotas–precisely because its architecture
was not optimized for
carriages. Even companies like Disney and Microsoft have publicly recognized
the importance of e2e to technological innovation. [7]

Yet David Reed already smelled a threat to the e2e paradigm back in 2000,
citing among other threats Hollywood's interest in streaming movies. In "The
End of the End-To-End Argument?," Reed imagined uses that could not be
foreseen by intelligent
routers, including "collaborative creative spaces":

"With broadband networks we are reaching the point where 'pickup' creation
is possible–where a group of people can create and work in a 'shared
workspace' that lets them communicate and interact in a rich environment
where each participant can
observe and use the work of others, just as if they were in the same
physical space." [8]

Reed's description of emergent collaborations bubbling across the network
like so many games of pickup basketball is a world apart from the stuffy
master classes of the Internet2 consortium. But it reads a lot like
Internet2's stepsister, the MARCEL
network of Access Grid communities [9]. If the "official" Internet2
consortium is a symphony orchestra in tails, the MARCEL network is a
makeshift performance troupe. Internet2 has 200 university and corporate
sponsors; MARCEL has a motley crew of
artsy scientists, network performers, and Jitter jocks. Internet2 uses
stable high-bandwidth videoconferencing for the privileged participants and
netcast for everyone else; MARCEL uses the rickety Access Grid platform,
which permits all users to
participate at the same level.

As MARCEL's Don Foresta has suggested, "efficient use of network resources"
will be the argument marshalled by the media conglomerates against creative
re-purposing of Internet2, just as the phrase was used justify the
commercialization of the
airwaves even if it contradicted the physics of electromagnetics. [10] (In
Italy fascist apologists vindicated Mussolini by boasting that the trains
ran on time.) Again, Reed saw this coming:

"The architects who would make the network intelligent are structuring the
network as if the dominant rich media communications will be fixed
bandwidth, isochronous streams, either broadcast from a central 'television
station' or point-to-point
between a pair of end users. These isochronous streams are implicitly (by
the design of the network's 'smart' architecture) granted privileges that
less isochronous streams are denied–priority for network resources." [8]

Privileges and networks don't make good bedfellows. For all its talk of
community and access, Internet2 seems to be offering a backwards-thinking
hierarchic model of culture, a sort of Great Performances meets Reality TV.
To be sure, MARCEL has
experimented with broadcast models as well, featuring gigs by luminaries
such as fractal mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot and Max/MSP inventor Miller
Puckette. But these admirable cameos don't reveal MARCEL's true potential;
that happens when three
students from different continents suddenly realize they are in the same
Access Grid "room," and begin trading Max patches or holding pen-and-paper
sketches up to the videocamera. In these quotidian, pickup
collaborations–as in the beguiling
video-composite performances Net Touch and Net Hope organized by Tim
Jackson's Synthops lab in Toronto [11]–high-bandwidth networks prove they
can be even *more* reciprocal than low-bandwidth networks. [12].

While MARCEL has for some time seemed a promising platform for the
interchange of ideas and networked art, only recently have I come to realize
that it can also serve a valuable tactical function. Like the EFF's efforts
to make room for legitimate
uses of digital TV recordings, MARCEL's creative community can develop and
showcase remixable network performances–both for their own sake as well as
to provide empirical evidence for future court cases to defend the value of
end-to-end networks.
[13] In so doing its members can promote the vision of a vibrant future for
the Internet–one that lets us all play onstage instead of admiring the
players from the balcony.

Jon

NOTES

[1] http://eff.org/broadcastflag/

[2]
http://news.com.com/MPAA+seeks+Internet2+tests%2C+P2P+monitor+role/2100-1026
_3-5458537.html

[3] http://www.nws.edu/NWS_internet2.asp?pg=NWS_internet2.asp

[4] http://www.campus-technology.com/print.asp?ID405

[5]
http://energycommerce.house.gov/108/Hearings/05122004hearing1265/Valenti1987
.htm

[6]
http://www.reed.com/dprframeweb/dprframe.asp?section=paper&fn=endofendtoend.
html

[7]
http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200212/msg0005
3.html

[8]
http://www.reed.com/dprframeweb/dprframe.asp?section=paper&fn=endofendtoend.
html

[9] http://newmedia.umaine.edu/marcel/

[10] http://www.newamerica.net/Download_Docs/pdfs/Doc_File_143_1.pdf

[11] http://www.rcc.ryerson.ca/synthops/process.htm

[12] Theorist-gadfly Jean Baudrillard pointed out that reciprocality was the
key feature missing from Hans Magnus Enzensberger's definition of
emancipatory media.
http://www.calarts.edu/~bookchin/mediatheory/essays/19-baudrillard-03.pdf

[13] Cyberlaw guru Lawrence Lessig laments that a lack of empirical evidence
doomed his argument in Eldred v. Ashcroft.
http://www.authorama.com/free-culture-18.html



_______________________________________________
MARCEL-members mailing list
[email protected]
http://wimbledon.ac.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/marcel-members

—— End of Forwarded Message