Dear Senator Mikulski,
The first time I voted for you, I was living on South Montford Avenue
near Patterson Park. At the time I was an employee of what was then
called the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company of Maryland. The
descendent of that company, Verizon, is now one of the two leading
Internet Service Providers in this region.
I am very alarmed by what I read regarding the legislation coming out
of the House that basically allows ISPs to enhance/degrade
connections to selected websites. This is easier to do than you
might think.
Let's say my ISP is VeriZomcast and they obtain a financial stake in
the internet phone company Vonage, what's to stop them from degrading
my connection from their hubs to any Vonage competitors? There are
all kinds of ways VeriZomcast could make it appear that Vonage is
better (and the competitor worse) by routing "competitor traffic"
through older equipment or even introducing the equivalent of
"static" to degrade the performance. The only way customers would
learn of this would be by a VeriZomcast whistleblower. Even then they
could argue that the routing of the "competitor traffic" through
older equipment was not intentional. How would customers be able to
prove otherwise? This is an open invitation for mischief.
It also has implications for the marketplace of ideas. If VeriZomcast
decided it didn't like the website of, say, the Baltimore City Paper,
it wouldn't take a programming genius to figure out how to route that
traffic through slower parts of the network or even to introduce the
Internet equivalent of dropped calls. I suspect your staffers might
know a current Verizon employee or two who can vouch that this is
technically possible. Please, PLEASE, don't just take my word for
it. And please, PLEASE, don't let the ISPs get away with this. Back
when TV's had "rabbit ears" did you watch the channels that had a lot
of snow over the ones that came in clearly? ISP will effectively
have the power to introduce "snow" on links to sites that they want
people to avoid. The result being to drive traffic to sites that are
more favorable to their financial/political interests. If
VeriZomcast enters into a partnership with Sinclair Broadcasting,
which TV website do you think will stream video the fastest?
P.S. I can understand your "trusting your gut" when it came to
General Hayden. I hope you're right.
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