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This site claims to have inside information from Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that they are planning to go to the Cable TV model for the Web — basic service buys access to a list of web sites they stipulate, but if you want to wander off that territory, you’d have to pay them extra. $19.95 to get to Google, say, but $29.95 if you want access the New York Times web site (for which the New York Times itself charges nothing). That would be the end of the Internet as we know it, where anyone can put information up on a site and anyone else, for nothing more than their base ISP connection fee, can go see it.

“Net neutrality” is an important basic principle. I like to think of Internet connectivity as the US thought about rural electrification in the last century — something that might not be cost-efficient for private providers in the short run, but would yield enormous social and economic benefits to the US in the long run. If this report is true, imagine a world in which the electric company might supply you with electricity so you could run stoves and refrigerators on its approved list, but would charge you extra if you plugged in an appliance not approved by the electric company itself.

This is a complicated topic, but the fundamental problem is that there are not enough competing suppliers of Internet services. A quarter of the US still has only dialup; half has two suppliers, usually cable and telephone DSL; and a quarter has only one. The percentage of US households that have more than two choices for broadband connectivity is negligible. Under such conditions, the suppliers can contemplate tiered pricing schemes, which make absolutely no sense in terms of resources required — it costs no more to deliver packets from a billion different sources than from only one.

On June 4, the Center for Democracy and Technology published The Internet in Transition: A Platform to Keep the Internet Open, Innovative and Free. This 25-page report summarizes CDT’s recommendation on Internet policy for the next Administration and Congress.

Readers of Blown to Bits will find the issues here familiar: preserving free speech while protecting children online; strengthening consumer privacy and restoring protections again government surveillance; using the power of the Internet to promote freedom and democracy on a global scale; protecting innovation by resisting attempts to undercut the Internet’s open architecture; and capitalizing upon the Internet as a force to encourage open government.

In the words of the report:

In recent years, policymakers seem to have forgotten what makes the Internet special. Increasingly, policy proposals treat the Internet as a problem to be solved rather than a valuable resource that must be supported. Debates over objectionable content online, protecting intellectual property, preventing terrorism, or restructuring telecommunications policy seem to have lost sight of the Internet’s history and its architecture.

This version of the report is a first draft. CDT and has launched a web site for readers to comments and suggest additional policy initiatives for incorporation into later versions of the report.

There are many detailed proposals and links to other CDT policy reviews. This is a great reference to Internet policy, and well worth reading and commenting on, regardless of where you stand on the issues.

The site is at http://www.cdt.org/election2008/ and the report itself is available at http://cdt.org/election2008/election2008.pdf.

I got an email yesterday from a sales agent for Palisade Systems, which offers a product called PacketSure. The “Packet” in that name refers to Internet packets, the little blocks of bits that are the unit of information the Internet transports. And “Sure” means that the product will make sure the packets going into and out of your business won’t contain information you’d rather not see crossing the boundary into and out of the outside world. For example, movies you don’t want your employees wasting their time watching, or Social Security Numbers that might be client or employee data leaking out, or medical records which are private by law. The web site has a short demo video that gives the idea.

As originally conceived, the Internet was simply a packet delivery system. A computer at a junction point in the network was just supposed to look at the address part of the packets so it could send them off on the proper outgoing link. Those computers were slow enough that it wasn’t practical for them to do much more anyway in the way of peeking inside packets, and it also wasn’t feasible to do much scanning of bits as they entered or left host computers at the edge of the Internet.

With faster computers and much more concern about undesirable uses of the Internet, it is now possible, as the email I received states, “to manage communications across over 150 different protocols and¬†applications ‚Ķ¬†to block, log,¬†report, and alert based on company policy.” Not only possible — it may well be wise or even necessary, given the variety of laws and regulations now in place about appropriate handling of data.

But the “based on company policy” part makes this technology much more than a tool for legal compliance. It gives the company complete control over the web sites employees are allowed to visit, the content of their email, and the use of office computers for sharing pictures. It is as though your office phone were locked to work only with certain other phone numbers, and was subject to a constant wiretap to boot. (Except that, I suspect, most personal communication out of offices these days probably goes by IM or email: Telephone conversations are less private because they are audible.)

Questions: If there were a home version of this product, would you buy it to keep your children in line? Should a university install these boxes to monitor or prevent students’ illegal music and movie downloading? If you were the government of Myanmar, would you want to install the system for the entire country?

Like so many other ingenious and useful technologies, this one is wonderful or terrible, depending on how it is used. A few years ago, no one needed to face the question of whether such systems were good or bad, because there was no practical way to build them. Now they exist, and they will keep getting cheaper and better. And I’m sure no one from Palisade Systems does ethics checks on its customers before shipping the PacketSure products.

ComputerWorld reports today:

The Chinese government is demanding that US-owned hotels there filter Internet service during the upcoming Olympic Games in Beijing, US Senator Sam Brownback has alleged. The Chinese government is requiring US-owned hotels to install Internet filters to “monitor and restrict information coming in and out of China,” Brownback said Thursday.

This is an odd story. China is demanding that the hotels filter bits during the Games—as opposed to what happens the rest of the time? “The great firewall of China” already keeps lots of bits out of the country. The story doesn’t explain what extra protection the hotels are supposed to provide.

Anyone going to China should try going to a few web sites or doing a few searches. You can get some of the effect just by sitting at home and using google.cn for awhile rather than google.com, but that won’t give you the experience I had in Shanghai last year, of mysteriously losing the Internet connection in my hotel room because I had asked the wrong question.

The OpenNet Initiative web site has a great deal more information about what is filtered where, and how the ONI researchers have gotten those answers.

I say: the hotels should comply with whatever the Chinese are demanding, and make sure their clients understand why they are doing so.