Isenberg's freedom to connect

David S. Isenberg has a wonderful short essay in his latest Smart Letter, reproduced in full below, with David's permission via a creative commons license

THE LIMITS OF FREEDOM TO CONNECT
Confessions of a Customer
by David S. Isenberg

Recently, Verizon blacklisted whole ranges of IP
addresses in Europe, denying mail delivery to their
U.S. customers. The problem, Verizon said, was that
spammers were using some of these IP addresses.

This might be framed in several ways, one of which
is as an attack on customers' Freedom to Connect.

One might suggest that if you don't like Verizon's
policy, you can opt out! That is, thanks to the End-
to-End property of the Internet, Verizon's customers
can use Verizon as an access provider only and get
their email services from other providers.

Here's a true story. I am a Verizon DSL customer.
I do this. I connect to the Internet via Verizon
DSL, but Earthlink runs my incoming mail server and
Fastmail runs my outgoing server.
However, I am not your average DSL customer. Other
people might not know that alternative mail services
are possible. Setting up alternative mail services
could be intimidating and non-transparent. Thank
goodness I have network-savvy friends to help me
understand things like POP and SMTP.

One could perhaps use a right-to-vote as an analogy
to explore this further. During the 2004 campaign,
there were reports from Philadelphia of men in suits
and official looking cars appearing in poor
neighborhoods telling people that if they voted they
might be arrested for overdue child support or
unpaid traffic tickets. If true, were these men
violating peoples' right to vote? Perhaps you could
say they weren't. Almost certainly they were wrong
in a technical sense; there probably were not
"outstanding warrant inspectors" at the polls. Lets
assume that the reported vague threats were simply
vague threats. Were these men violating peoples'
right to vote?

Back to Verizon. The main reason I went to Verizon
was that Cablevision (Optimum Online) began limiting
my ability to send email. First it somehow capped
the number of emails I could send in a certain time
period. I am not sure exactly how the cap worked,
but I could only send 150 SMART Letters at a time
(from my list of about 3000) before the cap kicked
in. This could be viewed -- in isolation -- as
reasonable, e.g., to control spam sent by zombies in
peoples' Windows PCs.

Then I switched my Cablevision-connected client to
the Fastmail SMTP server. For a while this worked,
then it didn't. Cablevision was blocking Port 25.
People smarter than I pointed out that I could use
Fastmail with other ports. Sure, but maybe
Cablevision would block those ports too. And
Cablevision itself offered a workaround, pay $109
instead of $45 for the "business service" and Port
25 comes unblocked. I asked the service rep what
else the $109 bought me and he said, "That's about
it."

Was Cablevision violating my Freedom to Connect? I
am "free" to find workarounds if I know enough to
hack them. I am still "free" to connect at $109 if I
can afford it. I am still "free" to use other ports
besides Port 25 to send out email -- until these are
also blocked. And I am still "free" to switch from
one of two (count 'em, two) providers to the other.

Again, please permit me an analogy. This is kind of
like telling the protesters they are "free" to speak
over there in some isolated barbed wire cage where
nobody is likely to hear or notice what they are
saying.

What happens to my "Freedom to Connect" when both
providers clamp down on it in the same ways, and
there is no third provider?

Borrowing liberally from Pastor Niemoller, first
they came to limit my email server, but I was not a
heavy email user so I did nothing, then they came
for Port 25, but I didn't need to use Port 25, so I
did nothing, then . . . and soon I realized that the
Internet had become a walled garden where the only
content I could see was Cablevision-approved
content, and the only sites I could access were
Verizon-approved sites . . .

"These examples are just hypothetical, of course.
It can't happen here," said the frog in the pot of
lukewarm water.