Just over a week ago Phil reported that Jordan's telecom regulator had ordered that Skype be blocked. It was a short-lived blockade; the decision has been reversed. According to a report from Middle East North Africa Financial News:

Director of the commission's regulatory department, Al Ansari Al Mashaqbah, confirmed yesterday that the recent decision to block Skype had been reversed.

The official told The Jordan Times that the security issues, cited as the reason for the block, had been resolved.

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You invite some friends to a party at your home. While at the party, they sublet your home to strangers. You learn this after the strangers are throwing their own parties in your home and moving in, eating your food, dating your wife.

Although the plot is straight out of Madhouse (1990), I'm really talking about San José State University's network managers facing the reality of Skype adoption. In this metaphor:

• the student Skypers are the friends,

• the sublease is the Skype EULA,

• the strangers are the members of the Skype network,

• and side effects are:

  • a new thing to support without any planned budget,

  • unanticipated use of your networks,

  • unknown exposure to various risks on your master list.

This gets trickier when Skype's architecture (a blend of p2p and centralized services) isn't well understood beforehand.

Don Baker and Bob Neal are resisting proven defensive instincts. Before tossing out the scoundrels and locking the doors, they're inviting comment from campus stakeholders and building expertise by bringing an eBay/Skype person to a closed briefing on Tuesday. All the public attention doesn't make it easier to take a measured approach, so these SJSU University Computing and Telecom (UCAT) execs are showing great discipline.

If you want to learn more, and share your thoughts, Steve Sloan is hosting a discussion, open to the public, on Skype in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications (JMC). We'll be Skypecasting it too. I'll see you there.

Organized crime organizations suppress competition in a market. This keeps margins high on vice goods and services. Higher prices means overall crime rates fall, some people just can't afford vices at higher rates. Organized crime trys to avoid "wars" with rivals because they are expensive and bad for business. Big Crime also stifles small time rivals who expand the market by bidding down monopolist pricing.

In theory, police would cooperate with mafiya to keep the streets clean of petty crimes that interfere with the mafiya's business. Total crime falls because monopolists will maximize profits in a smaller market at higher prices. General law and order benefits those holding monopolies on drugs, gambling, prostitution, and other steady businesses.

But there's a greater problem. Monopolies concentrate wealth and power. This leads to corrupt government.

So we write special laws that hurt organized crime. We add penalties for large quantities of drugs. We legalize big gambling to bring it out of the underground economy, producing tax income instead of fueling crime lords. We mandate property forfeiture and allow mobster surveillance. In short, we make it more expensive to do big crime and we level the playing field. You never do away with crime altogether, but you cut the concentrated cash flow that corrupts.

Which brings me to net neutrality.

Our Martin Geddes thinks little of laws and regulations supporting net neutrality.

I've said it many times before, but Network Neutrality is a treatment for the symptoms, not the causes - and it's an ineffective anti-consumer folk remedy at that. Good intentions aren't enough. ... Picking at one tiny part of the anti-competitive edifice isn't the way forward. Better to have power over suppliers through your wallet than via politicians.

I agree. In a perfect world.

But the markets are imperfect, power is already concentrated. We see the corrupting power of the largest lobbyists in Washington D.C. and other centers of political power. We see their astroturfing and other bad acts.

So we must act.

We must effect change.

We must out-innovate and out-market.

We must organize as consumers.

We must organize as citizens. We need to educate this generation's Judge Greens, the judge who broke up Ma Bell and made the mobile revolution possible.

We must lead our society to define unmediated access to the Internet as a human right, a civil right. And to react with anger and purpose to anyone who tries to tamper with that access.    

We must find allies, if not friends, in other industries. Companies that need their bits to go untrammeled. That need an Internet without gatekeepers. Companies that know how to lobby.

Like the mafia, yakuza, or bratva, the concentrated power of the telcos will fight back.

They won't fall to any one measure. So we need a theme that All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
 -- Edmund Burkedrives many measures, new ones over time, each driving the monsters toward acceptable societal norms. Perhaps the theme is liberty and freedom?

I agree with Martin that fighting the telcos with laws is hard. Maybe impossible. And not without risk.

But doing nothing is not an option. The societal consequences of giving absolute control over public assembly, public speech, over our new libraries, encyclopedias and news sources, over our civic participation and education - this is tantamount to creating a new branch of government, one without oversight, without checks, balances or accountability.

Martin, we don't have dozens or hundreds of viable suppliers in the United States. We don't have efficient markets for Internet access. And we have damning evidence of the foul intentions of these monopolists to subvert civic freedoms and rights.

So, instead of waiting for Adam Smith's invisible hand to restore rights seized by phone and cable companies, what do you think should we do? 

P.S. Dr. Magaddino, my old economics professor, challenged me to consider crime, applying supply and demand theory to social evils instead of goods.

Consider this.

I'm a cheapskate, and I'm with Tesco Mobile's prepaid plan. I hardly use my mobile except as a camera and for brief voice notes. Under $10/month expenditure.

Tesco's MVNO only offer Web (ports 80/443 HTTP/HTTPS) access on their GPRS gateway. This is a means of the host operator (in this case, O2) to segment the market and avoid competition from the MVNO for its premium customers.

Now, if you have neutrality rules, you get two unwanted effects:

• Tesco may have to close down their GPRS service, because it discriminates against service providers who happen not to use HTTP as their only protocol. The customer loses if the only type of Internet access allowed is 100% unfiltered.
• Tesco can never expand the service to, for example, allow POP email access whilst disallowing VoIP by inducing jitter and using deep packet inspection. The customer loses again -- in this case the marginal one who may even be willing to pay a little more.

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The gambling and telecom industries are both very effective at lobbying the American congress to raise barriers protecting their cash cows and starving innovative startups. Mike at Techdirt writes about the new U.S. ban on online gambling. All it will do is drive online gamblers underground, virtual casinos offshore, and the whole industry out of the reach of regulators, taxation, consumer affairs and law enforcement.

Who benefits? Offline gambling.

Doesn't this smell just like the incumbent-protecting legislation pushed by the telecom and cable lobbies?

It Happened to Jane (1959) with Doris Day, Jack Lemmon, and Ernie Kovacs. A tycoon buys the only railroad going through a small Maine town. A local widow (Day) tries to get her live lobsters to market, but the railroad downgrades her shipments, letting lobsters die before they get to their customers.

Despite the railroad's dozens of high powered lawyers, Doris Day wins in small claims court. When the railroad won't pay, she seizes a train, and starts a PR campaign against them that includes radio, television game shows, newspaper reports, and the like. The railroad retaliates by cutting off passenger and cargo service to their small town. The townspeople try to use the seized railcar to haul their goods, including the lobsters, to New York. But the tycoon routes the train all over New England to delay it. They intentionally congest those routes with other rail cars, start construction at chokepoints, and deny water for the steam engine to further slow down the lobsters. Will they make it to the Bronx in time for the dinner time rush?

In the end, the mean tycoon's heart softens when he meets Day and her cute kids, and everyone lives happily ever after.

Sound like the network neutrality issue?

Big telecom incumbents abusing power. Playing favorites with routing. Delivering less than they're paid for, stopping innovation, and spending money on lawyers instead of upgrades.

Unlike the movie, we don't have a Doris Day to charm "the meanest man in the world." So it comes down to congress and the FCC in the United States, and similar government organs in your country. Grassroots activism seems the only course since it's nigh on impossible to out-lobby phone and cable companies.

So:

• What will you do for the Internet this week?
  
• How will you defend your right to call unimpeded? And in private?
  
• Who will you call?
  

Users of Skype in German and English VoIP forums have been complaining about the automatic withdrawal of their Skype credit after inactivity in their account. Now a German court rules: Prepaid account withdrawal based on inactivity must stop! Up till now Skype tells users to call your Mum at least every 179 days or you will lose your SkypeOut credit balance! Spending two cents twice a year can be important.

Those who occasionally use O2 to get airtime in Germany may breathe easier in the future! Germany's fourth largest mobile company gets the red card from the High Regional Court of Munich. Several prepaid clauses are declared invalid.

Hopefully this new court ruling will be a wake up call to Skype about this inappropriate business practice of closing out the account balance after 180 days.

"Skype is currently not doing business in Korea, nor does it have a telecoms operation in Korea. Should Skype begin to conduct business in Korea, either directly or with a local partner, all applicable laws will of course be followed." This on Monday from DongChol Beh, Skype Market Manager for Korea. Parsing carefully, this means you cannot buy Skype credits if you are in South Korea (or is it if Skype believes you are in South Korea? or you can't buy it with a South Korean credit card?). You can spend Skype credits if you have them on SkypeOut to South Korea land lines.

It's in response to headlines like:

• ZDNet Korea: Skype, new memberships halted!
• VoIP news: Skype in trouble with South Korea government
• The Korea Times: Skype Probed for Unregistered Marketing
• 21talks: Skype accused (again) of illegal practices
• Strategy Page: South Korea Puts the Screws to U.S. Troops
• Jan in Malaysia: South Korean government held off on its plan to ban the use of VOIP

Hmmm.

• Auction & Skype's Korean site.
• Launch announcement from last month with disclaimers about SkypeIn and SkypeOut.
• Notice from Skype about the continuing problem.

It's a story of growing pains, of Skype moving in to a country, running into an obstacle, and backing off to re-enter correctly.

It's also about large local phone companies lobbying hard with government regulators to restrict competition from VoIP. (Sound familiar?)

Follow-up questions unanswered by press time.

• Was Skype doing business in Korea before?
• When, for which products, and in what manner?
• When and why did Skype stop?

If Skype or its partners are subject to fines for infractions, then we may not get answers for a while.

Skype clearly plans to serve the South Korean market with SkypeIn and SkypeOut. What about PayPal? At the moment, PayPal only lets South Koreans withdraw money, not send money. This must be tough for eBay since South Korea is eBay's fourth largest market, after the United States, Germany, and the UK. More than 34 million Koreans use the Internet, about 70% of the population.

The regulatory embarassment, customer inconvenience, and deferred cash flow must be difficult for Skype's portal partner, Auction. It's unclear if Auction-Skype is a joint venture, an Auction project, a Skype project, or a Skype subsidiary. UPDATE: It is an Auction project, working on behalf of Skype, its sister company.

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Technorati Tags: politics, activism, netneutrality, askaninja, ninja, rights, ebay, skype, skypejournal, freedom, access

I'm sat in the Internet cafe in Stockholm Arlanda airport burning my last few Krona coins. Fighting with a Swedish keyboard brings back fond memories of being a code monkey in a Norwegian bank a decade ago. Anyhow, in my hotel and here I've noticed that the both seem to be using some kind of transparent proxy. If a web page doesn't load right, and a duff version is cached, you need to shift-refresh to force the 'no cache' option on.

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Lee Dryburgh -- a friend and recovering SS7 signalling guru -- has stumbled upon a barbed and thoroughly wicked anonymous denunciation of the "Quality of Service" efforts of some distressed incumbent telcos. He's posted it up over at TelephonyDiscussion.com.

via G's TeleQoSolypse.

Ever had Skype ask for your feedback on a SkypeOut call? That's more than AT&T ever did for me. Would be nice if it used a secure browser page (SSL, https) instead of posting my skypedout phone number in the clear. The url leading to the form:

http://www.skype.com/feedback/survey/calls/? service=skypeout & version=2.0.0.103
& username=YOURSKYPENAMEHERE
& call_date=1147565396
& cpu=0
& bandwidth=0
& a_number=+DIALEDPHONENUMBERHERE
& call_type=outgoing
& provider=
& status=
& result=FINISHED
& log_ringing=0
& log_answer=12
& log_finished=145
& pstn_feedback_info=

Lots of unencrypted personal info floating from users to Skype over the Internet daily, where anyone with a packet sniffer can assemble and read the data.

This data is exposed before you even see the form.

Fortunately the fix is easy to recode, a small change. But it's an indicator of how hard it is to keep complex information systems in full compliance with all regulations and company policies.

As of post time:

• SkypeOut data is still being posted in the clear.
• Skype is working on a client hot fix.
• The number of calls and callers exposed is still unknown.
• This doesn't compromise call security, just the metadata describing the caller (skype name, IP address) and call (phone number, start time, duration).

One last note. The timing of this report is an accident. I noticed this privacy problem around 3am Pacific Sunday morning.

The Financial Times' Alison Maitland scored an interview with Niklas Zennström that ran yesterday. In it Zennström confirms the TOM-Skype joint venture censors text messages on behalf of the Chinese government. He claims: "One thing that’s certain is that those things are in no way jeopardising the privacy or the security of any of the users."

I posed the following questions to Skype but they have no comment beyond trying to insulate Skype from responsibility. "The Skype offering in China is actively managed by our joint venture in the country; TOM Online. Skype works hard to co-operate with local laws and regulations in all markets where we do business." 

1. Is TOM only filtering chats where at least one of the callers' accounts were signed up by TOM Online?
   
   
2. Will TOM filter chats if both parties are Chinese nationals but outside the PRC, say travelling in the US?
   
   
3. Is TOM only filtering conversations where at least one of the parties are using the custom version of the Skype client written for the joint venture?
   
   
4. Will TOM filter conversations using the TOM client being used by non-PRC nationals who are outside of China?
   
   
5. Does TOM's contract with Skype provide for disclosure to Skype and Skype users when their information is provided to a government official?
   
   
6. Are records of what the filter does kept? If so, by whom? Does Skype have or keep copies of those record?
   
   
7. Does the filtering mechanism use a list of keywords? If so, is the list public? May I have a copy? Who has the list? How often does it change?
   
   
8. Are the keywords only in Simplified Chinese or are they in other languages too?
   
   
9. Is China the only country where Skype and Skype's partner have set up filtering?
   
   
10. Do all Skype chats have the potential for a hidden participant, whether human or a robot?
    
    
11. Are filenames for transfer subject to filtering?
    
    
12. Are people's names among the keywords?
    
    
13. Are the content of files transferred via Skype also subject to filtering?
    
    
14. Does Skype encrypt end-to-end the IMs that are subject to filtering?
    
    
15. In a multiparty, multinational chat, can I as an American citizen have my text to a British subject filtered if someone from Shanghai is in that chat too?
    
    
16. Are audio conversations, where at least one party is in China, being listended to, filtered or recorded?
    
    
17. Are all calls filtered, or only if users meet certain criteria, or are conversations selected for filtering randomly?

Skypes founders are not strangers to prickly questions of international law and corporate ethics. Their background with file sharing firm Kazaa left them very aware of the business and technology strategies available and their legal and social consequences. This is also a context where phone companies completely block Skype.com and Skype conversations. Did the ethics conversation ever took place at Skype when they agreed to the Chinese joint venture? Who was involved and was there a real debate? And did eBay understand this situation before the acquisition?

See also:

• Jan in Malaysia: "The difference between Asia where Internet is seen as venue for free expression in Asia, unlike China. Thank god I live in Malaysia. Malaysia Boleh ! Wawasan 2020."
  
• Metafilter thread. "Oh dear, I had high hopes that Skype would hold out. Still, I guess they are telling us. Can anyone find the list of banned words in the TOM client?"
  
• China Herald: "But on a positive note, unlike Yahoo, Skype does not help to send their users to prison"
  
• 21talks: "And dear readers, the next time you want to give a call to the holy Dalai Lama, just say you’re trying to reach the smiling guy with glasses and a yellow head cap."
• IP Democracy: "Yeah, well, last I checked, the U.S. and Germany don’t lock up their journalists and throw away the key."

1. Bumper stickers. Short and powerful. Most explanations of what we want and why are incomprehensible as Marxist dialectic. Give me talking points I can use with non-technical human beings.
2. Actionable items. For example, furnishing every VoIP user with a "Call to Civic Action" button that pops up their elected representatives' phone numbers. Getting staffers on the Hill to use Skype. Writing platform statements that Republicans and Democrats can include in state platforms, to which we can hold congressional candidates accountable, which we can feed to the press as newsworthy questions. Acta non verba!
3. Continuity of Conversation. I can't believe there isn't a wiki and a listserve up before the conference. This needs to be an ongoing conversation leading to organization and action.
4. Allies. I don't understand the political map. Many players with multiple agendas. I want to understand who cares about what so I can ask for and offer help.
5. Underwriters. Sponsor our political coverage and we'll acknowledge you Public Television style.
6. Clients. Skype Journal Consulting is helping online campaign managers understand, adopt, integrate, and deploy Skype (and related systems) into their netroots operations. If you thought blogs and listserves were effective in 2004...

Here's three Skype products that aim to enhance your Skypeing experience that leaves me questioning exactly what I'm buying with Skype Certified. The three products are the VoSky Chatterbox, Jawbone Headset and the Motorola Wireless Interenet Calling Kit. Each provide a different angle on bettering the standard Skyper's headset and as you might expect each has their pro's and con's.

VoSky Chatterbox.

This simple USB device provides an easily portable plug and play speakerphone for Skype. It's simple to use and requires no additional software to be loaded. It has a volume and mute button on top and works probably as expected, as a low cost speakerphone. I'd liken it to the solution we had as kids when we could finally plug in a speakerphone box between the old phone and the whole family sat around. In principle great, in practice it left something to be desired. The Chatterbox is a little like this. It works. It's also no substitute for a decent headset. The caller on the other end of the line will know and possibly complain. Handsfree solutions curently work better with a good set of speakers and a proper stand mic. Locate them correctly and the caller won't get a any feedback. Many laptops work as good as the Chatterbox. If you feel the need try it. Just don't expect it to be a Polycom and ready for the office. For kids it may be more robust than a headset - read youngsters talking to Grandma.

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Brightcove will serve video from commercial producers. Facebridge will let users distribute their own videos. 2006 will be the year that Skype turns millions of Skypers into podcasters, vloggers, and videographers. Who at Skype is working on vid distribution alliances? The long tail of edge created content will dominate in time but there is still good money in Skype as a TV and movie player for the next few years.

Rich Tehrani has a timely riff on mashing up Service Oriented Architecture with VoIP. Bringing voice into enterprise app development.

Another Niklas-is-cool profile. Muesli for breakfast! Niklas is still hard at work with Skype: “My ambition is to make Skype into the world’s largest online communication company. That’s the driver. Financial gain is secondary.”

Google tests phone-enabling AdWords. Long-established technology, but never deployed at global scale. Dear eBay, Skype could design this in one day, prototype in three days,