"When you go online,
you can see the world.
Richard Pombo hates that.
So he's selling control over which sites you visit
to strangers,
gatekeepers to the Internet.
People who get to choose for you.
Pombo is selling your freedom for cash.
The freedom to read what you want,
to say what you want,
on the Internet.
Fight for your Freedom of Speech.
Save your Free Internet.
Fire Pombo."

You haven't seen ads like that in this campaign. Not on TV, radio or the web.

Because Net Neutrality never cost anyone an election. And NN advocates aren't peppering the Internet or the airwaves with independent advertising for/against candidates.

Russell Shaw doesn't expect Tuesday's US election to remove Republican control of the Senate, so doesn't expect a shift in Congress's net neutrality stance.

I'll go further.

Even if the Dems win both houses of Congress, it will not matter.

Since nobody will win on a "net neutrality" platform, no political capital will be earned for NN. So NN won't be a priority in the 2008 election. It's not like anyone tied NN to big issues like jobs, the war in Iraq, political corruption, or public morals.

And nobody raised a million dollars to advocate for net neutrality.

Jordanians have been using Skype without problems for years. Until now. For example, JRBT wrote "My ISP is Batelco and it does appear to be blocked. I am unable to gain credit for skype out from Jordan I have to get a friend in uk to get it for me."

Researcher David DeBartolo confirms that Batelco blocks Skype as directed by the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission. Presumably for "security." Here's the letter from DeBartolo and the fax from the ISP.

Dear Philip,

My name is David DeBartolo, and I am an American working in Amman, Jordan. I am the chair of a nonprofit organization with colleagues in Washington, London, and Cairo. I have been using Skype to keep in touch with all of them, and it has been tremendously useful -- until two weeks ago.

At that time, I started to have severe interruptions to my Skype service here in Jordan. It is forbidden to access the Skype website, and I have even been unable to make regular Skype-to-Skype or SkypeOut calls. Other colleagues of mine in Jordan have reported similar problems. The problems abated for the last week, but have now returned.

I inquired with our ISP in Jordan, named "Batelco," and they claim that the Jordanian Telecommunications Regulatory Commission has required them to ban access to Skype's website and to its authentication server. As proof they sent me the attached fax that they received.

I called the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission, and they confirmed that they had ordered it banned, for "security reasons" responding to concerns of the government of Jordan. Most folks here don't believe this ridiculous justification; they believe that the state communications companies are upset about losing long-distance customers to Skype.

I've been told that complaints should be directed to the director of regulatory department of the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission, Dr. Al-Ansari. His email address is alansari.almashagbah@trc.gov.jo. The contact information for the commission is on the attached fax; Dr. Al-Ansari's extension is 2300.

I wanted to let you know about this issue because I am furious at the Jordanian government's self-serving decision. I hope that you will get a good blog post out of this, and that you may be able to mobilize Skype executives to officially protest the commission's decision. Jordan has a very close relationship to the US, and if they believe that Americans are upset at the decision, or that international investment will be jeopardized, they may be persuaded to change course. I also hope that you may be able to get Skype technicians working to counter whatever obstacles they have created to using Skype in Jordan.

Thank you for your time and please do not hesitate to contact me if you need any additional information.

Sincerely,

David M. DeBartolo
Fulbright Researcher, Jordan, 2006-2007
Binational Fulbright Commission
Amman, 11185
Jordan

Are you having difficulty with Skype and your ISP? Do you believe the "security" reason for blocking Skype.com?

Guest blog by Steve Sloan, Information Technology Consultant, San Jose State University.

UPDATE: At the moment, Skype's status remains undetermined and unblocked on the SJSU campus. A UCAT Operating Practices document describing the reasons and details for blocking Skype. (pdf)

Skype is a peer-to-peer (p2p) voice communications, instant message and file sharing program. The recent decision to pull the plug on Skype at SJSU (has it been implemented?) may be a classic example of command and control (Web 1.0 thinking) versus collaborate and communicate (Web 2.0) technologies and principles. According to one person I spoke with in the networking department of the university's computer center, "the issue that caused the decision to kill Skype is that Skype communications are encrypted." But, other protocols like SSL, SFTP and SSH are allowed and are encrypted. These protocols could be also used to do evil things. There is no discussion I know of to block these communications and they are used a lot on our university's network. Also IPSec and Kerberos are protocols used used on the SJSU network. These protocols are also encrypted and supported by SJSU. Should we also kill them? Do we want to have to make credit card transactions in clear text?

Yes, there have been past concerns about Skype. But, these concerns may be over blown. Oxford University, which had banned Skype, in fact recently lifted its ban on Skype.

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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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BlogHer starts today, perhaps the live blogger event with the least recycled blatfarb and the most human context. In honor of women bloggers everywhere, here's a guest post by Matt responding to our SkypeMe Eve post by Dina Mehta. 

You know, I haven't really given much thought to what it would be like for a woman in skypeme mode, but for myself I put it on when I just want to talk to someone and all my friends are busy. I don't often think of speaking with someone intimately that I don't know in real life, so the idea of meeting someone on skype, or anywhere else on the internet on intimate terms is kind of disconcerting to me, but what I have been thinking about is that the internet has slowly been taking the place of other social avenues.

At one point in time, people looking to find 'true love' as well as people looking to find 'a quick lay' would converge in physical establishments such as bars and clubs, and by being there it was like they were announcing themselves to be open to society (that is to talking with strangers). In such situations the people there would have to gauge what others were after by various signs that the person would make, as an example, if there was a woman sitting in a booth alone quietly, I would assume she wanted to remain that way, however if she were at the bar, I would assume she would be open to company at the bar.

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Declan McCullagh breaks down the FBI's new Net-tapping push. Requiring manufacturers of VoIP systems (including Skype) and IM (like Skype) be as tappable as your plain old telephone system. I suppose it comes down to trust, your world view, and how you balance risks with freedoms.

Law enforcement, for example, keeps pressure on legislatures to widen authority, at the expense of citizen privacy, in the name of being efficient and effective. They form an organized lobby putting safety over liberty. Do you know of lobbies that push back the other way?

Laws makers are aware that the threats are personal. For example, this bit from the official site of Ohio Senator Mike "Coingate" DeWine (R-Ohio):

NOTE: Due to heightened security restrictions in the Senate office buildings and elsewhere on the Capitol complex, mail addressed to members of Congress continues to be significantly delayed. Mail addressed to my office must now be sent off-site for irradiation treatment and other preventative measures to ensure safety.

Those wishing to quickly contact my office are encouraged to correspond by telephone or fax. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Senator DeWine will introduce the FBI's bill. If you're a U.S. citizen, Skype him to say the new CALEA extensions are over-the-top and intrusive. Or that you don't mind being spied on. Here are his public phone numbers. If you click them, you'll dial straight from Skype, free in the US:

• D.C. Office: (202) 224-2315
• Xenia, Ohio: (937) 376-3080
• Cincinnati, Ohio: (513) 763-8260
• Cleveland, Ohio: (216) 522-7272
• Columbus, Ohio: (614) 469-5186
• Marietta, Ohio: (740) 373-2317
• Toledo, Ohio: (419) 259-7536

This is an election year for DeWine. He is running for reelection against blogging Congressman Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). If you think privacy and freedom should be a campaign issue, Skype Brown's campaign office at 440-282-3314 or his congressional offices: Lorain County (440) 245-5350, (440) 365-5877; Summit County (330) 865-8450; and his Washington Office (202) 225-3401.

Does making phone numbers clickable (click once to call) make you more likely to call, just for the convenience?

Skype on your razr?
incompatible today.
SoonR might do it.

Net neutrality
astroturfed, lobbied and shelved
telcos win again

fcc taxes Vonage
maybe SkypeOut too
Save the Internet!

pick friends well, Yahoo!
AT&T messenger
now with NSA

Supernova word:
people Curate their passions
a new meme rises

Calls in US free
June promo: call the world free.
Skype teases America

Censor carefully:
Global Online Freedom Act.
Do you read Chinese?

Packard-Bell laptop
push keyboard to call
or answer the phone

Phishing in Skypeland
Suckers waiting to be fleeced
Study the handbook

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

A letter from a concerned reader:

Hi. My company has blocked the use of Skype on our company computer network (becuase of pressure from the national phone company here). When I try to launch Skype, a message pop-us saying "This application has been blocked!" Is it possible to avoid this block? Can Skype be used through a website or does the application actually need to be launched? Are there other VOIP or telephony programs which work from websites or otherwise don't need a separate application to be launched on the PC?

One at a time:

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Many people have commented on how Vonage is pimping its IPO to its own customers by sending them a voicemail.

This voicemail doesn't make their phone ring. I'm not sure if they receive any notification of it. In all, it's fairly unobtrusive.

Anyhow, I'm currently completing a questionnaire from my business bank: "Which of the following types of communications do you recall ever receiving (from us): ... [ ] Courtesy phone calls from our Call Centre". There then follows: "Which is your preferred method of contact..." and the predictable list of existing channels.

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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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A Skype Journal Exclusive. It is a great book, a great read. It belongs beside your computer, (Windows, Mac OS X or Linux) not on a book shelf. "Skype: The Definitive Guide." The book is rightfully portrayed as the only official guide to Skype, every chapter reviewed and approved by Skype staffers. Written by Skype insiders Harry Max and Taylor Ray (more on them later this week) with a foreword by Skype co-founder and CEO Niklas Zennström.

The whole book feels good. It has balance. Skype stories, user stories, interweaved with useful but hard technical facts. Even QUE Publishing and Amazon got it right. They understand the Skype user is not going to pay big bucks for a book. The price of $12.99 (US) means just about everyone can afford it.

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Last week, Skype changed the NorthAm VoIP landscape with free SkypeOut until year end. Skype downloads picked up right away.

This week Vonage speculators caught on about 24 hours too late. Vonage, its bankers and investors took in half a billion dollars. That'll buy them a mix of time, talent, features, and paying customers. We'll see how well they use it. 

StreamCast Networks' little litigation engine ups their lawsuit's ante by going for deep pockets, including eBay's, and naming Skype's founders in the expanded suit. Reading their complaint, they think they're facing the Sopranos. ♥ The ammended complaint (4.6MB, PDF) is full of juicy language like "fraud", "exclusive rights", "secretly siphoned-off", "conspiracy to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act", "steal", "hatched a scheme", "theft", "secret disabling feature", "sweetheart deals", "hijack the 28 million Morpheus user base", "scheme", "scheme", "conspiracy to restrain trade", "pattern of racketeering", "mail and wire fraud", "are currently being aided and abetted in their efforts to fraudulently tranfer funds and properties by their families, accountants and attorneys". ♥ They say Skype's p2p technology is owned by StreamCast, and that Skype's founders cheated them out of the technology. They also say Skype lied to eBay about owning its technology free and clear, or that eBay (wink, wink, nudge, nudge). To make their case, they must pierce several corporate veils, show they had rights to the technology in the first place, prove the people and companies named messed with their rights. The parties span the globe, from Estonia to Vanuatu, but they may have enough to assert California jurisdiction. ♥ The kicker: StreamCast asked the court to shut down Skype. Right now. Protect your Skype SuperPowers! Should you tell StreamCast's management how you feel about it? Using your free or cheap SkypeOut minutes? Just by clicking on the phone numbers below? Maybe you'd say something like "Hands off my Skype, Mr. StreamCast!"? ♥ Do Skype's users have any legal standing in this?

• Michael Weiss, ceo, (818) 887-8610 x110
• Matt Neco, counsel, (818) 887-8610 x105
• Elizabeth Cowley, vp bizdev, (818) 887-8610 x108

The eBay/Yahoo deal seems healthy. Partner with a symbiote, not a parasite. Don't fuel Google's rising threat with ad dollars. ♥ It's an opportunity. Generalizing for a moment, eBay is great at making markets for goods. Yahoo! is better at making markets for intangibles, like jobs, movies, travel. Both create rich communities, but very different mechanics and cultures. As eBay uses Skype to embrace an intangibles strategy, Yahoo! could be a great partner. ♥ What happens should the Skype and Yahoo! Messenger teams swap spit? The best bits of both products could show up in the other. Might they resolve digital ID spaces and data models for users and conversations? Agree to strong interoperability for chat, voice and video? Standards for distributing in-client adverts? API co-development, blending the Yahoo!, eBay, PayPal and Skype developer communities? Together, they'd be an unbeatable team.

Skype updated Windows and Mac clients, bug fixes and repaired security problems, including a bug that exposed millions of SkypeOut call records to the NSA and other Internet snoops.

Dan Houghton, Skype's answer to Shelley Vision, started blogging about new Skypecasts.

The Skype ecology has been active too. VoIP Voice launched a new Mac phone in the UK. ♥ Actiontec is hiring a director of bizdev for VoIP products. "Actiontec is expanding its presence in the Skype Certified VoIP business! As a leader in this marketplace, Actiontec plans to capitalize on it's first to market advantage in the commercial space, and leverage it's intellectual property and strategic relationships in the VoIP adapter business. This is an exciting opportunity for a highly motivated professional to drive a huge up and coming business segment for Actiontec." If you apply, let us know what you learn. ♥ PhoneGnome to Skype came out, using the Uplink SIP to Skype Adapter.

Sometimes people ask me how I find something to write about just focusing on Skype. It's weeks like this, my friend.

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.

I'm looking forward to blogging the Conversations that develop from the sessions at mesh 2006 tomorrow and Tuesday. With featured Conversation Mentors such as Om Malik, Michael Geist, Steve Rubel and Paul Kedrosky there should evovle some interesing perspectives on how the a Web 2.0 world will evolve.

Mark is getting excited in preparing over the weekend, he says:

I couldn't help but think that we are a long way from a cold winter night a few months ago at the Paddock Tavern when someone raised the idea of putting on a conference. Little did we know what we were getting ourselves into! I'm looking forward to meshing as much as possible so if you see me wondering around, please introduce yourself.

As a media sponsor, Skype Journal will be reporting back daily with a particular focus on how Web 2.0/Voice 2.0 can be integrated into, impact and influence a public beyond the geeksphere.