[LINK] TPP signed: the ‘biggest global threat to the internet’

[Bernard Robertson-Dunn]

TPP signed: the ‘biggest global threat to the internet’ agreed, as 
campaigners warn that secret pact could bring huge new restrictions to 
the internet

The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement covers 40 per cent of the 
world’s economy, and sets huge new rules for online businesses as well 
as traditional ones
Andrew Griffin
Monday 5 October 2015
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/tpp-signed-the-biggest-global-threat-to-the-internet-agreed-as-campaigners-warn-that-secret-pact-a6680321.html

An agreement that some campaigners have called the “biggest global 
threat to the internet” has just been signed, potentially bringing huge 
new restrictions on what people can do with their computers.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is the conclusion of five years of 
negotiations, and will cover 40 per cent of the world’s economy. Its 
claimed purpose is to create a unified economic bloc so that companies 
and businesses can trade more easily — but it also puts many of the 
central principle of the internet in doubt, according to campaigners.
Landmark TPP deal announced in Atlanta

One particularly controversial part of the provisions make it a crime to 
reveal corporate wrongdoing "through a computer system". Experts have 
pointed out that the wording is very vague, and could lead to 
whistleblowers being penalised for sharing important information, and 
lead to journalists stopping reporting on them.

Others require that online content providers — such as YouTube and 
Facebook — must take down content if they receive just one complaint, as 
they are in the US. That will be harmful for startups looking to build 
such businesses since they'll be required to have the resources to 
respond to every complaint, experts have pointed out.

In 2013, when the partnership was still being discussed, the Electronic 
Freedom Foundation called TPP “one of the worst global threats to the 
internet”. The changes are dangerous because to unify the various 
countries in the partnerships’ rules on intellectual property and other 
internet law, they are opting to take the US’s largely very restrictive 
rules.

“The TPP is likely to export some of the worst features of U.S. 
copyright law to Pacific Rim countries: a broad ban on breaking digital 
locks on devices and creative works (even for legal purposes), a minimum 
copyright term of the lifetime of the creator plus seventy years (the 
current international norm is the lifetime plus fifty years), 
privatization of enforcement for copyright infringement, ruinous 
statutory damages with no proof of actual harm, and government seizures 
of computers and equipment involved in alleged infringement,” wrote 
Katitza Rodriguez and Maira Sutton.

The changes could also lead to huge new rules about surveillance.

“Under this TPP proposal, Internet Service Providers could be required 
to "police" user activity (i.e. police YOU), take down internet content, 
and cut people off from internet access for common user-generated 
content,” write Expose The TPP, a campaign group opposing the agreement.

As well as imposing strict rules on those on the internet, activists 
point out that some of the parts of the agreement could limit central 
parts of the internet and modern computers. A restriction on breaking 
“digital locks” for instance — which is meant to allow companies to 
control their products even after they have been bought by customers — 
could stop disabled people from making important changes to their 
computers or using different technology.

The agreement has been made in secret and will not be fully published 
publicly for years.

Tech experts wrote to the US Congress in May to demand more transparency 
about the agreement.

"Despite containing many provisions that go far beyond the scope of 
traditional trade policy, the public is kept in the dark as these deals 
continue to be negotiated behind closed doors with heavy influence from 
only a limited subset of stakeholders," they wrote

-- 

Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Sydney Australia
email: b...@iimetro.com.au
web:   www.drbrd.com
web:   www.problemsfirst.com
Blog:  www.problemsfirst.com/blog

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Re: [LINK] The data drought

[JanW]

At 11:17 PM 5/10/2015, Karl Auer wrote:
>People's requirements are not geographically defined, so why do so many
>people think it makes sense to provide service quality based on
>geography? 

Turnbull responded to a person complaining about BAD connectivity by asking why 
the person moved there if they needed it that bad.
I guess he thinks everyone has the money to buy into  Point Piper.

Jan


I write books. http://janwhitaker.com/?page_id=8

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jw...@janwhitaker.com
Twitter: JL_Whitaker
Blog: www.janwhitaker.com 

Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you're gonna die, so how do you 
fill in the space between here and there? It's yours. Seize your space. 
~Margaret Atwood, writer 

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Re: [LINK] The data drought

[Karl Auer]

On Mon, 2015-10-05 at 11:08 +1100, Tom Worthington wrote:
> Who is playing the NBN for political gain? There would not seem to be 
> anything to gain for the incumbent government, whoever they are, to 
> deliberately limit NBN service in remote areas. Or are you suggesting 
> someone else is deliberately exaggerating the problem?

By providing a substandard service to as much of the country as
possible, they keep the embarrassing cost blowouts down, and/or save
money to spend on areas with larger voting populations and/or marginal
seats. This whole issue should have ripped the coalition apart two years
ago, I can only assume the Nationals are a bit slow to catch on.

The cynic in me also thinks that this could well be a deliberate
exercise in lowering expectations. By giving people 12Mb/s,
"shaping" (because "throttling" is such an ugly word), dismal quotas and
distant deadlines, they hope we will all be pathetically grateful when
they get access any time sooner, and get 20Mb/s or 40Mb/s and with luck
will forget that with FTTP they could have had 100Mb/s just for an
entree, and gigabits in a few years time.

> I have a wireless modem with a 10GB a month allocation, which then gets 
> "shaped". This is fine for on-line banking, large photographs, podcasts 
> and low resolution video (as well as for tutoring and being a student of 
> on-line university courses).

Your personal requirements are of very little relevance.

I want to work on remote servers and enjoy the odd online game, so
latency is critical to me and satellite access is useless, regardless of
quotas and bandwidth. I have a colleague here who uploads about 350GB
per month of original high resolution video; satellite worked fine for
him, but he has just been forced to MOVE HOUSE because of this new
limitation, or face the loss of his business. One of my clients in town
is a real estate business with a database application running on a
remote server. They can only get ADSL at the moment, so only three
people can work on the application simultaneously. They upload photos
all the time - and while that's happening, pretty much nothing else can,
and it takes ages because ADSL is limited to about a megabit outbound.
Moving the application in-house will cost them about 15K. They can't get
more ADSL because providers won't put in any more capacity because "the
NBN is coming" - this year? Next year? Sometime? Never. And so it goes. 

People's requirements are not geographically defined, so why do so many
people think it makes sense to provide service quality based on
geography?

> > "The new half-a-billion-dollar satellite was launched this morning, but
> > due to months of testing will not be commercially available until mid-2016.

And REGARDLESS of its capacity, it can delivery NOTHING of value to
people needing to use low-latency applications. And with the ludicrously
low data quotas, it will also provide nothing of value to anyone who
needs to transfer any significant quantity of data. 20GB is next to
nothing in today's terms. That's two strikes...

> Yes, commissioning a satellite really is "rocket science": it is 
> difficult and takes time.

Indeed it is and does! So why bother doing it? Why not spend those
millions on doing something useful, long-lived, and socially equitable?

> Remote satellite users can never receive the same speed as city users. 
> This is not a matter of politics, but of physics and geography.

Putting the word "satellite" in there begs the question. Take it out,
and you have something that is *entirely* a matter of politics. Yes;
poor service via satellite is a matter of physics (not geography), but
why should remote users be limited to satellite service?

> That said, 128 kbps should be sufficient for applications such 
> e-learning via Moodle. If not, there must be something seriously wrong 
> with the way the courses have been designed.

Jeez, Tom, you are supposed to be the expert here! Wann to learn
surgical techniques over a satellite link? Want to fly a
super-computer-backed jet fighter simulation over a satellite link? Want
to download a fluid dynamics dataset for local analysis over a 128kb/s
link? Want to learn cinematography by studying "Casablanca" at 320x280
resolution? Want to videoconference a class of ten students and a
teacher over a 128kb/s link? Or a satellite link? Hope, nope, nope,
nope, and nope. "E-learning" doesn't begin OR end with Moodle. 

Why is it so hard for people to see that data networks are the new
roads, the roads that lead to the future? And that by not building those
roads (or building only goat tracks), we cut off parts of the country
that could have been part of that future and now will not be.
 
We can run fibre to every corner of this country. Yes, it will cost a
bit - but the same people that cry poor on this then turn around and
support highly dubious and ridiculously expensive escapades in the
Middle East; think that American cast-off jet fighters are a great
investment; think th