Implementing an Internet Bill of Rights

The U. S. Constitution’s first ten amendments make up what is called the Bill of Rights.  These guarantee freedom of religion, of the press, the right to a speedy and public trial, and other rights that were not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution itself.  As I was sitting in on a telecommunications class taught by industry expert Andres Carvallo last week, he speculated about something that I’m going to call an Internet bill of rights.  It doesn’t exist yet, and there are good technical and economic reasons to suspect it never will, but it’s a great idea and deserves airing.

Right now, your rights online are a hodge-podge of hundreds or maybe thousands of legal boilerplate agreements that you’ve checked that you agree to, probably by lying that you have read and understood them.  As I mentioned recently, this is a nasty little piece of hypocrisy that nevertheless is forced on anyone who deals with computers or the Internet.  But legally, your rights online are nothing more than the sum total of all the incomprehensible technical gobbledegook of those fine-print agreements, plus any applicable laws of the municipality, county, state, or country you happen to live in.  

And that’s just the stuff you are entitled to know about.  Internet companies sometimes do things with your data that they don’t admit to in their agreements, and the only way we find out about such things is through news reports of data breaches and underhanded dealings.  Such is the fragmented state of online rights today.

Carvallo’s vision is this:  you, the individual user, get to say exactly what your online privacy and other rights are.  If you don’t want anybody sending you ads for stuff you view online, you can say so. If you don’t want companies accumulating data about your eight-year-old daughter when she uses a toy that’s connected to the Internet, you can say so.  And if you’re on social media platforms, you don’t have to figure out each one’s arcane permissions structure individually.  You just state your preferences once for all in a centralized location, and everybody you deal with has to follow the rules you set up.  

Now this notion may not be original to Carvallo.  But it’s the first time I’ve heard of such a concept, and it’s very appealing.  It would also be very hard to implement, but as he spoke in the context of teaching an engineering class, he encouraged the students to think of future technical possibilities, of which this was one.

You could push this even farther, to the extent of being able to say what ads you do and don’t see.  Google has been making a feeble effort in this direction for some time, in that when I close an ad that’s popped up in the middle of some article I’m reading, I will sometimes get a Google Ads option to say whether I never want to see that ad again and why.  But this is only a tiny step in the direction of the comprehensive vision of personal control that an Internet bill of rights would involve.

Of course, the reason most of the Internet is free is because there are ads. And having the privilege of saying no to some or all ads would mean that for you, anyway, the companies would have to find some other way to make money.  And they’re not about to do that, not if the present system works for them. 

Pay-for-viewing websites are a step in this direction.  In my limited experience, they seem mainly to be operated by newspapers and other old-school media who are striving to maintain some vestige of the old subscription model that worked for so many decades for physical newspapers and magazines.  So something like this can work, but only within the context of a single organization. Fixing things so no matter what you looked at, you’d never see ads anywhere on the Internet is presently almost unimaginable, although I suppose somebody could come up with some kind of shell or filter gizmo that might do that.

Which brings us to the technical question of how an Internet bill of rights could be implemented.  My answer is, I have no idea.  But anything that has to work with any website you go to, would have to be built into the very structure of the Internet, and that means global standards and protocols. When strictly technical problems come up, such as running out of IP addresses or something like that, the world’s engineers have figured out a pretty efficient and effective way of forming working groups, hashing out a technical solution, and agreeing on a standard that implements it.  

But this only works for technical matters.  Things that threaten to affect an industry’s bottom line drastically are not suitable for the technical standards-setting mechanism. And an Internet bill of rights such as we’re discussing would be viewed as a threat by most online for-profit entities. 

In that case, we’d have to get into the political, social, and economic aspects of the problem.  And you’re not going to solve those kinds of matters with merely a working group of engineers.  Something like the United Nations or its International Telecommunications Union might have to be involved, but again, they primarily handle technical matters. Because of the international nature of the Internet, an effective implementation of an Internet bill of rights would have to be agreed on worldwide.  And getting the world to agree on something even as simple as what time it is, can be a hard thing to do, let alone a matter affecting the online activities of everybody on earth.

Well, we’ve traveled from one classroom in San Marcos, Texas to the whole Internet in one column.  I don’t think we’re any closer to having an Internet bill of rights than we were when we started. But it’s a nice idea, and I thank Andres Carvallo for bringing it up.  And if you’re optimistic, maybe you think that this won’t be the last time you read about it.

AT&T Considers Data-Only Billing

What if you had to buy gasoline for your car in the same the way you have to buy cell-phone service nowadays?

First, you’d have to pick a gas company.  You’d go in, fill out a form or answer a bunch of questions, and then you’d have to sign an agreement to stick with that gas company for a year, say, or else pay a $200 broken-contract fee.  Once you agreed to that condition, you’d have to pick your gas plan.  Do you want gas just locally, or for long driving trips?  Gas for a sports car, a pickup, a minivan, or a lawn mower?  Want extra quarts of oil every 2,000 miles?  You have to make all these choices in advance, and then you’ll get billed a fixed fee, more or less, every month, at least as long as you don’t use more than your maximum number of gallons—plus eight or ten dollars’ worth of taxes, air-pollution recovery charges, and other government nitnoise that nobody but the lawyers can figure out.  If you go beyond your plan’s maximum amount of gas, though, you’ll end up paying big, maybe six bucks a gallon, for every gallon you go over.  And by the way, you have to buy your car from the gas company too—it won’t run on gas from any other company.

Sound pretty silly?  Yet if you substitute “phone company” for “gas company” it’s a fairly accurate description of how cell phone and related wireless-network services are sold today.

In the interests of full disclosure, I am no longer a fan of AT&T.  My childhood regard for that firm bordered on adulation, bolstered by their support of the legendary Bell Laboratories and reinforced by a positive experience in high school with an Explorer Scout group run by a bunch of telephone engineers.  I stuck with AT&T through the Ma Bell breakup in the 1970s, but parted ways with the firm after going on an extended trip in the summer of 2000 and committing the unforgivable sin of using my cell phone to call home a lot.  Because of this sin, I paid through the nose, several hundred dollars at least, and switched to Sprint as fast as I could after I got home.

Now that AT&T has more or less reassembled itself out of the sundry pieces that the courts chopped it into, its clout in the market makes it worthwhile to pay attention when its CEO, Randall Stephenson, speculates about future pricing structures.  On June 1, Stephenson said that “in the next 24 months” we may see phone companies selling phone, data, text, and other services on a “data-only” basis.  While he wasn’t too specific about the technical details, this probably means something like charges based on the number of bits transferred, rather than on other arbitrary things like number of text messages sent or number of minutes talked.

The arcane and ridiculous way that companies currently charge for phone and wireless services came about through a combination of historical circumstances, marketing ploys, and government regulation.  Back when there was nothing but POTS (plain old telephone service, on landlines), the big expense to the phone companies was their long-distance networks, once they had installed local plant and equipment.  So the custom of a flat rate for local calls plus per-connection fees for long distance arose, and at the time it made sense.

Then came multiple revolutions in telecommunications technology:  fiber-optic cables and digital transmission (which vastly lowered the unit cost of long-distance calls) and wireless, which increased the volume of data sent and added new varieties such as text and images to the mix.

Technically speaking, it is more challenging to carry the data representing a two-way phone conversation than it is a one-way text message.  The allowable network delay can’t be more than a fraction of a second, and there are difficulties with sidetone (hearing your own voice), echoes, and other things that increase the cost compared to simply sending some bits from one point to another.  Yet my current cell phone plan lets me talk as much as I like locally, but charges me 20 cents for every text message I send, even if it’s simply “OK.”  If you send “OK” via ASCII, a seven-bit-per-character code, that’s a total of 14 bits, or more than a penny a bit.  If I paid that much for a typical phone call, it would run into thousands of dollars.

A sensible billing system from a technical point of view would charge nearly nothing for actions that use nearly no bits, namely, things like texting and email.  Two-way voice would come next, then still pictures, then movies.  The network companies have to structure their pricing so that customers use enough bandwidth to keep them in business, but not so much that their network bottlenecks (e. g. cell-phone tower equipment) gets clogged and spoils the party for everybody.

As things stand, I suspect it’s kind of like a cartel.  Everybody is getting away with the inverted structure of charging more for texts (which use few bits) than for phone calls (which use more and are inconvenient network-wise).  But as soon as some upstart outfit gets out there with a data-only billing plan, the whole house of cards collapses and the consumer wins, in my view.  My guess is that the AT&T head’s announcement is a way of telling the market that they are prepared for the deluge if it comes, though how they are going to deal with it is not yet clear.

All the same, I look forward to the day when cell-phone pricing is a little more rational.  I don’t think it will ever be as simple as filling your gas tank, but the way things stand now, it’s like medical-insurance billing and tax forms:  it takes an expert to catch another expert who’s cheating, and the average citizen doesn’t stand a chance against a company that decides to bend the rules, or to create Byzantine price structures that are legal but so complex nobody can really know if they are getting a good deal or not.  Let’s hope Mr. Stephenson’s prophecy comes true, and maybe I’ll even consider going back to AT&T.

Sources:  The Austin American-Statesman print edition carried an AP article by Peter Svensson with the headline “Data-only plans may be near, exec says” on Saturday June 2, 2012.