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But to me, it's no different than the National Post covering half the
front page of my newspaper with a sticky note or house ad of some kind
to remind me of something, or the TV network I'm watching delaying the
program for a second or two in order to show me a programming notice.
I'm not really troubled by it. It's no worse than a pop-up or
interstitial ad, and everyone is pretty used to those.
You cannot make analogies from traditional media. As a matter of fact, it's that type of thinking that gets people into trouble on a continuous basis (including the intro of pop up ads that should be banned whether we are used to them or not - bad for connecting brands to consumers IMHO)
and ps. I was not up in arms. Truth be told, I rolled my eyes. (and for future reference - privacy issues - upping arms - companies being idiots to their customer base to save money in the short term, rolling eyes)
just liked the sound of it :-)
I think it is important because it's the first time we're seeing this type of behaviour. If everyone just accepts it and goes along with it, who knows what they may want to do next? It may be a doorway to widespread acceptance. If there is an outcry right off the bat, then it will be a lot tougher to make any inroads.
Cheers,
Aidan
www.MappingTheWeb.com
with the content itself or replacing it with their own then I would
agree. But they aren't, not any more than CBS or ABC messes with the
content when they put an informational crawl of text along the bottom
of Studio 60 to tell me what's coming next, or when they pop their
logo up in the middle of a show.
This example is factually innocuous and there is a global opt-out, so it's easy to not get too fussed on the facts. But Rogers and other ISPs are progressively testing the outrage boundaries to see what they can get away with. Sooner or later, the principle will really matter, both as principle, and on the facts.
town square with a pitchfork and a torch just like everyone else. But
for now, I don't see what the big deal is -- the network provider is
sending a message to me about something important to do with my
account, in a way they know I will see. It doesn't change or replace
or modify the content in any important way.
I've never seen this one, because setting them up as a proxy is way slower than using the net directly.
I've never seen such a thing (although I probably haven't come
anywhere near my bandwidth limit before).
Network neutrality means not using one's control of the pipe to disadvantage competitive content or service providers. For example, if you're a cable company that offers VoIP, network neutrality means not blocking customers' use of other VoIP providers.
Network neutrality does NOT mean that a provider can't "frame" pages (as do many providers -- especially those like Juno which provide inexpensive or free service) or send them informative messages via their browser.
Let's step back and take a dispassionate look at what Rogers is really doing here. They need to get a message to a customer. Like any experienced ISP, they know that there's a good chance that e-mail won't be read in a timely way, if at all. (We, as an ISP, find that our customers constantly change their addresses -- often after revealing them online and exposing them to spammers -- without any notice, and often let the mailboxes that we give them fill up, unread, until they exceed their quotas and no more can be received.) The Windows Message Service once worked to send users messages, but only ran on Windows and is now routinely blocked because it's become an avenue for pop-up spam. Snail mail? Expensive and slow... and the whole point of the Internet is to do things faster and more efficiently than that. Give users an special program to display messages from the ISP? Users have too many things running in the background, cluttering their computers, already -- so no one could blame them if they didn't install it. (Also, many users won't install an application for fear of viruses, and alternative operating systems likely would not run the software.) Display a different page than the user requested? Perhaps, but that certainly comes much closer to "hijacking" than what Rogers is doing. Display a message in the user's browser window (where we know he or she is looking) along with the Web page, and let the user "dismiss" it as soon as it's noticed? Excellent idea. A wonderful, simple, unobtrusive, and (IMHO) elegant solution to the problem.
Now comes Lauren Weinstein -- known for drawing attention to himself by sensationalizing tempests in a teapot -- who has never run an ISP but seems to like to dictate what they do. Lauren claims that the sky will fall if ISPs use this nearly ideal way of communicating with their customers.
Contrary to the claims of Mr. Weinstein's "network neutrality squad" (who have expanded the definition of "network neutrality" to mean "ISPs not doing anything which we, as unappointed regulators, do not approve"), this means of communication does not violate copyrights. Why? First of all, the message from the ISP appears entirely above, and separate from, the content of the page in the browser window. It's not much different that displaying it in a different pane (which, by the way, the browser might also be able to do -- but this is better because it's less obtrusive and unlikely to fail for the lack of Javascript or distort the page below). The display can't be considered a derivative work, because no human is adding his own creative expression to someone else's creation. A machine -- which can't create copyrighted works or derivative ones -- is simply putting a message above the page in the same browser window.
It isn't defacement, because the original page appears exactly as it was intended -- just farther down in the window. And it isn't "hijacking," because the user is still getting the page he or she requested.
What's more, there's no way that it can be said to be "non-neutral." The proxy which inserts the message into the window doesn't know or care what content lies below. The screen capture in Weinstein's blog showed Google, but it just as easily could have been Yahoo!, or Myspace, or Slashdot. For the same reason, it can't be said to be an invasion of privacy, because the software isn't looking at the content of the page above which it is inserting the message.
In short, to complain that this practice is somehow injurious to the author of the original page is akin to an author complaining that his book has been injured by being displayed in a shop window along with another book by someone he didn't like. (Sorry, sir, but the merchant is allowed to do that.)
Nor is what Rogers is doing a violation of an ISP's "common carrier" obligations (even if they were considered to be common carriers, which under US law, at any rate, they are not). Common carriers have been injecting notices into communications streams since time immemorial ("Please deposit 50 cents for the next 3 minutes"). And television stations have been superimposing images on program content at least since the early 1960s, when (I'm dating myself here) Sandy Becker's "Max the burglar" dashed across the screen during kids' cartoon shows and the first caller to report his presence won a prize. (The game was called "Catch Max.") And in the US, Federal law -- in particular, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act -- protects ISPs from liability for content they retransmit whether or not they are considered to be common carriers.
There are sure to be some folks -- perhaps people who are frustrated with their ISPs for other reasons -- who will take this as an opportunity to lash out at ISPs. But most customers, I think, will recognize this as a good and sensible way for a company to contact its customers. Our small ISP is looking into it. In fact, because the issue is being raised, we're adding authorization to do it to our Terms of Service, so that users will be put on notice that they might receive a message through their browsers one day. I suppose it's possible that a customer might dislike this mode of communication and go elsewhere, but I suspect that most of them will appreciate it. In the meantime, let's just say "no" to regulation of the Internet.