EBU • UER - Technical Review

No. 285 (December 2000)

Internet geography?

The Internet is often portrayed as being beyond the rule of existing laws: the concept of copyright is widely ignored, piracy is the norm, national taxes cannot readily be imposed on Internet transactions – and content regulation seems impossible. Some people are worried that governments are powerless to control the Internet, but others feel that this is "good news"!

Remembering that ARPANET, the military forerunner of the Internet, was designed to operate as a self-healing distributed network in the hope that it might survive a nuclear war, it is not surprising that today’s Internet is difficult to control. In 1997, Nicholas Negroponte boasted that the Internet would destroy national governments because it was unaware of national boundaries. Few would share this extreme view, but many believe that the global nature of the Internet will limit the influence of national governments.

The global nature of the Internet also challenges many existing business practices. For example, TV broadcasters operate predominantly in national markets, rather than in a global market. Most broadcasters would welcome their services being made available throughout the world, but how many of them would also welcome fragmentation of their audiences due to the increased competition?

The Internet is not yet able to deliver reasonable quality video across the world, but that has not stopped many broadcasters from experimenting with Internet delivery. Apart from the problems of congestion and the cost of such services, broadcasters have to ensure that they have the right to transmit their programmes on the Internet. As Hollywood typically offers the broadcasting rights to individual movies on a national basis, they would not welcome broadcasters using the Internet to distribute their programmes on a global basis. Hence, broadcasters generally restrict the use of the Internet to selected programmes, such as news broadcasts, rather than their complete broadcast schedule. Some radio broadcasters are obliged to discontinue their streaming audio services via the Internet when they are transmitting commentaries on national sporting events, such as football.

During the Sydney 2000 Olympics, the International Olympics Committee was very concerned that broadcasters would broadcast the Olympics via the Internet, thus potentially upsetting other broadcasters who had paid large amounts of money for the TV rights on a national basis. The IOC warned broadcasters that they did not have the right to transmit TV coverage of the Olympics via the Internet, even for the short items included in TV news programmes. Consequently, EBU Members had to black out portions of news broadcasts when they were being delivered via the Internet. To ensure that there were no breaches of the IOC’s rules, the IOC arranged for comprehensive monitoring of broadcasters’ web sites during the Olympics.

It is arguable whether such restrictions were appropriate or even necessary. At present, the quality of video delivered via the Internet is very poor, especially for coverage of fast-moving sports. It is unthinkable that sports enthusiasts would abandon their TV sets in favour of jerky and fuzzy images from the Internet. Furthermore, most streaming servers can deliver no more than 1,000 simultaneous streams – in other words, the maximum audience is 1,000 people. One EBU Member now has a server that can deliver 10,000 simultaneous streams, but this is expensive not only in terms of hardware – but also in terms of the bandwidth required between the broadcaster and the Internet. An audience of 10,000 via the Internet is clearly trivial in comparison with the audience likely to view the Olympics via traditional TV services. Despite the hype about the Internet, it is becoming obvious that, until the Internet can offer reasonable quality video, Internet "rights" have limited value.

The biggest problem facing rights owners and broadcasters is that material delivered via the Internet is available throughout the world. One example occurred earlier this year, when an Internet service called ICraveTV became the subject of legal battles in North America. This operation, which was based in Canada, operated on the principle of receiving off-air TV broadcasts (including services from the USA) and making them available on the Internet. Although this act was very similar to that performed by cable TV operators, the crucial difference was that the TV signals could be viewed around the world. ICraveTV did make an attempt to limit the geographical spread of its Internet service by asking users to provide their local telephone area code – and rejecting those who were not near Toronto. Of course, it did not take much intelligence to realize that, even if you lived in Europe, you could enter the area code "416" (corresponding to Toronto) and, hence, watch many TV services from the USA and Canada. Broadcasters from the USA eventually won their legal argument that ICraveTV was breaching their copyright, and the service has subsequently been closed down.

It is commonly believed that there is no way to prevent trans-national delivery – or is there? The term "cyberspace" suggests that the Internet exists in a "virtual" environment, but engineers know that the Internet is a physical network of communications links and routers. Internet routers examine the address labels of data packets and then send them to other routers on the path to their final destination. The locations of the routers can be easily revealed by TraceRoute software, as indicated below:

Could such techniques be used to prevent cross-border delivery? Imagine that a broadcaster’s web server receives a request for a streaming video service that the broadcaster does not have the right to transmit to other countries. The example of ICraveTV demonstrates that you cannot rely on people’s honesty in such circumstances.

Before delivering the service via the Internet, the web server could check, using TraceRoute software, that none of the routers on the path to the destination are outside the country. If they are, the request will be denied and the IP address of the potential client would be added to a "blacklist" of destinations that cannot be served. However, the most direct route may not be used in practice: for example, a user in Geneva might request material from a server in Zurich, but the actual route might not be entirely within Switzerland. In addition, as the routeing of data packets is dynamic, different routes may be used for consecutive packets depending on the degree of congestion on different parts of the network. Hence, there could be circumstances when legitimate requests will be denied because intermediate routers are outside the permitted country. One solution could be to check the location of the nearest router to the destination: if it were within the permitted country, the service would be provided even if the route passed through "foreign" routers.

There are several alternatives to the use of TraceRoute software, but this example suggests that there are viable techniques that can limit the geographic spread of information via the Internet.

Perhaps, by the Olympics in 2004, it will not be necessary to forbid the use of the Internet for such events!

Philip Laven
Director
EBU Technical Department