Having declared victory over DNS (Domain Name System) for my sipXecs project, I vaguely recall that a Supreme Court justice wrote extensively about DNS in a significant decision on the proper classification of cable modem.
It’s coming back to me now. Wasn’t it Justice Clarence Thomas, the eminent IT administrator, who specifically referred to this IP address lookup utility in the infamous Brand X decision as a way to prove that cable companies are really information service providers?
In affirming the FCC’s 2002 order declaring cable an information service, Thomas noted in Brand X that every Web request uses DNS to resolve URLs to IP addresses. There’s even a footnote to an O’Reilly DNS book (Albitiz & Liu)! So far so good.
Then he loses me. Thomas argues that DNS is a information function so tied in with the cable transmission part —read layers 1 and 2 of DOCSIS—and because of the well known principle of data contamination or “cooties”, cable transmission is therefore an information service.
To quote Thomas: “… whether the transmission component of cable modem service is sufficiently integrated with the finished service to make it reasonable to describe the two as a single, integrated offering. We think that they are sufficiently integrated.”
So there I was last week using the information component provided by zoneedit, the DNS provider, with the telecommunications component offered by Comcast to achieve my VoIP phone connection.
Clearly impossible, according to the lawyers, but I somehow managed to do it.
Related articles
- Afternoons With sipXecs (technoverseblog.com)
- Brand X and Information Cooties (tchnoverseblog.com)
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