Jasper Sluijs Website and Blog

Guest Lecture at Northwestern

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 18:21:42 -0600

Just now I finished a guest lecture in Pierre Larouche's Comparative Antitrust Law seminar at Northwestern Law School in Chicago. My presentation concerned a case study on the proposed Comcast-NBC merger, slides can be found here:

I enjoyed presenting on this contentious subject matter, before a critical and diverse group of students. Besides, it's been a lot of fun visiting Northwestern and meeting with faculty here. Had a good conversation with Peter DiCola this morning, and will meet with Jim Speta and Shane Greenstein tomorrow.

After a few weeks of California sun it took me some time to adjust to the snow in Chicago—but that's neither here nor there.

Another Day, Another Blog

Thu, 7 Jan 2010 04:23:51 -0600

I was asked by Chris Marsden to join his blog, Net Neutrality in Europe. I am happy and honored to contribute to this blog, as it allows me to engage with a larger audience and pitch my research there. My first two posts are already up.

I will cross-post some stuff, but most telecoms related work will be on Chris’ blog exclusively from now on. Keep following this blog for announcements and such, it will still be my personal hub.

Signing a Blank Check

Tue, 8 Dec 2009 11:31:29 -0600

My blogging activities of the last few months have been few. In micro blogging I've a much more immediate way of sharing thoughts online, see the tweet stream on this site (and follow me!) However, some stuff is just too good not to blog about at greater length:

We've been having issues with our current broadband provider ever since we singed a contract with them, so I'm looking for alternative suppliers now that the contract is about to expire. Cable is outpacing DSL speeds these days, plus I don't want a bundled package with a fixed phone plan that I won't use. Only cable offers TV-Internet packages around here, so that leaves me no choice. So cable it is. I was about to sign their contract, but wanted to go through the terms and conditions first. As I've written before, this particular cable company has a history of unreasonable degrading of Internet traffic.

Section 31.2 of these terms (in Dutch) states that besides these standard terms, there are also additional codes of conduct for usage of broadband services, available online. However, on first sight these additional terms were nowhere to be found on upc.nl. So I called customer service, and spoke to two people who also couldn't find anything in their records.

The lady I last spoke with promised to get back to me, and eventually told me that the supposed CoC consisted of rules-of-thumb about 'responsible' Internet usage that ‘anyone’ would agree with.

Sure, but as long as those are not in print, I'm not signing anything. I'd be signing the equivalent of a blank check for UPC to put whatever the hell they want in their CoC, and then keep me to it. The service desk lady agreed that this wasn't cool, and on the phone we together (!) drafted an email to send to her superiors urging them to take action.

We'll see what happens. My initial customer service experience was positive though :)

Work in Progress, Work in Schmogress

Wed, 4 Nov 2009 06:20:44 -0600

For today I was asked to do a work-in-progress presentation for my colleagues at TILEC, to show what I've been up to the last couple of months. For one, what I presented was not so much work-in-progress, as the paper I presented has already been accepted for publication and will be released in December. Ah well.

Presenting before a bunch of critical economists is a great exercise, it forced me out of the comfy confines of legalese. Many helpful comments and suggestions came up, for which I am grateful! Download the slides below:

Panel presentation at BBWF

Wed, 9 Sep 2009 09:03:53 -0500

I was in Paris on Monday to present at the European edition of Broadband World Forum, hosted by the International Engineering Consortium. I sat on a panel on Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), a monitoring technology that enables very close inspection of Internet traffic.

DPI holds promise in fighting spam and malware, but there is legitimate concern for privacy violations. The panel discussion at BBWF was organized to address these controversies. Most panelists were DPI developers, one Internet service provider was present, and I was the only academic. Of course my talk was most critical, judge for yourself below:

I was impressed by Klaus Mochalski's presentation, who is the CEO of European DPI developer ipoque. His approach to the controversies surrounding DPI was exactly in line with what I argued for in my talk: more transparency. Ipoque even made the bold move to release an open-source version of their software, and release a position paper on the controversial aspects of DPI and net neutrality. I'm curious to see if other DPI vendors will follow suit.