My Experience of Internet Services in Brazil: Conclusion

I now realise that I must get my head round the notion that it is now impossible in Brazil for me to buy a basic Internet access service at a price that is affordable to everybody. Such a thing is simply not available. This must be extremely detrimental to national development, especially in rural areas.

The only way I can obtain Internet access in Brazil is to buy an "Internet Plan", which provides Internet access plus a whole truck load of other products and ser­vices that are absolutely useless to me. That's the way it's done and I must learn to like it or lump it. So I will end up paying a monthly fee that is at least double the value of what I will actually be able to use. And there is no way around it.

This is simply disgraceful, despicable corporate exploitation. It is corporate bullying of the individual consumer. The service providers are effectively saying:

"We have a monopoly on access to the Internet. In today's society, there will be serious legal and financial consequences for you if you do not have access to the Internet. But we will not provide you with Internet access unless you spend as much again on products you do not want, and which, in some cases, you have no means of using. Further­more, though our country be a signatory to it, we will not follow any of the recom­mend­ations of the Suggested Practices of the Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group that we do not wish to follow, irrespective of any decree from any organ of the government."

The effect of this attitude is compounded further by the freedom these telecom cor­porations have to commit, with impunity, crimes of extortion upon the individual consumer. A young relative of mine worked for one of these giant telecom corpora­tions. She had the job of training their telephonists. She had to instruct them never to action a cancellation of service except in three situations: 1) death of the customer, 2) the customer emigrates from Brazil, 3) the customer be a person of influence. In all other cases the service will continue and be charged for. If the customer does not pay, his name will be placed on the Serasa-Experian national bad debtor's website, which will cause him to become financially dysfunctional with the inability to obtain credit or conduct normal business. This is pure unmitigated extortion, which would, in many other countries, carry a prison sentence for the company directors, plus a large award in damages to the affected customer for tort of defamation.

All this is an incontrovertible witness to the stark reality that the provision of tele­communications services to the citizen should never be entrusted to private hands. This is not a political admonition: it is a purely systemic one. The problem is not one of technology: it is a problem of bureaucracy.

Those who cannot acquire or maintain access to new technology become unable to participate in the mandatory processes of the society in which they live. The Inter­net has, in this way, become a vital element of public infrastructure to the extent that anybody without access to it can no longer function adequately within society in order to meet their legal and financial obligations or to obtain and maintain their fundamental rights. All must have the inalienable right to the necessary and suffici­ent means and facilities to participate in the basic functions of the socio-economic system under which they must live.

With regard to one of these necessary and sufficient means, namely, the Internet, the private corporations of the telecommunications services industry, like a malig­nant cartel, have effectively seized unelected sovereign control over this vital ele­ment of public infrastructure. They have unilaterally decided that subscribers' list­en­ing ports shall be closed. The subscriber has no choice. To them, customers are mere cannon fodder in a great economic war fought solely for the purpose of en­riching their preci­ous shareholders.

One should not be surprised at the way these giant ISP corporations behave. After all, they are corporations. As Lord Thurlow (1783-1792) said, "Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned; they therefore do as they like." Lord Thurlow's words are often paraphrased as "Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned, and no body to be kicked?" In his day, however, corporations could only come into existence by Royal Charter and had the nature of national or ostensibly public entities. How much more extreme is their nature since the private limited liability entity (pessoa juríd­ica) came into being during the mid Nineteenth Century.

I remember once seeing an excellent film called The Corporation. Somewhere in this long film was presented a step-by-step list of behaviour traits, which limited liability corporations are required — by the very law under which they are formed — to behave in their dealings with customers. The film later revealed that this list of be­haviour traits is the clinical definition of a psychopath. For this reason, I see the placing of such a vital element of public infrastructure into the greedy hands of profit-driven private corporations as a supreme act of unmitigated irresponsibility.

I see the blocking of listening ports as the amputation of a basic and expected Inter­net function. The practice effectively prohibits all direct peer-to-peer communi­ca­tion, including the running of a POP and SMTP server within one's own computer. [This latter is becoming more and more essential with the increasing arbitrary blocking of emails and email attachments by Microsoft and Google.] The blocking of listening ports is, in effect, a total and permanent Denial Of Service (DOS) attack perpetrated by the ISP upon the subscriber.

If the ISP is concerned about the amount of data traffic my servers would create, then it is an easy matter to use throttle-back and monthly data transfer quotas to control the amount of traffic. ISPs do this anyway. Consequently, I can see no good technical reason to implement port blocking, especially the total blocking of all un­solicited incoming IP packets. Blocking the listening ports to my (very low traffic) servers is an infraction of the Suggested Practices of the Broadband Internet Techn­ical Advisory Group. It is also an unjustifiable infraction of my individual liberty — a liberty I have enjoyed for almost 20 years of using the Internet until this present sit­uation arose.

Looking back to the years I had the W@y Internet open-port service, I remember being somewhat puzzled by something. Whenever I looked at the list of connected peers on the various networks, I saw peers from many many countries all over the world, including small and little known ones. But I only ever remember seeing one from Brazil. And that was only on the eDonkey network. I never saw any Brazilians on the gnutella or G2 networks. Why this distinctly disproportionate absence of peers from a country of over 200 million people? Could it be because, in Brazil, practically all Internet access has closed listening ports? The situation would tend to suggest this.

I can only speculate as to ISPs' motives for this Denial of Service. Perhaps they are being pressured by the film and media corporations to shut a means by which music and films are known to be copied and distributed illicitly. Perhaps they are suffering pressure from law enforcement agencies to close a possible means of distributing pornography and paedophilia. But these are obviously scape-goat ex­cuses. Neither is a just or valid reason for closing these means to everybody.

The original purpose of the Internet was to facilitate the free and unencumbered exchange of information and knowledge between any and all. Perhaps this is the problem. Perhaps the real reason for port blocking is that ISPs are suffering inter­national political pressure to close all means through which ordinary people may exchange information and ideas point-to-point, unsurveilled by the clandestine agencies of foreign powers. Perhaps somebody considers person-to-person intellec­tual exchange to be a real and present threat to the status quo. I don't know. What­ever the motives, I feel that right now I am witnessing the on-set of a new Dark Age of Closing Doors with regard to freedom of communication in Brazil. Or is it the whole world?

Despite my continued pressure, those who represent Oi to me continue to claim total ignorance as to the nature of my problem. They — Internet professionals — seem not even to understand what ports are or what is meant by closed ports. This seems very strange. They seem to be under some kind of oath of silence regarding closed ports. Is the ISP being pressured or paid for its silence? Are ISPs receiving hefty back­handers from the American Thought Police (ATP) to keep listening ports closed in order to force all person-to-person exchanges through giant American-owned servers, where everything can be monitored and recorded?

The apparent "inability" of Anatel — the Brazilian Government's Communications Reg­ulator — to enforce the suggested practices of the Broadband Internet Technical Ad­visory Group upon the ISP suggests something more Draconian. Perhaps the ATP are pressuring the US government to pressure all governments to mandate that ISPs close all listening ports on domestic Internet accounts, thus closing the doors to low-traffic servers, thereby plugging all the little holes and gaps where truth may leak out.

Whatever the reasons, it would seem that full-function access to the Internet is no longer available in Brazil, at least for domestic subscribers like myself. I don't know about accounts for government and heavy commercial use. In other words, Internet services in Brazil are not continuously scalable. It is not merely speed (which con­sumes bandwidth) that is limited on small accounts but also functionality (which does not). Thus, it would seem that my W@y Internet account must have been a hang-over from the old days of an open fully-functional Internet, which fortuitously contin­ued unnoticed until the recent change-over.

It would seem, therefore, that small-account Internet users (the people) are meant only to listen: not to speak. They are meant only to buy products from Internet shops and partake in trivial exchanges via social media sites (where they can be mon­itored). Only government, celebrity and corporation may speak and be heard. This is a serious question for individual liberty. It is also a serious consideration for inward investment and expeditionary business projects, which must frequently start small from one or more home-based offices.

I think that, for the purpose of private person-to-person telecommunications, the time has come to consider alternatives to the Internet.

© August 2015 to January 2020 Robert John Morton

[1] I was not the ISP's actual customer, that was somebody else, who subscribed to the service on my behalf. However, throughout this essay, for clarity of prose, the first person singular has been used to indicate either or both of us. The other per­son has no knowledge, involvement or responsibility regarding any of the content of this monograph essay.

[2] Within this essay, an open port is a TCP or UDP port number that is configured to accept unsolicited incoming IP packets. An open port in this sense is also known as a listening port.