NebuAd Grilled on the Hill Again - Page 2

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Customer trust

Then there is the greater issue of consumer trust. David Reed, engineering professor at M.I.T. and one of the early architects of the Internet packet-exchange technology, encouraged the representatives to think of the Internet as a shipping service. A technology such as NebuAd's, Reed suggested, is the equivalent to a carrier opening the package and looking at its contents before delivering it.

"DPI technologies are not at all necessary to operating the Internet," Reed claimed, arguing that "they violate long-agreed standards of Internet principle and design," and "pose major risks to the economic success of the Internet as a whole."

The shipping analogy resonated with many of the representative who took up Markey's part in grilling Dykes about NebuAd. But Dykes maintained that with the Internet moving to an increasingly free, ad-supported model, his technology was helping support some of the companies that constitute the backbone of the network -- the ISPs.

NebuAd pays its ISP partners a fee to collect Web traffic from their subscribers, which it then automatically translates into consumer categories such as travel or automotive, using that information to serve relevant ads.

According to NebuAd, its filtering system automatically discards information that falls outside of those categories, so it never sees queries for sensitive topics such as health or finance.

"The end result is simply our noting that an anonymous profile qualifies for certain innocuous categories," Dykes said.

Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., asked if they were expected to take him at his word. Dykes said that NebuAd was planning to hire an accounting firm to audit his company's system but would not name the firm because he said a final decision had not been made.

Markey shot back that he hoped Dykes would find one of the firms not connected with Enron or the subprime mortgage scandal or any of the other fiascos of the past seven years, where slipshod accounting helped concealed some very ugly truths.

"In most cases the accounting firms miss the stuff that the industry wants them to miss -- because they also have consulting contracts."