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Business Wants a New, Profitable Internet
An Anonymous Coward writes: "The collapse of "dot com" promises and continuing frustration at the inability of business to harness the Internet for a profit has resulted in calls to modify the basic structure of the Internet itself so it will "obey basic economic laws". See this article in the LA Times. Time to drum out the "hippie anarchists" and put some real business sense into this mess! Or, if you can't adapt your business plan to the Internet, then change the Internet to facilitate you business plan." If you haven't read Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, now would be a good time.
When will they learn their primary goal is to entertain us and share information (for free), not make a profit? And why can't they see the value in pouring their money in with no expectation of a return on investment, either directly or through their tax dollars? Their silly corporate philosophies cannot stand up to my well developed sense of entitlement.
With CISCO now beginning to implement IPv6, which will support differentiating levels of priority based on a priority number placed in the individual packet headers. Corporations may see this as a much more "managed way" to control the Internet, however to their chagrin it will only serve to open a massive hole in Network security. Just think what a DoS attack would do when the offending packets would be processed through the router at a higher level of priority than "legitimate" traffic. I can't neglect to mention the fun that can be had with Ipv6 packets with a maximum size of one gigabyte...
It means that anyone who bothers to choose anything or not choose anything decides, sorry.
It has nothing to do with the common man or class at all..
True, whatever "common man" means. "Class" is an ultimately meaningless concept, as is "race". Sure, people will kill others by the millions for race or class wars, but neither matters.
The free market follows the $$$'s plain and simple.
Actually, it follows the will of the people, $$$ or no $$$. Bad ideas that give someone great profit will fail if they are bad.
There is NO CONCEPT of loyalty or commitment, JUST PROFIT, cold hard cash.
Yes, under a free market system, there is no loyalty like that of the soldier goose-stepping for Stalin. The people themselves each choose what to be loyal to or to commit to. However, "profit" is just one part of everything. A true free market is mean and cold, using you until you have NO MORE then discarding you.
Mean and cold, kind and warm. It is what you put into it. If you are discarded, it is by your choice.
What does it gain the ISP? It reduces the value of coveted IP addresses in short supply, making them nearly worthless. Plus, with everyone having static IPs, people might want to run servers with apache, DNS hosting and other things that directly compete with the ISP. Can't have that.
But don't you find it ironic that you probably wouldn't have been able to make this post without those hippie anarchists?
It has come to the authors' attention that more and more Field Spotters are confusing Soldiers, (Homo sapiens belligerantus), with Hippies (Homo sapiens deadheadius). This is somewhat understandable, given the increasing rarity of both species. Despite some superficial similarities, however, each species is quite distinct, and we offer the following tips on distinguishing the two:
Appearance: Both species have multicolored coats, but the coloration serves very different purposes. The soldier's coat is quite subdued, one might say camouflaged. As soldiers are quite aggresive, when in the underbrush they prefer to remain unseen by other soldiers. Although soldiers may appear to look alike, closer inspection will reveal distinguishing marks which indicate their status within the group hierarchy (see Social Behavior, below). In contrast, hippies possess bright coloration -- due to their highly nomadic nature and lack of social organization, coloration serves as a useful tool for hippies to identify other hippies and aids in the gathering of hippie groups.
Olfactory: If in close proximity to the specimens, note their odor. The odor of a hippie will be quite pungent, often accentuated by the frequent burning of plant material, whose smoke they often inhale. Soldiers, particularly when near their living area (barracks), are fastidious groomers and will usually carry no strong smells. The exception is when a group of soldiers spend an extended amount of time foraging in the woods. After several days away from the barracks, soldiers will also develop a strong odor. Unlike hippies, this is usually temporary.
Vocalizations: The vocalizations of both species are usually indecipherable to outsiders, and are often confused due to the sharing of some calls (e.g., "bombed", "wasted", "blunted") which though phonetically identical, carry different meanings. The only clues to differentiating the species lie in delivery -- the soldier delivery will be in short, clipped tones, while the hippie delivery will be slower and often slurred. For some as yet unknown reason, during the nocturnal periods of Fridays and Saturdays, the soldier delivery will sound nearly identical to the hippie one.
Use of Tools/Implements: Both species use tools/implements, though again for different purposes. Soldiers will often use devices they call "rifles" to ward off other soldiers while hippies will use devices they call "bongs" in what appear to be a ceremonial fashion. Despite the different uses, each group often fetishizes their respective devices by giving them names and meticulously maintaining them.
Social Behavior: The experienced Field Spotter knows that social behavior is the surest way to distinguish the soldier from the hippie. Soldiers are highly territorial, and possess a strict group hierarchy. They rarely stray far from their barracks, and will construct extensive fortifications around the barracks area to ward off invaders. Soldiers show little interest in venturing onto native hippie habitats. On the other hand, hippies are highly nomadic, and sometimes even stray onto soldier habitats. If a group of hippies ventures too near the barracks, the lucky Field Spotter may get to see the soldiers stream forth to repel the intruders. The sight of a group of hippies being set upon by a group of soldiers is one of nature's grand spectacles, and not to be missed. If there is not enough time to observe their long-term movements, soldiers and hippies can often be distinguished by observing their group interaction. Though they may have long periods of inactivity, when they are active soldiers will seem more purposeful and organized. By contrast hippie groups will be seen to simply mill about. On the off chance a group of soldiers is simply milling about, it has been observed that those soldiers in the middle of the group hierarchy will become agitated, and employ loud vocalizations (e.g., "worthless maggots", "goddam mongolian clusterfuck", etc.) in an attempt to reorganize the group. Interestingly enough, during these periods, the highest in the group hierarchy simply drink coffee.
We hope these tips will help you differentiate these two fascinating and rare species, and enhance your field spotting experience.
Not only that, but I don't think DARPA would take too kindly to being called "a bunch of hippie anarchists."
I fully agree.
Especially since there are no "economic laws". Hell, there aren't even real laws of physics, so how could there be economic laws?!
According to this guy, the Department of Defense which built the Internet in the 1960s is the same as "hippie anarchists". This puts the whole vietnam war debate in a whole new perspective: both sides were the same!
somebody wants an SLA which guarantees a certain QoS to certain customers? well that's possible too, and for large networks it's not even particularly unusual.
this is an article which changes nothing, except that it makes Bud Michels, and by association CSP look extremely stupid, or desperate. I'm not sure which.
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... and even if there were, the problem with a medium that doesn't understand borders is that the economic laws of switzerland are probably quite different from those of Canada. Or Peru. Or [insert country here].
So they'd have to make the internet obey the laws of borders, which makes it about as useful as the postal service for things. Assuming they could do that, you'd still have to do things like let some packets go from anywhere to anywhere.... how long until someone hacks this to piggyback email in those packets?
Personally this scares the crap out of me. Can you imagine sending an email to friend@peru.com and getting a popup saying "This email crosses 4 borders and is subject to peruvian import, and will cost you $1.23, send? [y/n]". Or surfing to support.asus.tw and getting "this site is xxx miles away and will cost you $1.00/link clicked, $.50/m access and a $4.00 first access charge [y/n]"
I'm glad that this will (probably) never happen. Guess it depends on how powerful business is (oh, and all the people who aren't businesspeople and need the internet? well, we won't worry about them will we.....)
The Internet complies with basic economic laws quite nicely, as it happens. The problem that certain people are bleating about is that they do't like the way economics are giving them a spanking. One example of this provided in the article was people whining that in order to get hihgly reliable delivery, they have to build and operate their own internal networks, and that it's too expensive. In other words, what's being complained about it that the network you pay for (with your access fees) doesn't act enough like an ultra-reliable private network for free.
Ta-da! You get what you pay for. If you want a T1 pipe to every consumer, you can either share a network and amortise the cost across all the users (making it cheap, but also with no preferential treatment), or you can buy everyone a T1 to view your content.
This is an attempt to create a broadcast style economy, where largely artificial scarcity is enforced for the benefit of a handful of companies; think broadcast TV or radio. A one-way relationship rigged to exclude small players so as to exclude economic norms like free market competition.
It's the analogue of businesses that like a free market for employees when they can drive down wages for assembly line workers, and then squeal like stuck pigs when it allows scarce network engineers to charge like senior executives...
Anyone interested in this should go read Where Wizards Stay Up Late - an excellent read on the origins of the Intenet.
One of Cringley's documentary series also had a chunk on historical 'net stuff. Triumph of the Nerds (or similar) was the name of that.
...j
If you want an economist to pay attention to you, use the terms positive and normative instead of descriptive and prescriptive, respectively.
From the Times article: Failure? Just who is defining success and failure in this context?
Far from the anti-Establishment attitude this guy alleges, the crafters of the 'net were not in the least antagonistic to commercial use - once the system was ready for it. What this commentator seems to find unpleasant is that the 'net's structure isn't specifically oriented toward his and his clients' wishes. The egalitarian nature of the 'net that flows inherently from its application-independent, decentralized design must frustrate those who'd like to centralize control under agencies that could ultimately make access to, and therefore the usefulness of, the 'net a function of what one can pay for it.
From A Brief History of the Internet, Cerf, Kahn, Postel et. al.:
Anti-business hippie-pinkos? Hardly.The Internet is a communication medium. It's like the phone system.
Yep, It sure is. And when they try to use it to make money, it commences to suck. Just like when they try to use the telephone to make money. My wife and I don't answer the phone between 5 and 8 pm becasue of telemarketers calling from boiler room operations. They are making our phone suck. The same thing is happening with all these companies cluttering up the 'net with images, popups and other slow-loading crap. One news site after another has been glitzified to the point that you don't want to go there anymore.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
"The Internet is an important cultural phenomenon, but that doesn't excuse its failure to comply with basic economic laws," said Thomas Nolle, a New Jersey telecommunications consultant.
Mr. Nolle is refering to economic theory, right? Well, it's not the internet's responsibility to conform to the theory, it's the theory that needs to be changed to conform to reality. Sheesh.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
Well, you have the right to say whatever you want, but I also have the right not to listen. Businesses that have this notion that they are somehow entitled to demand that I look at their idiotic banner ads (or worse, those fucking flash ads that take half the page on zdnet) should wake up or go to hell.
Here's one of the hard, harsh facts of life - politics and philosophy rarely outlive the people who subscribe to it.
Here's another: the dominant philosophy of a given group of people tends to be that of the people leading the group - and these leaders are in their 50s and 60s.
These people were typically born in the post WWII boom. They had their childhood in the 50s, their teen years in the 60s, their adult-but-politically-powerless years in the 70s and 80s. They took over the reins of political power from the generation that _fought_ in WWII, who's primary political concerns were the issues fought over in that war.
That generation was educated in WWII, and when they took political power, they were consumed with idealogical issues (communism, fascism, and capitalism) Their children were educated in economic prosparity (with little focus on pure politics) and now that they have political power, they are primarily concerned with economic issues.
Compare JFK (a politically motivated leader from the WWII generation) to Bill Gates (an economically motivated leader from the post-WWII generation)
But _our_ generation seems more and more interested in something else entirely. It's hard to describe or pigeonhole. We're not slaves to a political agenda like our grandparents. We're not (usually) slaves to our greed like our parents.
We believe in free access to information. We believe that the economic interests of corporations are subordinate to the social needs of individuals. We're better connected to each other than at any other time in human history, and that tends to make us more tolerent of each other.
The same way our parents (who have power now) can't imagine going on the Communist-witchunts of the 50s, we can't imagine (once we take over power) of passing laws like the DCMA.
The established order may not like that very much - but who cares? In 10, 20 years, they'll be dying off and irrelevant.
That doesn't mean that we don't fight and resist certain things now (the jailing of Dimitry is outrageous!) but even if we suffer local setbacks for the time being, we'll still win in the end.
Just like our children will eventually triumph over whatever idiocies we put in place when we take power.
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
A few years ago, some of the VCs got the idea that this Internet thing was actually a "Good Idea" and they embraced it. They embraced it with vigor and enthusiasm.
To be fair to the VCs, there may have been other reasons why they didn't show an interest in the internet earlier - in particular, red-tape. If I remember correctly, I don't think that the internet was allowed to be used for commercial purposes before the early 1990's. This is what Al Gore was instrumental in changing in the early 1990's (and what I think he was referring to in his infamous quote which was taken as a claim to his having invented the internet).
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Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
-- Boots of 'The Coup'
A free market means everything in the market, no commons, no common goods, all social costs and externalities shifted off onto those least able to defend their interests (meaning those with the least capital.)
Do we really think we have the power to stop them? We geeks may have designed the web, but we did it with ruling class money, which comes with strings, always. They are the mac daddy pimps of the whole world. They own us and they own the web.
They don't like freedom, it can't be bought and sold.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Some pages will always be put up by some person or group in their spare time because they want to. Some other pages will be put one by a group who wants to spend money to spread a message, for example a politcal web page would probably fall under this catagory. As would say the web page of a town.
However many web pages that we know and might actualy like, including google, slashdot, ebay, amazon and so forth have to pay the bills. This means that at the end of the day the amount of money the earn *MUST* be greater than the amount that they spend. If you spend $10,000,000 a year and earn $9,000,000 you will sooner or later run out of cash and die.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
Basic Economic law:
You have to earn more than you spend. This has nothing to do with national laws.
As for national laws, well you have to obay the laws of the place you are. If doing X is illegal for you doing with a computer probably won't change that.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
I wasn't talking about personal debt, but corprate debt. If a comapany can't earn enough money to pay the bills sooner or later it will run out of cash and close the doors.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
Science is an inherently self-supporting process. Why do I believe in science? Not because it's self-consistant. There are inumerable self-consistant bodies of thought. What makes science different, is that it consistantly works. The scientific method (though not perfect, and often very ineficient) simply works. And it really is that simple. What more rational basis can there possibly be than, "it works?" That kind of basis does not require any faith, or really any assumptions, except one: The world we observe with our senses is real and not some ethereal construction. From my experience, a large majority of people believe that.
Science is not technology, they are seperate things, although I will admit that there are many fields of science and technology that would not exist today without either, but that does not make them equivalent.
And Fundamentalism==idea worship? Well, I guess that statement shouldn't surprise me too much, since most people's conception of faith is so royally screwed up that few people can really explain faith....which should not be construed as an attack on faith (or religion), only an attack on the idea that you can substitute fuzzy logic for faith.
Shop Smart, Shop S-mart!
Theory building may be a rational process, but it doesn't take place in a vacuum. Newton's theory of gravity really wasn't based on any previous theory (yes, there was Copernicus, but epicycles really wasn't going to lead one to GMM/r^2 imho). Newton based his theory mostly on the astronomical observations and data of Tycho Brahe, from which he derived a theory that fit the data. Which I would call a rational process. Basically another way of stating my point is that theory building is a self-reinforcing rational process. Meaning that the theory is derived from some data, which allows you to begin to predict a new data set, which reinforces or refines theory, which... on down the line. Now granted, sometimes a theory can require you to posit the existence of an unknown parameter or principle, but here again, the data will be the ultimate arbiter, and tell you whether or not you're on the right track. What you miss in 1), is the data input process. General Relativity was built on top of Newtonian gravity, not because it felt right, but because (amoung other reasons) Mercury's orbit was found not to be fully explainable by Newtonian gravity. Experiments and data provide the rational feedback loop that negates the need to pull theories out of thin air.
Shop Smart, Shop S-mart!
They didn't do their research and based their businesses on something they didn't fully understand. Now they're trying to step in and take control, but what they're proposing further illustrates their ignorance and lack of understanding of the technical (and social) issues.
And, yes, 300 emails, no matter how polite they each may be, counts as harassment. Don't do it, please. Think of the children.
- jon
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
We DO NOT need to be harassing a Network World columnist for expressing his opinion to some reporter.
A lot of people have made the point that the net needs a better economic model, one that allows for better cost allocations for bandwidth usage. The stuff in the LA Times article is just talking about that, plus Quality Of Service and multicast features that will support investment in things like video on demand.
Nothing terrible here that I can see. If you disagree philosophically, go out and do like Clay Shirky and Jon Gilmore do and write intelligent, thoughtful, non-knee-jerk pieces about the future of the net.
DO NOT harass a commentator and justify the impression that the net is filled with irrational sux0rs (sux0r, n: one who sux.) who are bent on getting everything they want for free, now, dammit.
- jon
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Oh, come on. Give me a break. I am so tired of this.
Doing business on the internet is a privilege and not a right. Why do these people think that they deserve to be able to make money off of the internet when the majority of dot-bombs didn't have a good business model in the first place? In fact, why do people in general confuse the difference between rights and privileges?
Nothing frustrates me more than people who see an opportunity, try to take advantage of it, fail, and then lay the blame upon somebody other than themselves and say "I have a right to succeed at such and such!"
When will people grow up?
Unchecked greed is not a good thing.
That's what a LOT of the big businesses possess It's greed without any sense of what tomorrow might bring. It's greed without any sense of propriety. It's greed without playing by any of the rules we've set for ourselves as individuals.
Unchecked greed ends up producing monsters that slowly gobble up all the competition. Unchecked greed creates the pollution we see in the skies over the cites we live in. Unchecked greed produces the pablum that we're force-fed in the form of pop music and pop television.
Not unethical? Some of what they're doing is unethical. Do you consider $0.25-0.50 profit earned by a recording artist per every $15-20 record ethical? Do you consider region coding on DVD's ethical? Do you consider keeping you from using a given media item such as a book or record being explicitly controlled by someone else ethical? I don't. Apparently your concept of ethical and mine are completely different.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I'll give you "one"...
"Two" is so much bunk it's not even funny. Electric distribution was developed in the US, first by Edison, later by Tesla. The incandescant light bulb came from Edison. The fluorescent light from Tesla. The AC motor came from Tesla. Do we have the unmitigated gall and audacity to tell the rest of the world what to do with their electric power distributiuon system, motors, lights, etc.? Nope- and we'd get told where to shove it if we dared to. Why should this be any different?
"Three" would depend on how much capability the "new" fork could muster. It might start out as a "piggyback", but it might just grow to be the main one. You just can't tell- it boils down to the ingenuity of the individuals building the alternate net (which is actually happening right now with Consume, etc.).
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Yes, because F-16s are in wide use as pavers.
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a funny comment: 1 karma
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this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
AARPNET? American Association for Retired Persons Network?
The ARPANET was _not_ intended for military purposes. Although the idea of a distributed communications network was suggested in a RAND study on the topic of war interrupting communications, the ARPANET was intended to network research facilities and help make efficient use of computer resources all around the country. (at a time when many programs could only be run on a single computer) I mean, come on. For years, the only installations on the thing were university computing centers.
Go read through the answers that the people actually involved with creating the ARPANET give to this question, and see how well the nuclear war myth holds up. Sheesh.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Yeah, 'Wizards' is one of my favorite books on tech history. I wouldn't bother with Cringely too much. He's better at writing about the personalities of the players involved. He nailed Steve Jobs as probably being a sociopath, and Bill Gates as being a control freak of exceptional proportions.
If you want a good general history of early-mid microcomputing, try 'Fire in the Valley' to go along with 'Wizards.' Now I just need to find something good on minis other than 'Soul of a New Machine.' (it's okay, but there's more to life than Data General... boy is there)
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
UCLA and Stanford were the first two machines to be connected, and yeah, I believe they used leased lines. Although no one seems to remember who was doing it, the historic first message is remembered. The people at UCLA attempted to log into a computer at Stanford. Simultaneously they had placed a long-distance call to ensure that things were showing up at the other end. The conversation went basically like so (I'm writing this from memory, but I swear I am not making it up):
;)
UCLA: (types 'L') We typed an L
Stanford: We got the L
U: (types 'O') We typed O
S: We got the O
U: (types 'G') We typed G -- oh wait, it crashed.
This was probably an accurate omen
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
It's as if they no longer see the world as a place to try new ideas and put in effort to make them work. They seem to think that if they have a lot of money tied up in a particular idea, the law needs to protect them -- no matter how poor the idea is.
Just because it was originally created as an academic research tool doesn't mean that it has to stay that way. In fact, I'd be surprized if the vast majority of internet use is not commercial and recreational instead of academic.
I'm not saying that I agree with the businesses here. I'm not really sure what to think about that yet. It certainly has some pretty dangerous posibilities (imagine if a backbone company decided to put censorware on their routers...and that's just to start), but if done right, I think it also has some pretty attractive possibilities. I'm not really sure whatever came of the Valve/Cisco alliance to improve internet latencies and reliability for games, but that seemed like a reasonably good idea. This kinda seems like a logical extension of that. It's just a question of making sure the companies that control the routers are behaving. I'm not sure how practical even that would be, though.
Anyway, I don't think it's fair to say that the internet's academic (and don't forget military!) roots should prevent it from growing and evolving. It has certainly done that since it's inception. It's mostly just an issue of making sure it grows in the right directions. I think the greatest value of the internet is it's empowerment of free speech. A lot of established organizations (including governments) have tried very hard to block this (DMCA anyone?), but so far they have only had limited success. It would be a shame if part of the internet's evolution was to squeeze out the little guys (like me) who can get online and speak their minds where millions of people can (though probably won't) read it. On the other hand, it's totally reasonable for businesses to go out and try to make money with the net. At least so long as they behave and don't go and try to limit what the net can do. There's nothing wrong with a business trying to make money (in fact, most businesses have an ethical and legal obligation to their shareholders/investors to try to make money, and as much of it as possible), but they have to be ethical about it. I fear that the proposed modifications make it very easy to be pretty under-handed about it.
-Perrin.
-Perrin.
Now I want you to go in that bag and find my lightsaber. It's the one that says bad mother-fscker on it.
I'm inclined to reword that to say:
The Internet is for COMMUNICATION!
I'm not exactly sure how to define the difference here, but communication can be an essential part of business too. For example, me viewing an online catalog, then placing an order online using my credit card is a means of communication (and information sharing). I don't see why it should be unreasonable to base a business model off of this. And if you're trying to improve the internet to make this even more reasonable, then great. The danger is in doing something that will improve the net for some, and damage it's usefulness for others. There is definately a possibility of that here, but I think we need more details (just how smart do you want these routers to be?) to know for sure.
-Perrin.
-Perrin.
Now I want you to go in that bag and find my lightsaber. It's the one that says bad mother-fscker on it.
LOL...would that I had some moderator points for that. I can just see the lowly airman restraining The General from mobilizing a squadron of F-16s to pave that guy's office.
-Perrin.
-Perrin.
Now I want you to go in that bag and find my lightsaber. It's the one that says bad mother-fscker on it.
Or you advertize using another medium and specify a phone number in your add. I'd imagine that LL Bean makes a whole lot more money than a telemarketter (this is on the assumption that a catalog is just a compound advertizement). I think a really sound business model involves quite a few different mediums.
-Perrin.
-Perrin.
Now I want you to go in that bag and find my lightsaber. It's the one that says bad mother-fscker on it.
"The Internet is an important cultural phenomenon, but that doesn't excuse its failure to comply with basic economic laws," said Thomas Nolle, a New Jersey telecommunications consultant.
Well, I guess if they're not being followed, they're not really basic laws, eh? :)
Since when has the Internet been public? Every bit(and byte) is paid for..
The gripe here seems to be that you just can't get enough bandwidth in on the big I Internet. Build your own small I internet and add a router.. That's what everyone else does if I'm not mistaken..
Sure, it's not real time. You lose more messages than anyone ever receives. Political games cause splits in the network. Nothing is private, unless encrypted. The long distance gets expensive. The grafted-on file transfer and uucp/nntp gateways are klunky and unreliable. Hrm.
Somehow, though, I have more faith in amateur hobbyists than hyper-ambitious money-grubbing swine.
All good points, but there are restrictions now on the "free" 'Net... why do you assume there will be on a commercial 'Net? Especially if the opportunity is now there for a group of like-minded people to buy bandwidth that allow all these things to occur, at the cost of $X/month for the network charges.
This isn't available now on the "free" 'Net, though it would be a pretty good idea.
Who's going to control it, assuming it's controlled? And more importantly... are their interests compatible with yours or mine?
Good question -- it's applicable _now_ to the "free" 'Net. Who controls it? ICANN? Network Solutions? The Almighty Government? Who knows? And more importantly, are these mystery people's interests compatible with yours or mine? Who can tell?
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Wow, a stunning display of ignorance. The FCC regulations on radio and TV aren't just about protocols -- they dictate what they can and can't say, when they say it, whether a rebuttul should get equal time, and other blatently anti-First amendment restrictions. You, sir, are a fool.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Why not a commercial Net? I'll give a few reasons why it might be desirable, and I encourage others to give reasons why it isn't desirable ("Corporations suck" isn't a reason).
It's not perfect, and I can think of a few reasons where the above would not be true -- but there are good reasons to move the Net this direction. I'd be interested to see reasons why it wouldn't be good.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Hmm... at the cost of the First amendment, it might be added. Those profiteers you so despise may restrict what you see and/or say, but so will a Government, only the Government can back up their demands with force of arms, whereas those profiteers must sell you on taking away your libert (which, unfortunately, is quite easy to do. People will trade freedom for security at the drop of a hat. The price of Freedom is eternal vigilance, as the man said.)
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
the majority of the bandwidth is provided by HIGH $$ corp's. They will happily follow a trail of money to hell itself. If the corp's are willing to pay they can own the net :(
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
it means those with money decide. It has nothing to do with the common man or class at all. The free market follows the $$$'s plain and simple. There is NO CONCEPT of loyalty or commitment, JUST PROFIT, cold hard cash. A true free market is mean and cold, using you until you have NO MORE then discarding you.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
It has ALWAYS been spelled that way in England. Take a look outside, there is a WHOLE GIANT world outside the US. I like to visit it as much as possible. It will broaden your horizons, and make you REALLY appreciate the TRUE FREEDOMS we have hear in the US.
:)
Note this is NOT a knock on any other country, the US has plenty of problems, but we ALSO do SOME THINGS JUST RIGHT
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
why do you automatically equate loyalty or commitment to Stalin and facism ? What about the company you have worked at for 40 years that discards you because a 19 year old will do the same job for half the price and has no family to support.
"The free market follows the $$$'s plain and simple.
Actually, it follows the will of the people, $$$ or no $$$. Bad ideas that give someone great profit will fail if they are bad"
Um yeah tell that to the oil industry, or giant agri-businesses. Your definition of bad is foolish, and theirs is not profitable. If it makes money it is GOOD according to the corporate doctrine.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
what if there is no functional difference in performance beyond pay, and benefits ?? This is happening to programmers all over the place, just ask any 40 year old programmer now, what it takes to get on full time...
If it is a performance issue I agree the better worker should be hired hands down.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Actually, the article seems to have missed the fact that your application will modify how you implement it.
The phone system uses a circuit-switched network: everybody gets their own, dedicated line to the other end (once the switches are thrown). On the one hand, it's inefficient, because even if you're not actively sending data, you still have the line tied up. But, your response time is near-instant, since there's no routing once the circuit is established, and there's nobody *else* using the line. This is great for the wya people converse.
It's lousy for the way computers converse. A packet switched network is vastly more efficient in terms of using the lines, but has added overhead of switching and routing, and does not have the same sort of response time. That's fine for most data applications, particularly the ones in use when the Internet was designed. It doesn't really matter if your packets arrive in-order, or quickly, for an e-mail. Just wait. It's crappy for applications that demand real-time reponse, such as a conversation. Granted, using UDP will fix some of that, but then things arrive out of order and get wierd.
And "webcasting" never made sense. The marginal cost to add a new person to a broadcast is 0. The radio waves are going to be passing through a certain space either way. Cable TV works basically the same way, but pumps frequency down a cable instead of radiating it. Still, the only real cost there is the cable itself: as long as you have enough power going in, and keep the signal from degrading, you can add as many cable customers as you want. You *can't* do that on the Internet (since multicast isn't routed), and so every time you add a viewer, you up your required bandwidth. And you run out.
People who are trying to use the Internet for phone calls or video are doing the network equivilent of using a hammer to insert a nail.
In similar news, scientists are demanding that quantum physics obey the laws of newtonian physics.
"This new science is too hard," complained one scientist. "How can we use quantum physics to make better guns when we're not even sure if schrodinger's cat is alive until we look?"
"I can't understand this stuff unless I'm as high as a kite," stated another scientist. He continued, "What am I supposed to tell people that I do? I just tell them that I play with marbles all day."
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
it's only censorship if a gummint is doing it. otherwise it's just an expression of "your right to swing your fist stops just short of my nose".
Everyone has speech they do not like. Point is, they don't have to listen to it.
Why is it that many people who claim to support standards have such atrocious spelling and grammar?
don't normally say this, but mod this up. spot on, reactor.
Why is it that many people who claim to support standards have such atrocious spelling and grammar?
This was inevitable. And there will now come into existence a second internet. One with trustworthy biometric authentication.
That's what business needs. That's what they're going to get. But it'll have to be better, more secure and better controlled than the telephone .
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
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Just because something is there, doesn't mean that everybody has a God given right to make money off it.
This is a basic tenet of human nature that, for some reason, seems to elude the minds of some people.
The internet is out there. That's a fact. It has been true for quite a long time in some form or another.
Now that home users are able to get broadband access in the form of cable or DSL, the fact is that people are already paying for their access, and if a web site is going to charge $XX for you to visit them, that is $XX above and beyond what they are currently paying.
Pay per view and subscriptions seem to be working in the cable market, but there has been stern resistance for "pay as you play" on the Internet.
The MPAA and RIAA are whining and crying, saying that the Internet doesn't provide any protection for intellectual property. Well, guess what? It doesn't. And it won't, no matter how many congresspeople they purchase, and how many stupid acts of legislation they try to get passed. Deal with it.
People didn't like it that their perfectly good album collection on vinyl was rendered obsolete by studios that now only release stuff on CD. Back in 1980, it required the owners of the albums' masters to be able to produce the CD's. People grumbled, but they bought CD's, a lot of them duplicating stuff they already had on vinyl.
Today, however, the state of the art has reached the common man. The Internet is only a tool, just like a CD-ROM burner is a tool, and the software for copying CD-ROMS is a tool. These tools allow people to tell the RIAA just what they think about having to pay again and again and again for essentially the same stuff.
Do you think if listening to radio required a subscription that radio would be as ubiquitous as it is today? Of course not!
People will "share" the files they have around on the Internet. Deal with it.
People don't want to view banner ads on web sites. They will ignore them, or they will use software to make them disappear. Either way, they were intrusive and disliked.
Either invent a business model that can deal with the current reality of the Internet, or end up in the Darwinian garbage heap.
If you try to invent your own "business friendly" Internet that has none of the things that people can already get from the current Internet, then you will only have an Internet that has businesses there... and very few customers! What would make people want to give up what they have now? It had better be good, or it will go the way of the 8-track tape.
The Internet managed fine before businesses discovered it, and I feel it will still be around despite what some misguided businesspeople, congresspeople, judges, or whomever decide to do.
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"May I have ten thousand marbles, please?"
Let me guess... That would be Cisco's belief, right?
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It sure seems that business people forget that. Those are the folks who happily send me junk mail that is most likely largely subsidized by the poor schmucks standing in line buying first class postage stamps to mail in their gas/water/electric bills or the occasional greeting card for someone's birthday through the regular mail. Then Mr. Businessman still complains about how expensive it is to use the mail. As long as it costs them anything at all, they'll bitch and moan about it.
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Right. People do pay Sprint, et. al., monthly fees. If this isn't enough to keep them in the business of providing internet access then there's obviously a problem. But I haven't seen too many posts demanding that they wanted free internet access.
As for:
I happen to think that it is unethical for Big Business to raise false alarms about how the internet is unreliable, inefficient, etc., etc., and then claim that it'll take Big Business to make everything better. It's a lie. I find those unethical.
We have something rather similar here in Chicago. Lot's of major businesses making public statements about how O'Hare Field needs major new runway expansion projects. ``The airport's broken! It's unreliable! Blah blah blah.'' Sound familiar? The prevailing attitude from Big Business is: ``Who cares what those people think is best; we in the business community knows what's best''. Guess who most of these business leaders are? Heads of companies that'll see major financial benefits if runway construction proceeds: construction companies, the airlines (does anyone seriously think that more runways is going to relieve congestion? Has adding more lanes to a highway ever provided more than a very short term relief from traffic jams before they got worse? No, but you can be sure that a similar argument for additional lanes was made by people whose interests were very well served by pouring more concrete), other companies whose products will be used for infrastructure, etc., not to mention trade union leaders looking for a quick means of justifying the dues that they take from each member's paycheck. Do I think this is unethical behaviour on the part of Big Business? Damn right! Is it any different from what's Big Business would propose for the internet? No.
This whole ``concern'' on the reliability of the internet on the part of Big Business is just a means of hyping some imaginary problem that they can later make tons of money from.
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I think I remember seeing pictures of some of the guys at BBN who were involved in the earliest days. Some of them had BEARDS! Just like Lenin!
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Who promised that it was going to be an enterainment medium? Please, we all want to know who made that promise.
And it's those last two items that have the status quo's underwear in such a bunch.
Methinks that these problems are due to the servers installed at the sites where users are experiencing such poor performance. Quit trying to blame the poor performance of your web servers on the internet. ``Mr. businessman, you need to upgrade your server hardware and/or your communications line(s)''. And by ``weeklong outage in an e-mail account'', I take that was meant to refer to the recent Passport fracas. Anybody who goes around telling reporters that this was a fault of the overall architecture of the internet is a liar. Pure and simple. It was an execrable architecture, software, policies, and procedures -- and almost certainly the execution of those procedures -- at a certain large vendor of proprietary PC software that was responsible for that mess. Not the internet.
Bingo! We could sure use more creative thinking and less ``but I learned how to make money this way in business school'' lack-of-thinking. If you cannot adapt then get out of the business of trying to make money on the internet. There are plenty of other ways to make money in the world; find one of those and stop trying to screw up something that you don't understand.
Well that material blessed with high-bandwidth accessibility is surely the most popular with Excite@Home executives who certainly will charge whopping fees to those providers for the privilege of getting it loaded more quickly onto the computers of potential buyers.
Of course, Disney would never dream of offering to pay more to Excite@Home (and @Home would never dream of offering that option ;-) ) if
Warner Bros were unable to place content on that high-speed pipe. And while it
may not be blocked through some configuration on Excite@Home's network, it'll be
effectively blocked by forcing users to access it at near dial-up speeds
(or maybe a little better than that).
Should that have read ``Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers, a pseudo-public body''? And I like the overall tone of that comment: ``It's too complicated for y'all to let a bunch of geeks to care for. Heck, most of these guys can't even get dates. Just leave it to business people. They'll take care of you.''
And, of course, many of us have had the privilege of dealing with companies with those highly-praised business motives who cannot seem to employ any of those talented engineers. Hint: the internet needs those talented engineers to keep things running smoothly far more than it needs those protectors of Capitalism.
Another Bingo! How did that fellow describe this sort of thing? Oh, yes: a ``disruptive technology''.
Have a good one...
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If this weren't so tragic it would be funny. Corporate America is essentially whining "Mommy! The world doesn't work the way I want it to, make it go away!" Unfortunately there is a very good chance that the cheap whores we've elected, or had appointed to office "on our behalf," will do exactly what these losers (in every sense of the word) want.
... the oxygen I breath may be produced by your tree, but I breath it nevertheless. Why? Because it is so abundant that no amount of pro-capitalist or anti-socialist posturing, demagaugary, or hysteria is going to get anyone to seriously consider paying for the air they breath. The only way something like that would happen is if breathable air were to become scarce, as it would be for colonists in space, or citizens of a world so polluted that nature's natural sources of oxygen became unusable.
Capitalism relies on scarcity to function. Scarcity of food, scarcity of land, scarcity of medicine, scarcity of products. If something is not scarce, but rather abundant, then no "free" market can form around it. The air we breath is an obvious example of something so abundant and readilly available that no one would consider paying just to breath it. Water in many places is similar. Now, of course, even something as abundant as air can have value added (the oxygen cafes in California come to mind, as do pressurized oxygen systems for aircraft and scuba divers), but as it stands, in its raw state, its value is orthogonal to the capitalist system. Not valueless, for none of us would live ten minutes without it (making it perhaps one of the most valuable things around), but intractible as far as applying the Capitalist paradigm to it.
Socialism and Communism presuppose a level of abundance at least sufficient to provide "everyone" with certain basic products. As the physical world rarely has such abundance, such systems falter and even fail because of their conflict with our physical reality and the scarcity of the products and services their adherents generally want, things like food, electricity, and such. On the other hand, every nation on the planet practices communism in its pure form every day with respect to air
So to with information in the internet age. Take away the virtually free replication and distribution of information and we would be back to where we were twenty years ago, where information was scarce not because of its inherent nature, but because of the limited means available to distribute and share it. At one time this wasn't the case, when a culture's entire informational wealth was handed down from elder to youth in the form of folk lore, tribal rights, music, and so forth.
The internet was designed to allow information to flow freely, to be shared as widely as needed, and to become as ubiquitious, and as plentiful, as air. It has to a large part succeeded, so much so that the Information Barrons and Copyright Cartels have been falling over themselves bribing lawmakers in nearly every developed nation to pass some equivelent of the DMCA, the Sony Bono Copyright Extention Act, and various anti-hacking and anti-speech laws.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Efforts to impose an inappropriate economic system, such as capitalism, on the internet, where information is as abundant as air, will have consiquences at least as bad as those efforts to impose an inappropriate economic system, such as commmunism, on a world of physical scarcity. Legislation designed to do so will be at least as draconian as that which once governed the Soviet Union, perhaps even more so as even the Soviets never tried to charge for, nor ubiquitiously monitor, their citizen's use of oxygen.
We've already seen the kind of "free" world the Copyright Cartels and Information Barrons are persuing through their use of the DMCA to silence speech, drag 14-year old programmers from their homes in the middle of the night *cough* Motion Picture Association of America *cough*, and imprison visiting software engineers for exposing fraudulant marketing of products by large American corporations *cough* Adobe *cough*.
Is it really surprising the same people are now trying to make the most liberating and empowering medium ever created, the internet, simply go away?
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The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Someone decided that they could attract a lot of people to a web site, make tons of money on advertising, and presto, and instant business success. Maybe businesses should stop trying to mold the internet into something it isn't and start realizing that there are some very fundamental aspects of conducting business that simply cannot be ignored. First and foremost, I'd say that assuming that one can create a web site that is in itself, a business, for the most part, won't work. There are exceptions, of course. Perhaps looking at the internet as an ADJUNCT to a more traditional business model, rather than a replacement, would be a good place to start.
Second, I've seen several traditional companies use their web sites as a way to shield themselves from their customers - with no contact information, and and hence, no way of dealing with a real person. I don't know about anyone else, but this is a REAL turn-off for me, although it seems to be more characteristic of some of the larger companies I've seen, rather than the smaller ones. The larger companies seem to gain customers by playing the numbers game, while some the smaller ones are truly interested in building communities of loyal customers.
Overall, I think there are still some real opportunities for business to flourish using the internet - but not at the expense of a solid foundation and a good understanding of how to use the internet effectively.
*Tom opens up VMWare, Opens up Netscape Messenger and sorts by Priority flag.
I have one email that is flagged highest priority by "visitalk". After I registered with them for PC to Phone calls that was their confirmation email.
(I always delete the SPAM, I'll have to check next time (give me 20 minutes...) )
Quote from article:
"By adding "intelligent" switches and other devices, they believe, the system could work faster, avoid traffic jams, distinguish between high-priority data and other material that can wait, and generally live up to its promise as a worldwide communications and entertainment medium."
It's exactly what they want to do... e-commerence is "highest priority" to some people. That's alright, but it's nice to have a level playing field.
-Tom
There's a difference between paying for something and when that something is commercialized.
Paying $20 a month for your unlimited Dial-up account is just a fact of life. You don't get something for nothing.
Paying $25 / month in addition to $20 / month just to use a companies "inteligent network infrastructure" is a bunch of crap. You're paying for the priviledge of sending packets above and beyond what it costs to afford the equipment. They want to graft "service sector" business plans on a decentralized open network. And they wonder why the are having problems...
You don't get any valed added services from having to pay for their commercialized Internet. You don't get a choice in the matter; you just have to. Who does it benefit? The companies that collect the money. Who's a flat rate of $20 / month for an ISP benefit? The consumer. $20 is well worth access to the Internet. Keep it that way.
Now if you'll excuse me I have to go work for The Man to afford this damn cable modem....
-Tom
hehehe :)
:)
I was going to post a message just like that.
The problem is, what can anyone do about it? Nothing is offlimits from the grasp of greedy business men. You can say heathcare, bill of rights, etc, but that's just a load of crap. The United States still hasn't passed a universial heathcare program, and big businesses doesn't hesitate to walk on your rights when it's *profitable* to do so. I digress...
I haven't quite figured out what to do about it, but one thing that has me paranoid is an urgency flag in IPv6 (Is it in the RFC? Or am I imagining things again?). Just because some company has some e-commerence infrastructure now their packet is more important than mine? The purpose of the flag is to allow real time streaming such as surgeries and such. But it's wide open for abuse.
I don't know what can be done to protect anindividual's rights and make certain aspects of things (Non commercial Internet, Heathcare, Equal Rights, etc) offlimits to corporations while still being America... the land of the free.
I'm still working on my manifesto...
-Tom
If a person cant cut it in the real world of business they either teach or write books/columns.
I.E. the articles are written by people that couldn't manage a business if they tried, and it shows.
Real businessmen/women keep their mouths shut and stick to becoming filthy rich...
I don't hear the CEO of ebay whining like a baby... only the columnists that dont have what "they" have.
another example of the press giving a microphone to a moron (Kinda like Dvorak... an idiot with a column...)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Amen, sibling. Even if there are such things as "basic economic laws" -- which is not at all clear -- it can't fail to comply with them, anymore than than Thomas Nolle can fail to comply with the law of gravity if he jumps off a cliff.
"Having money gives me the right to manipulate the system to make more money" isn't a basic economic law, it just works that way often enough that it might seem like a basic law. Especially to those relative few who benefit from it.
Well, yeah, I guess we should have "carefully managed" Adolf Hitler's viewpoint of the world and avoided that whold WWII deal.
Yeah, there are prople who say "gee, it's all relative, and we should respect our differences, and if the Mowatonga culture wants to practice human sacrifice, then hey, we should just respect that". But that's not what I'm saying.
You're absolutely spot on to mention Hitler... people who say it's all relative, are forgetting that while it's true that people hold different views, some views are better than others.
As you say, there are some values that hurt society -- but now here's the difficult part: in order for a person to reach the age of 21, they have to pass through the ages of 2, 7, 13 etc. We can't just turn a baby into an adult overnight -- the person has to develop through all the stages, in order to get to adulthood. And unfortunately, it seems like values go through a similar developmental process.
So the problem is that, yes, the ORANGE competitive viewpoint does do damage to the environment, but, according to Spiral Dynamics, GREEN "common bond and concern" can only emerge after ORANGE is established. You can't skip any classes.
Spiral Dynamics says the vMEMEs emerge in sequence: BEIGE, PURPLE, RED, BLUE, ORANGE, GREEN, YELLOW. Where BEIGE is "just day to day survival", PURPLE is "family bonding", then RED "power drive", BLUE "respect authority and order", ORANGE "individual competitiveness", and only after all these others, we get to GREEN "sensitivity".
And you can't chop out any of the levels. Ie. a GREEN "sensitive" person may think RED "power drive" to be something bad. But if you somehow were to stop people developing RED, then you would arrest them at PURPLE, and they would never make it to BLUE, nevermind GREEN. Ie. we would throw our society back to the stone age.
I'm apologising to you now-- this post is way to long. You said, so what about Hitler? Well, Hitler wanted to "unite his tribe"... and there were probably a lot of Hitlers around 40,000 years ago. Because back then, the tribe was the biggest social unit that had developed.... there were no countries, never mind multi racial mixes. And as such, Hitler would have been the peak of evolution 40,000 years ago, but his ideas and values are hopelessly outdated today. And that would have been that, were it not for him having access to 20th Century technology... 40,000 years ago tribes would go to war with clubs -- so mass genocide, while their goal, was not easy. But today, it's all too easy -- Hitler wanted to make a tribe, by wiping out other tribes, using tanks, planes, bombs and gas chambers.
His view point, "the tribe" is not 100% wrong... there are plenty of tribes in Africa, but his means -- modern military machine -- were way beyond what he should have had access to. And we all have to pass through that tribal PURPLE value MEME, in order to eventually reach GREEN, whereupon we can feel concern for the planet -- so the ORANGE vMEME, is not "completely wrong" -- we have to allow it, within limits, just like we have to allow the tribes to exist, but make sure they don't get their hands on sophisticated weapons.
Again, sorry for the long reply -- I'm mostly recalling stuff I've read... and your point, about "Hitler's viewpoint" was spot on. It is relative, but some views are better than others, but they develop sequentially, and we can't chop off the bottom of the ladder -- people have to be allowed to grow through, and out of, the more primitive viewpoints, but without doing too much harm to others.
If you hold the GREEN value, then that means you already passed through the previous levels, including ORANGE. So it's not that ORANGE is wrong, it's just limited. And GREEN value goes beyond what ORANGE is capable of. Just like ORANGE goes beyond BLUE. And BLUE is higher than RED. Ie. the values of a Christian church goer (BLUE) are higher than the values of a street gang (RED). The trouble is that people get stuck at a certain level, like Hitler seems to have got stuck at PURPLE/RED, and happened to be head of a nation with hage technological capability. We need to find ways to help people develop, like, how do we get all those ORANGE businessmen to grow to develop GREEN values... and have them conscious of the damage their operations are doing.
So ORANGE/business isn't evil, it's just limited, and unfortunately, has access to vast technologies. 200 years ago, what the businessman could do to turn a profit was more limited. Today, we are desperately in need of getting a whole lot of people who are at ORANGE and in charge of Megacorps to evolve onto the next value level, say GREEN and then hopefully YELLOW. And meanwhile, keep a lookout for tribes with nuclear bombs.
Why is the Internet expected to comply with "basic economic laws"?
I have a sort of answer to your question. I recently read a book called, "Spiral Dynamics", which describes basically 6 different value "memes" which have been found to exist in people. And that quote sounds suspiciously like the speaker holds the "ORANGE" value meme (each vMEME is colour coded for convenience). Many people in this forum probably hold the GREEN vMEME, (see the book for a description), and hence sort of can't believe how anyone could be so "evil" -- how could anyone think that the internet is just a vehicle for profit??
People who hold different value memes just won't see eye to eye. And typically, whatever vMEME you happen to hold, because you value that vMEME, you dis-value all the others, so a competetive/profit valuing ORANGE person will think that people who try to work together for the common good are "just a bunch of hippies", while people who hold the GREEN vMEME will see the profiteering ORANGE viewpoint as being evil and self centered.
The point is to recognise that the other person simply holds a different value MEME, and as such, will value things differently to what you value -- so you just have to learn how to acknowledge and include their viewpoint, while getting them to understand the limitations of their viewpoint. IANAPsychologist, but just thought that what with this issue being basically about two different groups with different values, ie. "Hey, we business people (ORANGE vMEME) value profit and competition, and we see the world in terms of how it can be made to generate profit" versus the academic group (more GREEN vMEME) "we work for the betterment of all by the sharing of knowledge, and see everything as something to be studied, understood, and shared" -- that I'd mention the theory of Spiral Dynamics.
Yes, there are people out there who see a tree as a "resource for profit making". The internet, to their eyes/worldview, is no different. Their worldview is not wrong, it's just limited -- ie. we have actually evolved, at the cutting edge, beyond just profit making, and have begun to think about global environmental issues, but that doesn't mean we stop making profit -- rather, we include profit making, in carefully managed ways, as part of the greater "web of life".
As I said, the problem is when one vMEME thinks it's the "best" vMEME -- when profit makers think profit is the highest goal and the very meaning of life. But there ain't no big "treasury in the sky" place like the Ferengi believe.
The problem is that the new scheme wasn't sufficiently privatized - consumer prices were still held fixed, mostly because the power companies thought they could make a bundle that way. There was corporate greed, but also regulatory failure in that the government didn't think though the possible consequences of the new system. Market forces only applied to part of the market, so the system wasn't flexible enough to absorb rapid shifts in other parts of the market - wholesale energy prices. Privatization didn't fail in CA because it was never really tried.
An informative article on the topic: http://www.feedmag.com/templates/default.php3?a_id =1583
Remember: it's a "Microsoft virus", not an "email virus",
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Anyhow, what people in the real world (as distinct from pundits and soundbites) want is differentiated Classes of Service (aka QoS). Currently the internet runs pretty much on a single Class of Service: best effort. That's your Ipv4 ToS bit set to zero. As Rei mentioned, most routers ignore ToS because they're not configured to handle it.. and neither is the backbone they're connected to.
This is changing as companies begin to realise they want CoS and are willing to pay for the priviledge. They're happy to have most of their non-critical non-time-sensitive data to go over the wire on a best effort basis, since that doesn't really require much effort on anyone's part. That makes it the cheapest access you can get. If they want to send VideoConferencing data or Voice over IP, and an ISP can guarantee them the bandwidth and latency it requires, then they're happy to pay a premium for that.
That's where networks are going. You order a big fat pipe and allocate 10% to the highest class of service (guaranteed delivery, low latency), maybe 25% to low latency because you're a Quake fanatic, perhaps 10% more for guaranteed delivery and the rest best effort. Making everything the top CoS is akin to leasing your own ATM or FrameRelay backbone: too expensive if all you need is 10%.
It's happening already in various parts of the net, and it's a _good_ thing because it means corporates get the performance they want (by paying for the priviledge) and everyone else still gets the standard internet. It's all running over the same wires/fibre, just logically partitioned. The end result is that _everybody's_ bandwidth gets upgraded.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're NOT after you.
No. There clearly are economic laws. But the ones that can be accurately identified all apply at a very small scale. ... is it 3 times their deposits?, the Federal Reserve System isn't under that strict a limit, however. And the Feds can order printed as much money as they feel like.
Someone once said it:
1) You can't win
2) You can't break even
3) You can't get out of the gameAnd that's probably close enough to think with. And it's true. But you need to consider the whole effective system. Once you introduce money (in the current US economics), you've introduced Banks, the magic creation of more money than you own (banks are allowed to lend
That's as real as an El Mir copy of a master. Exactly. The money has value as long as you believe it does, and no longer. It's magic not bookkeeping, unless you count cooking the books as legitimate accounting.
Who was it that didn't understand the basic laws of economics?
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Yes. These are the laws of thermodynamics. In economics, considered as a system, they are also the rules.
As in thermodynamics, individual particles/entities can gain increased energy/wealth at the expense of the decreased energy/wealth of other individuals/entities.
It is inaccurate insofar as economics isn't a zero-sum game. Usually, however, all of the costs aren't/can't be taken into account. So we don't know how often economics isn't a zero-sum game. Only the assertions which various folk make. And this falls into the area covered by the original poster who declared that there weren't any laws of economics. So I restricted myself to the areas that were not covered under that ruberic.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It's the end points that are failing. The "in-cum-bent-on-raping-the-customer" telcos can't get DSL deployed right, even though the technology is sound. And the cable companies are no better.
For starters, let's take a look away from the internet for a moment and see how another of the operations of these large corporations is working: tech support. For the most part it just totally sucks. And the bigger the company, the worse it gets. The telcos and cablecos are among the worst. If they can't get that operation right, they are hardly going to be able to get something as complex as the internet right. And they haven't yet.
Yes, the internet has problems. But you're not going to get problems solved by letting them do it. Sure, things like massive broadcasts over the net to millions of people, or maybe even a billion in a few years, are going to totally overload it. A good broadcast infrastructure needs to be deployed within the net. All the suits needs to do is ask the jeans to design it, supply the cash, and it will get done. But they won't have it that way because the whole issue comes down to just one thing: control.
He who controls the internet controls information. He who controls information controls the world.
This is one of the reasons why so many of us have been fighting the likes of Microsoft. I could care less if they make high quality software or totally shitty software (I happen to believe they fall somewhere in the middle). I oppose Microsoft only because of their attempt to control information. But they aren't the only ones with their eye on the big cloud. We need to watch out for the likes of AT&T (yeah, the guys that tried to squelch it all in the first place), AOL/TW, and others. Watch what they are doing with content and see what I really mean.
We need some kind of ranking system for these companies that shows how well they do what they do, and what risk they pose in terms of trying to control information.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Why are you still sending your name queries to ICANN controlled root/gtld servers? You know you don't have to.
Of course there have been some failed efforts to create alternate roots. Part of the reason for such failures is because the people involved were small timers trying to think they were big corporations. Either way, profit motive was their downfall. It's not wrong to make money at something, but if you think profit first, product second, you're most likely not going to have either one. Once we have an alternate root started without a profit motive in its control (but not excluding businesses), then I think it can succeed.
Imagine, if you will, two separate networks. One is like these corporate suits are proposing. The other is like the internet used to be back in the day (e.g. no banner ads, no spam). Now how will these networks differ in terms of things like domain names (assuming this technology is still used)? That's right, they will be different name spaces. And what is so wrong with that? Separate name spaces would help separate the information network from the commercial network.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Didn't you know? Al "Flower Child" Gore fathered the Internet at a campus love in.
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--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
And why do you think that MS is moving toward software-as-a-service type models?
Unlike the short-sighted music industry, MS is a technologicaly aware company. They see the writing on the wall. As bandwidth increases, the amount of 'intellectual property' that can be 'pirated' will increase.
It's only a matter of time before the end-user has enough bandwidth to download software as easily as music can be today. MS is being clever here, they are moving to protect themselves from this eventuality before it occurs, not when it becomes too late.
-Wintermute
Back in the dawn of time, the Net was designed as a redundant network. If one link went down, there was usually another path available, and the data could get through. The architecture of the Net resembled a spider's web. These redundant links cost extra money, but with government funding that's not really a limitation.
When ISPs and other companies started using the Net as their business, they chose to implement few redundant links. They cost extra money, they said. Why have two or three separate links to the net when one will do the job?
So what happens when a lot of ISP's and bandwidth providers do this? The net architecture becomes more like a tree with little redundancy. Unlike webs, trees have many vulnerable points. Thus, it is common to see sites being unreachable. For example, my reaching Slashdot from my desk at work in Australia is a journey of over 20 hops, and if any of these links goes down, Slashdot becomes unreachable. The reliability of my connectivity to Slashdot over all these hops is about 95%-98%.
So the solution? Change the architecture of the net by putting it back the way it was! Put back the redundant links, and to hell with the bottom line of the penny-pinching providers. And get the corporations who want reliability to pay for it! The Internet is NOT FREE, yet corporations seem to want to make money off the net without paying for it. Well, big corporations, you get what you pay for.
--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
Shit Happens when you introduce disruptive technologies into a marketplace.
Amen! There are relatively few laws of economics, but they are real and you can't violate them without getting bit in the ass.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
The basic laws of economics still rule. If we have indeed entered a post-capitalism phase, then it won't matter if people listen to you are not. It will still happen. Just sit back and enjoy the ride.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Privatized regulatory system? Isn't that an oxymoron?
But that's beside the point. There was zero privatization of the energy market. All that happened was a de-monopolization of the energy production industry. Each of those newcomers on the production side was still regulated by the state. The distribution side remained a monopoly and was still regulated by the state. This created an imbalance and it almost destroyed itself. PG&E and SCE were/are monopoly purchasers of energy, and monopoly distributors of energy. By law. Purchase direct from an energy producer without Gray's permission and go to jail. Sell your excess energy without Gray's permission and go to jail.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
The internet is chock full of scarcity. Landlines are scarce. Switches are scarce. Servers are scarce. IP addresses are scarce. Domain names are scarce. Bandwidth is scarce. Technical expertise is scarce. Reliability is scarce.
And yes, information is scarce. Scarcity goes beyond the cost of reproducing information. It also applies to the creation of information. There's a shitload of information out there. But 99.997% of it is worthless to me. The information I need right now is very scarce. It might not have been created. And if it has, I might not be able to find it. And if I do find it, I might very well discover that it is useless to me without the application of some other equally scarce tidbits of information.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I hate to be the one bearing the bad news. But the internet's core infrastructure is already owned by commercial interests. It has been for twenty years. The vast majority those cables, switches, routers and servers are not owned by any government or public agency. They are owned by private commercial interests.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Almost, but not quite.
There is not "right to profit", but there is a right to attempt to earn a profit. Big difference. In todays mis-educated environment, too many people think "right"=="guarantee". This is bogus. There is no guarantee of profit. But there is a right to pursue happiness so long as you do not infringe upon the rights of others to do the same.
You have the right to pursue profits, to set your prices as high as you want, or as low as you want, to keep any profits that your earn, yada, yada, yada. But you do not have a guarantee to profits. You do not have a guarantee that people will buy your products if you set the price too high. You do not have a guarantee that you will be financially solvent if you set your prices too low.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Got to agree. Too many businesses don't want to compete on a level playing field. They find it more profitable to hire a DC lobbyist than to hire a competent engineer or marketeer. From what I have seen of the world, these types are everywhere, from the big multi-nationals to the small mom-and-pops.
When I say "business friendly", I mean an atmosphere that lets a business survive or fail on its own merits, on a playing field where the rules are known all and apply to all equally.
Those who would trade a little freedom for a little security deserve neither.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Privacy and anonymity are scarce outside of the internet as well. I'll go out on a limb here to say that they aren't really rights. You certainly have the right to pursue privacy and anonymity, but you don't necessarily have the right to have them given to you.
If you want privacy in the real world, you buy window shades. If you don't have window shades and your house faces a busy thoroughfare, you have only yourself to blame for your lack of privacy. In the real world it is up to you to ensure your own privacy. You have the right to buy and install window shades, but you don't have the right to have window shades provided for you.
Anonymity works the same way. If you want to be anonymous, it is up to you to make the effort. If you want to be anonymous, don't give out any information on yourself. Use cash for all transactions. Use a mail drop. Wear a disguise. Scurry through the shadows. Don't enter the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes.
Privacy and anonymity are indeed scarce goods on the internet, just as they are in the brick-and-mortar world. It looks like a good business opportunity to me! If the public doesn't see them as valuable commodities, then obviously these services need better marketing.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Yup! That's what we are! I've heard "hippie anarchist" used over the decades as a cheap euphemism for "libertarian". So I'll examine the internet in terms of a laissez fair, anarcho-capitalist, free market.
(Of course, the internet ain't 100% free market. The following musings are mere generalization. Since utopia is not an option, there are exceptions to everything.)
The internet works according to the principles of volunteerism and property rights. The internet is private property. Pure an simple. We just don't see it as such since we think of it as a whole. In reality it's millions of tiny homesteaded properties all connected together. Companies and individuals own the backbones, servers, domains and software. We have organized ourselves into a working system without having to resort to government fiat and decree.
The internet runs by way of voluntary cooperation. We don't have any law backed by the use of force. We don't have policemen running around with guns. We only have mutual agreed upon rules of conduct. When these rules are broken, we do not throw the perpetrators in jail, but utilize non-violent solutions. If a section of the backbone decides to charge an onerous price, we route around them. When a server becomes a haven for spam, we boycott them through established protocols. And when a member abuses their free speech, we excercise ours through flamage and email bombing.
Where needed services were missing, some entepreneurial sorts stepped in and offered them. Domain names are one example. I own my NIC and it's MAC address. But basing a global network of addresses based on device addresses is highly inefficient. So I rent a static IP address from my ISP. This works quite well and is extremely efficient. IPv4 addresses are getting filled up, but even as we speak we are self-organizing around a new IPv6 standard of addressing. No need for Congress or Parliament to get involved. But though static IP addresses are great for computers, they are lousy for humans, so along comes another party offering domain name services. Thus I rent my domain name as well. A good analogy would be "I own my home and it's physical location, but pay rent to have it listed with the post office."
If folks don't like this free nation we have built, they can always construct their own. Simply and easily. Intranets. VPN's. If they wish to recruit others and put out the capitalization, they can even create their own parallel but separate backbone.
But this LA Times article is bizarre. The internet is business friendly. All anarcho-capitalist societies are. Did a lot of businesses get hosed in the dotcoms of last year? Of course! But this is nothing new. Market booms based on stupid speculations have always occured. Read up on the history of tulips for a surprising parallel.
If he wants corporations to be in control of the backbone, he needn't worry. They already are. It just isn't owned by those he considers "worthy". Tough beans! This is the free market. If you don't like we won't stop you from creating an alternative, or block you from trying to convince the backbone owners from selling to you.
Who you going to call when the internet sputters, grinds or even breaks? I don't know. But that's his problem. Why doesn't he get off his butt and create connection insurance? There are no laws here to prevent him.
In the meantime the internet is working quite well. If there is a problem, it is because people see the net as a "whole" when it is not. It is a collection of individuals and companies working together voluntarily to synergize a new nation open for homesteading by all.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
...it's happening now. Klensin has significantly nonzero sway within ICANN governance. ICANN itself is comprised mostly of intellectual property lawyers and executives who have espoused sentiments closely matching those in this article. Medin, though relegated to a role as figurehead within @Home, has significant influence over strategic architectual decisions within @Home (and subsequently, AT&T Broadband to an extent). AOL-TW stand on the threshhold of acquiring both @Home and Amazon. Microsoft stands ready to yet again "embrace and extend" the software model, the hardware model, and their integration both on local busses and over networks. Couple that with InfiniBand and similar bus-decoupling advances (iSCSI, 10GB Ethernet), and the future is bleak: Corporate-controlled push-only Internet, and the demise of what we now know as the "home computer".
/. readers/posters, how about x00,000 concerned ICANN participants?), support of groups like the EFF, and direct lobbying of local congresscritters.
The pieces are in place. At this point, the only thing that will effect change is massive lobbying within ICANN (instead of x00,000
Without it, by 2010, you'll be paying other people for the privilege of letting them decide what you can do with your computer. And Linux won't matter much as a movement, because the control battle isn't on the computer anymore; it's moved beyond the OS. The Open Source movement is fighting a war its already won.
.@.
I personally don't see why we can't merge the two networks, have two seperate networks, one smart, one dumb, have them merge at the ISP which routes both to your home though one line, and then have the smart ends (the individual computers), dictate what network the traffic is going to go through by using different addresses, which can be easily identifided as to what network they are intended for.
Every time someone uses a website to make a bank transaction you get closer to getting rid of a few very expensive tellers.
I don't get it. No one's ever bitched about the postal service not making them any money.
Now, I'm quite poorly-read on such things, but wouldn't better multicast support, on the backbone and for the end-user, take care of network congestion for planned webcasts? And other quality-of-service things? We're not talking about depending on VoIP for your 911 calls.
"We're Sorry, but the number you have called, The Internet, is out of service."
i can understand some of the reasoning behind what they're saying, but the biggest reason the internet breaks today is because of business and politics
if everyone was giving everyone else transit for free, except for leaf networks going down, there would be no real outages. Fibre cut takes out
backbone A's connectivity to backbone B? No matter, we'll just route through C.
Things like this *can* be configured as last chance backups, but business rules dictate that you don't help out your competitors when they're down, you try and steal their customers instead.
If you think the old guard is squirming now, just imagine how these business' will react when molecular manufacturing (nanotech) is realized -- in a few more decades -- and then inevitably democratized.
.5% or so of the world's population, and you'll see that an economy of scarcity suits them perfectly, and they'll probably do anything to preserve it.
:)
I think "a few decades" is an optimistic view -- I also think that you are not taking into account the amounts of power that are exerted by the companies at the top to keep things the way they are. For example, if oil companies think that nanotech research might affect their business, all they have to do is lean on a few governments (on the legal side) and have a few words to, e.g., some people in the Russian mafia (on the not-so-legal side). Repeat this scenario across the richest
Or, maybe things will work out better than that. My crystal ball is in the shop at the moment, so can't really say
deus does not exist but if he does
I keep trying, and trying, but I can't seem to imagine Tim Berners-Lee and the W3C as a bunch of hippie anarchists.
What do TBL and the W3C have to do with the invention of the Internet?
Go and study some history. Free clue: the WWW is *not* the Internet.
deus does not exist but if he does
This is strange, if nanotech gets really going, which I don't think will happen in many many years, there should be no need to be afraid of losing business : everything will cost almost nothing to everybody.
What will you do with all your money when everything is cheap?
Money isn't money; money is power. People with power now don't want to be people with the same amount of power as everyone else in 30-50 years time. I don't think this is particularly depressing, just human nature...
One thing that an economy of plenty would involve would quite possibly be meritocracy -- those people who can use the tools (and construct the businesses around them) better would rise faster, as opposed to the situation now, where restraint of trade and massive amounts of marketing seem to be more common features of the market. Or maybe this is merely a characteristic of any emergent market, and ways would be found to limit the usage of nanotech, a la the nanotech viruses in Neal Stephenson's _The Diamond Age_...
Aah, who knows?
deus does not exist but if he does
And I think that "a few decades" is optimistic if a "few" is 20, but pessimistic if a "few" is more than 50.
:) (the only way I could likely live to my 120s is if I'm proven wrong, and life-extending nanotech becomes easily affordable...)
I'd place good money on it being more than 100, if I had any way to collect
Also, if your conspiracy theories held true, shouldn't big business have enough foresight (pun) to nip nanotech in the bud? If so, why did they "allow" Clinton to budget half a BILLION for nanotech research?
It sounds like you think $500 million is a lot on this scale. It's a drop in the ocean compared to the amount that will need to be spent before we have anything usable, I imagine.
I think that business likes to see the government spend money on R&D, as more likely than not, commercial opportunities will arise from it, and it's money they didn't have to spend... corporate welfare, in other words.
deus does not exist but if he does
They won't do that because they know it wouldn't work. Consumers don't want "biznet", they want "Internet". As long as their is ANY media distribution channel that the media conglomerates can't monopolize, they will fight to control or destroy it. The RIAA understands that the best way to make money is to monopolise all distribution channels.
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This guys complaining that QoS costs so much today because you basically have to rig private networks. Personally I think that QoS will always be expensive, because I think the majority of people will be more than happy with low-priority packets for the vast majority of data transfer. People have very low standards (just look at the success of Windows) - and quite frankly, who is going to pay double to ensure their email gets to the other side of the planet in 2 seconds instead of 8 seconds? And sure, the web would feel a little more responsive with QoS packets, but most people I think wouldn't pay much extra to get that. As for streaming video, I doubt the majority of streaming video on the Internet means enough to people to want to pay extra to ensure they get it smoothly (e.g. some random news clip from cnn.com, who cares if it breaks up a bit?)
I might be dead wrong here. Perhaps streaming entire movies etc might be a different story.
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The AARPNET was created to ensure communication between NORAD and the White House/Pentagon in the event of a nuclear war.
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Would you like a Python based alternative to PHP/ASP/JSP?
What gets me is that these people think they can avoid problems that occasionally affect the Internet. Let's see what happens when a backhoe hits a fiber optic trunk or one of their BizNet COs misconfigure a router. And how come they're not pushing to get everyone onto IPv6? Some of their concerns are addressed by that migration. Is it the answer to every one of their problems? No. But it would be more cost effective than ripping out the whole Internet and starting from scratch.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
Really... Anyone that thinks they can use the Internet for critical business applications that require near-perfect uptime and high speeds should get a 2x4-sized cluing to the head. The only way you'll get that kind of service is to either wait a few more years for everything to just develop (I remember dialing up to my friend's BBS with a 2400-baud modem, do you? Try doing voice or sending video over that) or build their own damn network to the specs they need it.
All these companies are doing is whining because they can't use a public medium to serve their own interests. Get used to it. It's like a good open-sourced program. If you don't like it, roll your own!
if( read(this) ) { you = programmer; }
When I see crap like this, I am immediately reminded of the phrase "replace the word 'internet' with the word 'telephone', and see if it still makes sense."
What they fail to realise is that the internet is a communications medium. Just like the telephone.
The two have remarkable similarities: they are both large-scale networks, designed to facilitate information flow across large or small distances. (In fact the only real technical difference is that the telephone was designed to transmit sound, and the internet was designed to transmit data.)
When someone says "How do you make money off the internet?" - just replace that with "How do you make money off the telephone?"
Try it with this article - once you put everything in context, you'll see just how stupid the quotes are.
IMHO, a little commercialism is ok for the 'Net, that'll help with the diversity thing.
The issue I have with this whole proposition is the amount of control over information flow it would give to inaccessible agents in the works.
Already we've seen a huge contraction in bandwidth carriers, ISPs, and a lot of content is flowing into only a few places.
I can't imagine how such a proposal could be construed as anything less than destabilizing and dangerous.
Time to get my lazy ass onto FreeNet.
mefus
In Open Society, GPL Software frees YOU!
Yeah, I can't get Natalie Portman's home address, either.
:)
mefus
In Open Society, GPL Software frees YOU!
Well perhaps you should listen a little more closely, and you'll find I'm on your side of the argument. The way things stand now you do have a lot of control over the content that spills onto your desktop and you can view it or send it to dev/null if you like. A web-site's gotta make a living somehow, right? My only problem is the current rumblings among the big corporations about taking that control away from you. They want to centralize packet distribution, for Pete's sake!
Well, I do have another problem: they will do it "for the children", i.e., in the name of business and in the name of authors and musicians. Well it has nothing to do with "business" and commerce so much as obtaining captive markets, people with no real choice as to what they might view, buy, or even learn from.
A large corporation is a slow-moving giant that can't compete against the quicker, more adaptive small businesses in this new frontier. It needs to grab up all the land it can reach and herd cattle. That's what the DMCA is, UCITA, and other efforts to control information flow. Fences in the new frontier, protecting their cattle and their profit.
These current discussions don't have anything good in mind for you, or even for small businesses attempting to farm the new frontier, it's just a land grab.
mefus
In Open Society, GPL Software frees YOU!
But, business wants you on their 'Net.
:)
If packets can be filtered, anything can be blocked or slowed imperceptibly "for the sake of the children."
The "children" in reality are the ads and "content" released by those mothers...
mefus
In Open Society, GPL Software frees YOU!
Not that I'm against commercial content on the net, but we've gone from a commercial-unfriendly environment to a commercial-friendly one. Now they want to wrest more control from the public hands?
blah...
Basic Economic law:
You have to earn more than you spend. This has nothing to do with national laws.
I don't know about where you live, but here in the US there are millions of people living in violation of that "Economic Law". Ever hear of credit cards? Consumer debt? Chapter 11? Fair Credit Reporting Act?
Also, laws governing situations where someone is living beyond their means vary from state to state (although most of them are national).
- bridgette
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
We've long passed the stage where the government would be willing to pay for the internet. If business cannot make sufficient profit off the net, then they will abandon it.
.yahoo's die. The on-line advertising market dies completely. Slashdot disappears.
People here seem to forget that the pre-corporate internet was a heck of a lot smaller and exclusive and had about 1/100th the information (okay about 1/10th the *useful* information) that the internet holds now. Sites like slashdot depend on corporate presence to keep themselves alive.
Obviously the article chose as inflammatory comments as possible (standard media trick), but the thesis is valid. If nobody can make money on the internet, it *will* go away.
Imagine: First go most of the ".com" destination sites that are the reaons that many users use the internet: Amazon, Napster, etc.
Second, Usage patterns drop across the board because lots of people don't have a reason to log on. Suddenly, all the barely viable high speed internet providers (or non-viable that were getting funding based on ever increasing user growth) die out. So much for sub-$500/month high speed access.
With the death of high speed access, a whole section of the rest of the corporate world disappears as funding based on a high speed future disappears.
Then the
Finally, we're back to the old days, except this time, the government isn't footing the bill. University funding isn't exactly what it used to be either, so many universities can't afford the cost. Soon, we have the priviledged few with internet access provided by their university visiting a few university web sites. Prices for everything internet related are many times higher as economies of scale have evaporated. Most companies won't touch the internet with a 20' pole in the usual way of business (it's the greatest thing since sliced bread or it's deadly poison!)
Doesn't sound like much fun.
It's a pretty apocalyptic vision, but it's not entirely out of line.
Anyway, trying to create a more business-friendly internet doesn't have to be completely at odds with the open nature of the internet. Even IBM's net (forget what it was called) hosted large numbers of mailing lists in its day.
That doesn't meant that the fuckwits in the middle of the connection should be restricting connections in any way. Frankly, if I find out that Time Warner is fucking with the data rates on my home connection based on the originating content company, I will sue their asses back into the stone age for selling "internet" connections that aren't.
What's next, are you going to start defending AT&T's refusal to carry my phone calls to companies that don't give them a kickback? No, you probably wouldn't, but many of the other monarchists pretending to be capitalists do.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Funny...
I keep trying, and trying, but I can't seem to imagine Tim Berners-Lee and the W3C as a bunch of hippie anarchists.
Maybe I just need another shot of Jack.
--
Shaun Thomas: INN Programmer
Read: Rabbit Rue - Free serial nove
BigCorpNet: Would you like to sign up for BigCorpPremium service?
User: I already get 1Mbps DSL. Go away.
BigCorpNet: But with our PREMIUM service, your traffic will get PRIORITY!
User: Wait... you're buying bandwidth priority so you can sell me what I already had six months ago?
BigCorpNet: And all you can do is bend over and take it like a lady. Now shine my shoes, boy.
I really don't like this idea.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Wait... someone hosting an expensive backup system over a PUBLIC NETWORK that they AREN'T PAYING FOR is complaining that they don't control it? Spare me!
Ha! Big businesses hide behind "Free market! Invisible hand!" in meatspace, but they're sorely outmatched inside the network. So they clamor for control to be handed over to them on a silver platter. Fuckwits.
The internet is like the telephone? Uh, try keeping up a correspondence with your buds in Sweden and Germany from California on twenty bucks a month.
"neighborhood Internet service providers that may be run by high school kids with a high-powered server computer and a leased phone line" -- really? If by "run", they mean "tended by unpaid labor", then *maybe*.
If these corporations want a reliable network, they can build their own. No fucking way is control of the public net getting turned over to them for a pittance.
I'm *outraged* about this. You should be too, every one of you.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Hear hear!
Last time I saw Vint Cerf, at a meeting on software patents lasw fall (in Tysons Corner) he was wearing a nice three-piece suit.
Best Slashdot Co
Economics is populated with charlatans, faith healers and witch doctors who are completely deluded as to their ability to understand a fundamentally chaotic system. These guys are right up there with snake oil salesmen in their pseudo-science. Next they will be asking the physicists to repeal the law of gravity because it offends some misguided Keynesian dogma. Small wonder that rocket scientists are in such demand in the stock market[1].
The sooner these morons are put ship and fired into deep space, the sooner we can on with making a living. (The rocket scientists could even get to build rockets)
Reminds me of man's argument with God in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Xix. [1] An Amusingly accurate grammatical error
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
This is a pretty scary notion, but (fortunately) it sounds completely impractical.
One Problem with that (as pointed out by the Phoenix Fire Department Chief):
Most of those detectors are set to trip the Traffic light to RED in all directions.
Kinda self defeating (for the cheater) if you ask me.
maX_
1) Quality of service. Regardless of commercial interests, the net is glaringly without any quality of service. I thought people were looking into merging ATM and the net somehow to solve this. Maybe that's Internet2. Whatever.
2) Big business can't make money. Holy fuck batman, cry me a goddamn river! This would almost be comical if there weren't actually businesses COMPLAINING about government utilities *preventing* them from say, *selling* you water to your house! That evil government!
I understand the whole QoS problem. Yes it sucks that the net has no way to distinguish between my large download, and a real time video stream. But QoS services should not be hijacked ("leveraged") to enable big business to start putting proprietary wedges in the net. Perhaps the only saving grace, is that the internet is already global, meaning, if worse comes to worst, you can always move somewhere else where big business doesn't own the government (those places still exist right?).
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I wish people would get the facts before they
... it was movement from one shitty regulatory system to another, worse, one.
start slamming California's power struggles.
It was not "privatization" that caused the
problem
As my father lik@(munch munch)...
A man comes to your house, which you built as a smokers den to beat the no-smoking-in-public-areas Laws.
First he tries to sell you cigarettes, and then wisens up a bit and decides to sell you a whole lot of other stuff you don't need... smoking tshirts, books on how to smoke, music to listen to while you smoke.
What he does not get is that you have tobacco growing in the garden, virtually free for all. Most importantly, with the windows of the house shut tight, there is no smoke loss.... hence smoke a cigarette once, and the secondary smoke is there for all those who come into the house to enjoy.
In frustration at not profiting from your house, he calls you a hippie in frustratino and tells you that your lifestyle does not make economic sense!
Like someone said earlier, if they can't make money, they can file for charpter whatever, and go away.
Live today. Tomorrow will cost a lot more!
"What do you mean the people on the other side of the world don't fall off? We must pass a law to forbid the earth from being round; we must make the earth obey the laws of physics!"
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Hey Rei,
FARK !!! from a fellow farker
No, Mr. Nolle, the historical fact that it was devised by a bunch of military strategists (who just happened to design something that was also very useful to hippie anarchists ;-) is the reason why it fails to comply with basic economic laws.
(Plus, someone should tell him that the "laws" of economics are wholly unlike the laws of physics, and one of those "laws" says that Shit Happens when you introduce disruptive technologies into a marketplace.)
And finally, the basic economic law of supply and demand doesn't seem to have fallen by the wayside.
Take Napster (out of its misery, please ;-). When the price was zero, and the product was freely-copyable MP3 files of every artist under the sun, lots of people "bought" Napster's product. Now that external factors have raised the price, and reduced the value of the product (DRM-encumbered .nap files from a few select artists), there's less demand for Napster.
Were there costs? Sure - bandwidth costs money. But telcos' overbuilding of the backbone (combined with the failure to bring broadband to the home) was the fault of a poor business decision -- the assumption that there'd be consumer demand for the extra bandwidth.
Had there been demand for the bandwidth (incidentally, something like the old Napster would have been a great source of demand!), and had they been able to deliver that bandwidth to the home, the telcos would have made a fortune.
Don't confuse poor business decisions with the end of economics.
The Internet is entirely capitalistic, which is exactly why many established corporations don't like it. Since the barriers to entry are so much lower than in meatspace, they have a lot more competition. It is not surprising at all that they would like a less open system that would stifle their competitors, but that is not "capitalism".
Same with the GPL. It doesn't suprise me one bit that MS and others would call the GPL "un-American". It IS un-American insofar as it's not capitalistic.
Sure it is. Capitalism is just the voluntary exchange of goods and services in a free market (not to be confused with corporatism, which occurs when those with political power forcibly restrict certain goods and services and rig the marketplace, see RIAA). The GPL is a voluntary agreement, and is in no way inconsistent with capitalism.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
The average joe doesn't have access to talk to people at NOC's anywhere -- and since the average joe isn't a direct bill-payer to UUnet or etc, anybody you talk to over there is just going to laugh at you. It would seem prudent to call your ISP and let them do the appropriate notifications.
OffTopic, but what with red-runner cameras and HOV cheater-detectors, it _is_ possible the stoplight knows what / who is in the car.
...he stop light doesn't know what is in your car.
Hrm, that's not necessarily true...
Don't sweat the petty things. But do pet the sweaty things.
I agree with nearly everything you say.
How to make money using the 'Net:
1. Fire all marketing and business experts.
2. read Cluetrain Mainfesto
3. Determine if your business can beneft from an *interactive global* network.
4. If the answer to #3 is 'no' continue yor business plan.
5. If the answer to #3 is 'yes' add the Internet to your business plan.
Stupid Net business plans
1. Competing on price
2. Traditional marketing pushing commodity products
Great business plans
1. Use the net to communicate with your clients to establish a relationship.
2. use the net to reduce business costs
3. small business with low overhead serving niche audiences (like hobbies)
Don't worry, the US seems intent on continuing the privatized profits, subsidized losses we've been seeing since the late 70s.
Another words, a pyrimid scheme.
(setq rant-mode 1)
One:
Why is it that everyone is supposed to have a "profit motive" in the USA for everything that they do? I am an American citizen, and I wonder just where the ideas of public service and other such non-profit motivation has disappeared to in the last few years. Since when is the "almighty buck" the most important thing in life?
Two:
Doesn't anyone in business or government realize that the Internet does NOT belong to any one country. Government and industry needs to stop trying to influence something that they can never own.
Three:
Let them fork the Internet. We can just take our Open Source/Free Software and rebuild the public Internet. We can make our own routers. We can build our own backbone. Hell, there are some of us who would go back to using UUCP or FidoNET to keep the public Internet public. We have the specs and we have the technology. They can play on their little CorpNet, and those of us that like this mangled thing that is the Net will just give them the finger and go on with our lives.
I am getting tired of hearing about this shit.
(setq rant-mode nil)
I feel better now, really...
--
If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck.
With all due respect to Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., blaming the fed for the dot com crash is like swatting butterflies in Hong Kong because your trailer was flattened by a hurricane last week.
A lot of otherwise pretty smart people (including myself. Yeah, I bought tech stocks too.) figured that telecom and network infrastructure could keep ramping up indefinitely. A lot of VCs and brokers were either hypnotized with tunnel vision over "new paradigms" or figured that as long as the stocks they were holding could be pumped up longer than their SEC-mandated lockout period, the long-term profitability of the companies they were hyping didn't matter that much ($200/share for an Internet retail company that could MAYBE in your wildest, wettest dreams double the 1-2% profit margins which are standard in brick and mortar retail? Get real!).
And a lot of suckers saw their friends making money on e-Meringue stocks, and figured they had to get themselves some of that.
Can you blame the Fed's loose money policy? Well, a little. Cheap money makes it easier to speculate, as Rockwell says. However, rather than spouting laisez-faire puffery off the top of his head, I'd like him to come up with an example of tight money policy deflating a speculative bubble.
I can see the mental gears of a daytrader grinding now:
"Let's see. If I borrow $20,000 at 10% to purchase shares, and keep that 10% line of credit maxed out for the next 10 years I'll be looking at paying about $12,000 worth of interest over that time period. But if monetary policy tightens and I have to pay 12% interest, I'll be paying $14,500 in interest for the same time period. Meanwhile some analyst on CNBC is saying that amazon.com will double in price over the next 18 months. Gosh, I don't know. That extra 2500 bucks in interest really tips the scales on whether or not this is a good idea."
Maybe Rockwell is having visions of interest rates jumping up to the same level they were at in the early 80s without benefit of inflation. If so, could somebody please put me in touch with his dealer?
j.
The companies are only responsible for bringing the disinterested neophytes online. Now they want control, seeing as the model they slapped over the Internet isn't as profitable as they had hoped. But this is like a group of 'anarchistic hippies' building a fun lane for people to walk through, then having a business come in and commercialize the road, making it admittedly many times fatter and longer. Then, people stop showing up, cause now it costs money, and its plagued by people using it who don't understand it. So the businesses wave the white flag, and do everything in their power to obtain the lease to the land, including that original kick-ass lane, so they can put a parking lot on it. But fuck that .. in the case of the Internet, there's no way to keep the original lane. In other words, in the long run, we're fucked. At some point, we'll be saying "It was fun while it lasted ..." Hell, you can even say it now .. sometimes I lament that the damn web killed the kick-ass Gopher protocol!
"Old man yells at systemd"
"then they can build there own damn NET! call it biznet."
The problem is that, sure, they'll be on their own private network. Of course, their CUSTOMERS won't be on that network, 'cuz they can't afford it!
Personally, I find the Internet to be about as reliable as just about anything else in my life. That includes my electricity, my phone, my car, my cable television, my Celphone (ok, it's MORE reliable than my celphone), my PC (as long as it's not running Windows)...
Nothing in life is fool-proof, and you can't control EVERY ASPECT of your life. This guy needs to realize that.
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
If there are only two choices for back-bone providers, maybe that's just not enough competition to cause them to push the 'quality' button...
Back when I had choices of ISPs (cable modem is fairly limited on choice), if the ISP was crap, I'd bail. If enough people do that, then the supposed 'quality problem' should disappear...
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
So, they want an internet that 'obeys basic economic laws' eh?
Has anyone ever quoted Einstein as saying 'Why doesn't the universe obey Newton's basic laws?'
Hey, they make sense so why doesn't the universe use them?
I'd like to see these commerce types get off their arses and figure out a new bunch of laws.
He isn't talking about the content available on the web. Basic economic laws don't apply because you can't pay more and have a faster, more reliable internet connection. You sort of can with Cable or DSL, or even with T-1 or better connections. Even still, there can be a lot of bottlenecks between a particular site and your home or work computer. Your ISP has no control over most of these bottlenecks. That is by design, but it means you can't pay your ISP more and be guaranteed quicker access, because the ISP only can control things up to a certain point.
It is incredibly dangerous to see this as a problem, because the solution is to have a monolithic network that is controlled by a small number of companies. It might be difficult to create, but if the right 4 or 5 companies decided to get together and wall of their parts of the internet, it could happen. These companies would have to beef up infrastructure, to make it worthwhile for everyone to be on their network. Then they could cut off everything on their network to the outside. To get most content, you would have to be with on of the big 4 or 5. You would be left with a few large corporations having absolute control over what would be left of the internet.
What you would essentially have is a small number of failure points (the theoretical internet corporations). They would be much more susceptible to censorship, governmental regulation, and corporate interference.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
get rich quick scheme.
They can't accept the simple truth that there's no free lunch. (It's a metaphor)
Maybe we should restructure the internet for information sharing instead.. Oh ya. I forgot, that's what it's good at.
-------------------
arcane for life
"Businesses are growing so frustrated by the unreliability of the public Internet... that many have moved their most critical applications to alternative semiprivate networks."
They ran corporate data on the web at large, probably in plain text! What idiot does this? Every house, every business should have its own internal network which only has a limited bridgo to the internet through a stateful firewall which does packet inspection.
If you want a "direrct connection," then have any packets destined for a certain IP go through via IP Masq. Properly implemented, you can have any internal boxes which can't otherwise be proxied (because of a broken client protocol, perhaps) be masqd. And, on the inside, you get all the corporate guarantees you want -- as well as having a nice, central place for VPN, etc, implementation.
But these corporate people are too stupid for this, I guess. After all, the techs who understand this want to be doing their work, not participating in manager meetings.
--
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
What companies are calling for the restructuring of the internet? What a bunch of crap (typical of the LA Times). The internet is driven by the same economic principles that govern our highway system. Much of the internet transport falls under the domain of a public utility. Just like the highway system. Some private ventures get special access rights to set up profit making operations, like gas stations and fast food joints on a major interstate. The analogy that the internet pipe is dumb is flawed. The pipe is not dumb. The pipe routes packets in the best possible manner. However, the pipe doesn't know what is in the packets, just like the stop light doesn't know what is in your car.
Someone you trust is one of us.
That is what Reed et al failed to adequately address in their insightful "end to end argument".
Much of this could be addressed by allowing communications-value tokens to be an option on SYN packets.
Seastead this.
While on the one hand I would like to get higher bandwidth with more options than I currenly have regarding internet offerings, I am also unwilling to pay $100 a month just to view webpages.
Right now I pay for satellite broadcast service for my television. I pay a monthly rate to have telephone service. I also pay a small fee to get internet service. If I could get high-speed internet and pay a slightly higher fee to get my television wrapped into one package, I would do it. It isn't unusual to pay more for more services; it is a question of releasing the public domain of the internet to get these addtional services. That is where I draw the line.
I can live with 28K-128K bandwith if it means roughly $15/mo to do basic research, but I would balk at paying more if it meant giving up public control of HOW the service is delivered. If private companies need revenue to increase the bandwidth to serve more customers (read, businesses), then a sliding scale of service is the answer, not giving up a public utility to private control.
The companies who plugged into the internet to get cheap connectivity should not be dictating how the rest of us use this resource just because the quality is poor. Let them build their own internet and sell it. My satellite company already does.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
In the U.S., any new business that starts has less than a 5% chance of surviving (5 or so, don't remember) years. Why should that be different if your business is on the Internet?
Look at the dot bombs, I'd guess that that number holds about true for them too, remember, there are plenty of dot coms that have survived and are profitable. Look at Ebay, they came up with a good business model and are profitable. Plenty of smaller computer resalers are making money selling on the Internet. Look at Amazon, with how much shit they sell they SHOULD be making money, how the hell did such a dumbass of a businessman make Time's Man of the Year? WTF?
Un-fucking-believable how these people feel they have some God given right to make money. If your business plan is stupid, that's YOUR fault, is that so hard to understand?
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
It's just that the mainstream public (or the press for that matter) don't know terms like "ANSI X.12", "EDIFact", "Transaction sets..." But big companies like Walmart have depended on EDI for many years. Smaller companies do as well. When implemented properly, it really streamlines the whole supply chain. EDI needs an overhaul (the costs of implementing it are getting higher due to increasing complexity and fewer "experts") but it's what you use if you want accountability and security in your critical electronic business transactions. What we need are point-of-sale systems for end users that interface traditional EDI systems with the internet. But they probably already exist.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
On most routers packets with these bits set get handled in software rather than in hardware, so they end up in a slower queue.
It's the ATM paradox:
ATM's big feature is guaranteed quality of service. When you set up a TCP/IP connection, the Internet does not reserve network bandwidth for you to guarantee that your data will not suffer network congestion or loss. ATM does offer guaranteed reserved bandwidth. This is its big advantage.
Or is it? If you reserve bandwidth for one user, then you have to refuse to let anyone else use that bandwidth. Everyone always talks about reservations in the context that you are the one who gets the bandwidth and it is everyone who is refused. What about when you are the one being refused? Reservations suddenly doesn't seem so wonderful any more, do they? The only way to make sure no one is refused service is to engineer your network so that you have enough bandwidth for everyone -- but if you have enough for everyone then why do they have to keep making reservations? That's the ATM paradox.
More here and here.
As for streaming the same video to lots of people at once, there is a fine answer already, called multicast. But corporations foolishly don't turn it on on thier networks.
The guy in the article fails to grasp that the Internet is fundementally different than what we had before. It's just like the difference between steam power/electricity or horse power/automobile. A lot of historians are looking at the Internet and the information revolution as another wave of the Industrial Revolution. I'd argue that all these .com ventures failed because they tried to replicate existing business processes through the Dnternet. They didn't try to take advantage of what the internet uniquely offers.
For example, companies sell cars using car dealerships. Now, they have sites that sell cars just like the car dealership. The problem here is, these companies aren't taking advantage of what the internet offers. These days, the car companies have realized the problem and have sites that allow you to configure your car or build it to your order. That's something that wouldn't have been possible before for the avegare user because of the problems with the existing infrastructure. (It's still not completely possible because car manufacturers still have existing infrastructure/business processes that isn't compatable.)
Historically, there has been a decade or two lag between a major new innovation and their successful wide spread adoption. (Ex: Cars became hugely popular only after a few decades.) I see no reason why we wouldn't have the same thing with the Internet. Businesses are learning the hard way that you need to innovate and change existing processes to take advantage of the Internet. Dell and Ebay are excellent examples of companies that have figured out what the Internet is about and are taking advantage of it. I'm looking forward to the next decade when companies will really understand how to do business on the Internet and use it to full advantage!
"You" want to change the basic nature of something so it works like something else?
Let's see here...
Did anyone change the basic nature of the automobile so that it could take a saddle, be steered by reins, and respond to spurs or a whip, leg pressure, and start and stop with vocal commands?
Maybe someone did try it. A quick look around reveals that if someone did, they had no real success. But many did learn to use a steering wheel, pedals, and levers... and got along rather well with a new item with a new nature.
Congratulations guys, you're on your way to failure.. AGAIN.
I don't subscribe to RMS's GNUtopian vision.
Why are you posting on slashdot? Shouldn't you be at home consuming your mainstream name-brand media content instead?
Edith Keeler Must Die
Umm - did they happen to notice the DDOS attacks on Yahoo!, Amazon, etc. that were carried out for no apparent reason? Corporations seeking to control and prioritize the Internet are just begging to be hammered by every kiddie with a script. "Traditionalists" might not mind so much, either.
Um, NO. When one of our clients complains our site is down, and it's not, it's not specifically our ISP or theirs. Do you even realize how many hops there are between your computer and a website?? You're probably traveling through about 15 routers, or more, along the way, through different networks depending on what site you go to. The internet isn't just some big ass straight line that an ISP just has a connection to, it's a bunch of small networks combined to form a big one, with a few larger networks holding most of them together. Yeah, if your ISP is to blame, fine. But, for the most part, a router that goes out in Kansas City can be the downfall of our website in Denver for someone who tries to access it from LA.
Right, that can and does often happen. I guess my point was simply that a scenario such as this often happens to us:
:)
We get a call from a client in LA for example. "Your website is down". We check the servers, our T1, etc, all check out fine. The client claims they can get to www.ebay.com, so they know the "internet" is working, but our site isn't. What usually happens is that the single route to get from their computer to our website happens to go from their ISP, to their ISP's ISP, to another ISP (which usually is a backbone of some kind), and that's where the problem is. So, by this person calling us, and not having a clue who their ISP is or even their IP address, we can't do a damn thing to help them. We run a tax website, and we have had several clients complain because our site is down, and they can't enter their info to have their taxes done on April 14th at 11 PM. I'm sorry, but relying on the internet for important business transactions is like using the US Postal Service to send an important package that must arrive on time in one piece
there aren't that many isp's left.
Those that have the most money make the laws.
how do you know the organizers don't know what their focus is, just because the ignorant follwers don't?
That's right, I'm suing the Internet. Every one of you will owe me a nickel.
Netscape received tons of VC funding, which is how they grew so fast, then burned so much money and ultimately became an also-ran. I think you're right, though. It was really one of those push-pull things - the market wins fueled more VC speculation, which fueled the market, and so on.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Eeeks! You're right. I stand corrected - and Gore DID play a huge part in getting the 'Net opened up to private enterprise.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
A few years ago, some of the VCs got the idea that this Internet thing was actually a "Good Idea" and they embraced it. They embraced it with vigor and enthusiasm. The results were:
* They piled millions upon millions of dollars on startup companies that were run by inexperienced, bright-eyed, I-think-I'm-part-of-a-new-paradigm kids
* They ran up the stock market by helping to inflate valuations on these worthless companies.
* They got filthy rich before the market collapsed.
* And now that the pathetic dot-bomb companies have failed, they want to ignore the few success stories (anyone notice how eBay is bringing in "profit" - yeah, that's where you actually make more money than you spend) and tell us all that because of their own stupidity, the Internet is flawed.
Businesses are using the Internet in myriad ways to improve service, streamline production, and eliminate waste.
But the reality of "pure play" Internet companies is that most of them simply won't work. To VCs I say this: Get over it. Look for real business models that will lead to profitability. The days of 50x returns are over. You don't need another mansion in Los Altos anyway.
The Internet works for business - just not for the overhyped, underbrained, overmonied ones.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
A fine list, but there are a couple of missing items that I think are important.
These have been undervalued IMO, because they have generally been plentiful through most of the history of the internet. Lately, though, it seems that most of unwashed masses that use the internet are getting diminishing amounts of those resources. Effectively safeguarding your privacy seems to require scarce ingredients: technical sophistication, and either a lot of money or loose enough morals to be willing to illicitly acquire some 0wn3d zombie relays).
The masses, however, don't notice this privacy erosion except for rare occasions when they start getting personalized spam, or becoming victims of identity theft and credit card fraud.
I would rather, however, that measures be in place to preserve some semblance of privacy and anonymity so that free exchanges of ideas can proliferate. Just because many of us don't, at the moment, happen to live under the yoke of an authoritarian regime is no excuse for blithely surrendering valuable components for freedom of expression. If you surrender them now, be assured you won't retrieve them later.
You can see already in China, with the recent crackdowns on cyber cafes, that the authorities are uncomfortable with the current levels of freedom of expression and communication that are enabled by the internet. You can see their dilemna: they want the technology advances, but not all of the current possibilities for communication that might not be in the state's interest.
It would be the most ironic shame if it were US corporations, striving for making money, or US government regulators, protecting our kids from terrorists/pornographers, that were responsible for initiating changes in the underlying technology of the internet that enabled Chinese government authorities to clamp down on this medium.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Lets not forget that the majority of protocols used on the ip stack are not propriety, but standards decided on by the IETF. OSPF, BGP4, RIP, etc. No matter how good EIGRP gets, most networks don't want to implement it because of the lack of interoperability. Standards are good. There is one Internet-native language, and it's BGP4. You can strike deals with other networks to use proprietary protocols, I'm sure. By why on earth would anyone do so, when the expense and difficulty associated with doing so far outweigh the protocols already available on the ubiquitous platform?
In short, I don't think that provider-vendor deals are going to be very easy to strike. One network is one thing, but the Internet is another. Achieving critical mass among all the providers on the globe has been done with hardware, but that was in a virtual vacuum. The thought of actually replacing protocol stacks is really hard. Look for this when IP6 rolls around. It's gonna be one big mess and I'm sure it'll be years in the repercussions.
toeslikefingers.com - because
Thus, economic law dictates that the price of the product should be zero.
No it doesn't, the price will be whatever seller and buyer can agree on. If new technology threatens to break the illusion that money maintains, it'll just mean that the commercial industry will have to adjust or perish. It's time for creativity, not holding onto old ideas about control and power. This is not just a property of Internet. It's a property for all information and it's the reason humans have become so knowledgeable, technical and full of old stories that we have.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
What if there are no laws in the universe? What if what we perceieve as law is actually changeable?
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Good post. I just like to add that the issue is greater than what you seem to realize. You see, those creating information need to eat too. So basically, what "basic economic law" says is that to sustain that activity people will need to share their money, even though they can get it for free.
Sounds impossible? Maybe, that's why people need to change themselves, not technology. As long as people don't want to share fairly, they'll fight over "their right to listen" as others will fight for "their right to sell". In this process, huge companies and powerful executives will probably have to adjust their malpractice to more reasonable levels and become more human.
On other news today, Microsoft defended consumer rights against AOL!
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Ah, I didn't think of it that way, but I guess it's basically the same argument as zero-cost copies. That's why I propose creative thinking, and also that people will learn to support what they find valueable and convenient. I would much rather live in a society without push-marketing everywhere and huge mass-marketing blitz of fancy fluff. It seems technology will disrupt the market enough to make that a reality, but of course it's a double-edged sword too. I don't see it as a disadvantage that people will be forced to consider what money really is, that it has no inherent value and that we're all in this together.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Sounds to me that what this guy wants (a corporately-controlled network organized around profit rather than data exchange) is basically AOL without the Internet access. Or any of the other non-Internet network services that, incidentally, all seem to have died off years ago. (Compuserve, Prodigy..? Can't remember)
Why did they fail? Because while that's what the corporations and merchants might want, the customer could care less. Same as that CueCat nonsense: it's fabulous for marketers and companies but not worth it for the customer. And without the customer's money, there's no point to this new infrastructure. So... is there any compelling reason for me, the user, to use this new all-commercial flavour of Internet? It's like hoping to replace all of cable TV with 125 home shopping channels. Thank you, but I'll pass.
Science, tho making a valiant effort to make it's anthills of theory logically consistant ones, is ultimately founded upon assumptions that were not arrived at via a rational process.
The glittering gem of science is a cargo-cult artifact floating in mid-air just like any other body of theory you might care to name.
It's not a path of truth-divination but a technology. Just like the wheel, freudianism, voodoo-dolls and electrical engineering. Of limited use (but useful all the same of course) and, in the face of great infinite whatever, of ZERO "truth".
Fundamentalism==idea worship. Which ideas one chooses to worship is irrelavent.
To observe 20 apples is to assume the theories of apple and number (and their respective relationships to apparent patterns this river of experience). Apples do not name themselves apples, we do. We are also the definers and counters.
Does the world itself possess a form or is that just a convenient way for us to organize our thoughts about it?
Data that describes an object at location x-y-z at velocity v assumes a whole slew of theories like object and space and movement (not to mention observer and observed). You may call such theories natural (...obvious, compelling...) ones to use when describing one's world (Newton might) but "natural" sounds to me alot like unconscious or habitual. In my experience, habits and other unconscious processes have a tendancy to unravel under close inspection. I've never seen and end to that unraveling.
I didn't mean to imply that theory building always takes place in a vacuum but these initial theories upon which later theories are based must come about somehow. How about we just made them up because it was convenient to do so? A creative process. We do it all the time. It certainly pleases Occam.
Do you see beyond your thoughts? Can you tell the difference between an experience and your thoughts about it?
Wear shoes and the world is covered with leather.
How can anyone expect dot coms to cut a profit when the few that actually sell something sell it so close to the break even point?! I would much rather buy my stuff online at the same price I could get it locally than have to deal with jerk off drivers and mallrats.
The Internet structurally doesn't need to change, it needs to change the mindset behind its commercial enterprises. The Amazon.coms will not be able to cut a profit until they set realistic prices and spend more time trying to get a reputation for excellent service than pissing off people with patents. If Bezos is so concerned about protecting his company and getting a good name for it, why didn't he sign the patent over to a not-for-profit group like the FSF or EFF?
What is being made quite apparent is that those behind the major ecommerce companies usually have no clue how to run a business. The smaller ecommerce companies have to be doing something right, because they have little venture capital and 99% of them would be out of business in the blink of an eye if they lacked business savvy. The biggest mistake the ecommerce giants made was getting their customers used to VERY low prices, prices so low that profitability would be unthinkable unless pricing policies changed.
This article is a kind of validation of all the fears, rumors, and suppositions collectively posted on this site. I love this one:
:-)
:-)
"The Internet is an important cultural
phenomenon, but that doesn't excuse its failure to
comply with basic economic laws," said Thomas
Nolle, a New Jersey telecommunications
consultant. "The problem is that it was devised by
a bunch of hippie anarchists who didn't have a
strong profit motive. But this is a business,
not a government-sponsored network."
No, Tommy boy, this is the internet. Who's economic laws are you comparing it to? You run your business as you like. We'll keep doing our own thing.
I look at the apologists and execs for the dot bomb companies and wonder how they ever got hired in the first case. They don't even understand their own medium. I see all sorts of companies doing well over the internet... I can think of any number of pron sites.
I see the reliability problem with the local telco's, who ironicly are credited with the five nines reliability of past. These guys, with their iron grip over the last mile, are the one's that need to be killed twice and cremated.
~Religion is O.K., as long as it gets you laid.
according to a recent Ludwig von Mises institute article (warning: libertarian writings ahead) on the dot com crash, we can blame the federal reserve bank:
...
Sure enough, when you look at the Federal Reserve policy of the late 1990s, you find dramatic inflation of the core measures of the money stock (M2, M3, and MZM [M1 no longer has much meaning because of financial deregulation]). These core measures hit bottom in 1995 and then began a straight upward climb until peaking in early 1999. By 2000, a long fall in the rate of increase was evident in all three, until earlier this year, when the Fed turned on the spigots once again. Why can't the Fed keep going indefinitely? That way lies hyperinflation.
This pattern closely tracks the run-up and subsequent collapse of Internet stocks. Because of the loose money policies of the Fed, venture capitalists enjoyed a huge increase in funds available for investment. What they may or may not have known is that the funding was an illusion created by the central bank. It wasn't based on savings (which actually fell during the same period), and the investments they made were not based on a realistic assessment of firms' earning potential.
...
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Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Is he talking about scarcity?
The fundamental nature of the internet is copying data. It gets copied from the host, copied at the routers, and plants a copy on the user's system. There cannot BE scarcity of information on the Internet, because no one ever needs to lose information to give it to someone else.
The Internet does not obey "economic laws" because of the fundamental nature of information technology, not because someone decided it should be that way. It would be like repealing the law of gravity because it was inconvenient for business, it's a fundamentally stupid suggestion.
sig fault
The equivalent of industrial production in cyberspace, namely coding, is doable with the same resources you need to access the Internet. This gives an essential equality to all participants. What Nolle refers to as "basic economic laws", it seems to me, is actually the sequestering of resources by a few based on their access to money and influence. If they can't play that game, then the system must be unfair, hmm? I am sick of these jerks portraying their beliefs and prejudices as rock-bottom facts.
Others detect a hidden agenda: an attempt by big business to stifle some of the cultural empowerment that the Internet represents. "This is the past trying to kill the future at a time when the future is down," said John Perry Barlow, a former Grateful Dead lyricist who is co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a defender of free speech online. "And it's happening in ways that are generally invisible to the public."
OK, he might be a "hippie", whatever that is, and an anarchist, but he's right. The ad hominem attack is the kind of thing I might expect from a "telecomunications consultant", not a supposedly independent and news organization interested in the public good. The drafters of this document might agree with the EFF. So do I, a flat topped engineer.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
What he's talking about would bring MORE bottle necks, and content conrtol as well as higher prices for everyone. I don't want to give that kind of control to anyone and it is not in this country's best interest to destabilize the net that way. Real Audio packets already rudely give themselves top priortity so that a soap commercial will push my email, telnet and other comunications out of the way. Do I really want someone to be able to decide that RA is right?
There is plenty of inteligent stuff right here. I asked him if he had read it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Funny, but I haven't heard the common man complaining about the internet being unreliable and needing big corporations to step in and save it. I use the internet every day and very seldom (nowadays at least) have any trouble whatsoever.
The LAST THING I want is more commercial control of the internet's core infrastructure, and I imagine most of you agree. (Disclaimer: I work at a big internet company, and nobody here's been complaining about it either). Yet this article makes it sound like businesses are up in arms about it. Does anyone else out there have that experience? Is your business complaining about the anarchistic 'net?
I have a strong feeling this is just FUD being spread by telecom companies who want a bigger piece of the pie -- can you imagine more corporate control somehow bringing costs *down*?
--- egomaniac
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
By what right do they have to complain. Ealier in the article they say that the internet is a business sponsored entity not a government sponsored one. I say bullshit. The internet was brought to the point where it was usable and free by people who wanted to share information. Business muscled it's way in and took over. It was never meant for business and never will be. How can businesses poosibly complain when they are reaching their customers through channels that were not bought and paid for by themselves? They took an established network and leverages it's reach to hit customers around the world.
The solution is simple, if they don't like the internet, then create their own network.. businet or some shit. Get off the public internet and give back the bandwidth you've stolen business, we'll be happier when you're gone.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
But [centralized telcom architecture] also reinforced the AT&T monopoly. As undisputed owner of the phone network, the company dictated how it could be used by customers, who were forbidden to connect any phone to its lines except those that AT&T manufactured and sold. The phone company decided when and how to roll out new services and how much to charge. Innovative features had to pass muster with AT&T's engineers, who often rejected those they thought would encourage competition. Among the rejects: the Arpanet, the government-funded network that evolved into the Internet, which AT&T obstructed for years.
Can you say "Hailstorm"?
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
The funny thing is that the Internet DOES follow "basic economic laws". If it didn't, they wouldn't be basic laws, would they? All the quote shows is that the Internet doesn't follow the laws this twit can remember from school. This is typical, the business equivalent of the slashdot knee jerk condemnation, and follows the law of regression to the mean. If the mean intellegence of all the creatures on the planet is about that of a carp, then this guy has a scaley back.
The internet owes its popularity to its openness.
If it had been otherwise, it would never have become ubiquitous, and these people would not now be bemoaning that they can't make money off of it. They never would have tried.
So now they want to change the rules. Typical, maybe even understandable. But I don't think the commie aspects of the internet are what caused the dot-coms to self destruct. They just tried to bait-and-switch with a lot of free stuff and then stupidly assumed people would get hooked enough to start paying.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
The AOL advertising to the computer tyros urges them to "join" (appealing to the herding behavor inborn in a large percentage of humanity), gushing over things on AOL that you cannot get "anywhere else"... bundled inside their (closed source) product.
The AOL-T-W conglom has a strong hold on the media ... it's usually advertising bought by and shown on their media outlets that has the AOL keyword added to the URL (I wonder about that, all by itself... are they requiring the AOL keyword of their advertisers? ...does this add to their exposure at their advertisers' expense?). I can envision how AOL usage numbers will soar... and they are already providing a corporate-controlled product in a "f(r)ee" market. They are setting themselves up as a viable alternative and serious competitor to the real internet.
Has anyone else noticed this end-run in action?
-Eldurbarn
You're entitled to your opinion, but the simple fact of the matter is that you don't have that bandwidth...you share that bandwidth. Anyone else on your "segment" has to make do with whatever you decide not to use.
Unfortunately, I see both points of view. The problem is, often there's nobody willing to provide the service we need. The local Cable/DSL monopoly provider simply refuses to negotiate a mutually acceptable AUP, or offer multi-tier service, and you're SOL. I'd drop cable for DSL in a heartbeat if I could get an unrestrictive AUP and two static IP's for less than $100/month. But I live 582 feet too far from the CO, and expantion has been a long time coming. My alternative is a T1 line of some sort, and they cost big-$$, and need CSU/DSU's and arcane V.35 cables, etc... What we have now, is similar to the stance of the phone company before "required to serve" regulations went into effect. You got one phone line. Need two? Tough.
my first dial-up was to a main-frame with a homemade PET at 300 baud in 1978...Heck I just wanted to play Star Trek... anyone else remember THAT?
Yup... and punch cards, and paper tape, printing consoles, bridge cards (and skinned knuckles)... Which brings us to acoustic adapters. You see, it was illegal to actually connect anything to the phone line back then. At least anything that wasn't approved by Ma Bell. The acoustic adapter was created to skirt the rules. Not entirely different from quietly running your own mailserver on a cable connection.
Temkin
I hate to give AOL credit, but they deserve it. They are one of the few major ISPs that I see doing it the way it should be, that is, if you share the opinion that the Internet needs to be reconstructed to better facilitate business. AOL, while offering a connection to the not-always-stable Internet, also has its own internal network through which customers receive data from a more reliable or stable source. When doing business over AOL, doing a web cast from an AOL server to an AOL user, you have that direct line that bypasses any of the Internet and it's unfortunate congestion. Why can't more companies do this? That is, build AROUND the Internet, or build to the side of the Internet and offer as part of their service an Internet connection. Redesigning the Intenet, besides being nearly impossible, is going to cost quite a substantial amount of money, and who is going to pay for it? The major ISPs (who will then pass it onto the customers). The point being, why pour money into a redesigning of the Internet when you can use the same resources to build your own network that can offer great service and speed and at the same time, allows for these companies to keep control of their own space without having to share it with other corporations. Administration becomes a bit easier since both the client and the server are the responsibility of a single entity, network sniffing becomes a thing of the past, and all those other evil cracker stories the media likes to propagate. Then, as several of this attached networks start to show up, companies could create partnerships between each other and interconnect themselves with some large "pipes" and allow for cross-network communication without the need of using some sort of unstable, unreliable public network. Leave the Internet to those who enjoy it. Keep it free. Just make a copy of it and package it as your own. Isn't that what companies do anyways?
Yep, you got it right. I've been saying since about '97 we're entering the post-capitalism phase since we're well into the post-industrial agel. So everyone thinks I'm crazy. And I've been writing since about '98 about how you CAN make money using society's new nervous system (the 'Net). Does anyone listen? No, why should they, I'm only a genius (very high intelligence AND very high creativity), with wide-ranging expertise and experience in fields ranging from Wall Street to statistics to human communication and other "soft" sciences. All that doesn't count, because I'm also female and 50!
Nope. Had, like most writers, long and checquered career, which included working in many banks and brokerages, academic work (social sciences), and technical work (programming, documenting, managing).
Fundamentally, no one should make an economic profit. That is to say, no one (including CEOs) should end up with a salary any higher than necessary to find someone with the required skillset, and the profits remaining for dividends should be no higher than necessary to secure enough investors to get the business off the ground. The idea of .coms as wildly profitable businesses just because they were on this new thing called the Internet was always ridiculous. It would be like expecting someone listed on Pricewatch to make enourmous profits because they sell high tech equipment. Instead, those companies make just enough money (most of the time) to keep from defaulting on lease payments.
Likewise, most of these pure internet plays will likely end up with just enough money for a small content staff (or whatever staff they need to get their jobs done) and bandwidth. This is how economics WORKS! That's not to say people's lives are crappy under Capitalism, it just means that only monopolies (which usually only form with government support, like the phone companies or those with intellectual property (Disney, for example, has a narrow monopoly on Mickey Mouse products)) can throw the kinds of wild spending sprees that the .coms were famous for. Real capitalism tends to produce many companies, all barely hanging on by the skin of their teeth, as you see in computer assemblers/parts resellers, restaurants, farming, and so forth.
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Sorry, Nolle but the Internet does respect a basic economic law. Not supply and demand: natural monopoly.
The internet is a public good, it cost so much to build the thing that a market couldn't reap enough benefit to warrant the investment. But, the combined use of lots of people be socially worth the cost if indirectly paid for (taxpayers and ISP subscribers).
And most of the slashdot crowd is right: if entertainment firms want better performance they ought to build their own networks. However, that's kinda what the rest of the article talks about. While some of the people talked about sorting data by priority on the main line, some of those interviewed did mention things like (ostensibly) caching and direct pipelines from "content providers" to major ISP's.
But the "get the hippies out" crowd needs to remember that the 'Net sucks in their eyes because it wasn't worth it to build their own network back in the sixties any more than it would have been cost-effective to build their own Interstate highway systems. And we should all thank $deity that AT&T didn't get wholly on the ARPANet bandwagon. Like the long-distance voice network or the highway system, the internet could have been a monopoly or a public good, and I for one am glad it's the latter.
__
alt.geek
One might ask the same about birds. What ARE birds? We just don't know.
Last I heard, the internet was designed as a model of communication and learning. It's funny how everything changes once you put money in the middle. Remember back in the good ol' says when you weren't prompted with 600 million banners on every site you visited? Perhaps it's a good thing that capitalistic ventures (from a big corp's standpoint) are faultering a bit. Hopefully this will stop any crackhor-of a business from polluting our home with propeganda. ... just my two cents.
~tro
I find this amusing. There's nothing hidden about this agenda -- stifling "cultural empowerment" (ie. empowerment of people other than corporations) is exactly what they're trying to do. They say so themselves, in several quotes in the article. (The author seems to lean somewhat toward the opinions of the business folk, too, which I find odd/unsettling...)
-Erf C.
-Erf C.
Cthulu always calls collect...
Prescriptive laws are, for instance, speed limits. They don't attempt to describe the world but to govern it. These are human social constructs and subject to rapid change. They have a goal (e.g. prohibit bad behaviour), and can be adjusted depending on how well they serve that goal. If you disobey one of these laws you're likely to be punished by your peers.
Descriptive laws are, for instance, gravity. They attempt to understand and explain the world we see. They are not human constructs (unless you're a solipsist), and are not subject to human modification. They serve no goals (unless you're a deist), and do not change. There is no opportunity to disobey these laws.
So what is this guy saying? What types of laws is he talking about? If he means that the Internet is not obeying the descriptive laws of the science economics, then he's fucked: if a verified experiment conflicts with what you think is a law, then the law goes (hint: scientific method). That would mean that the Internet is an exception to economic law. Ergo, economic law is full of holes. Oops. Not much of a descriptive law, eh?
If he means that the Internet won't obey the prescribed laws of the human construct of economics, he's equally fucked: if economic laws work so well, why are we in a recession? If they work so damn well, why was the Internet a surprise to most people? Why was the dot-com hype and crash a surprise?
In short, he's full of shit. He wants economics to be a science so he can be its High Priest ("Only I can interpret the laws of the great God economics."). But he wants it to be a set of regulations that he can impose on things he doesn't understand. Typical late 20th century capitalism, eh?
"We all say so, so it must be true!"
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
This article is silly. Have you ever read over the structure of IP and TCP headers? There's all sorts of neat things in there. One field, I don't remember whether it was TCP or IP, actually does this - sets various priority flags for the data - whether you're concerned about throughput, response time, etc. Near all routers ignore them. Why? Its not profitable.
You don't need to re-write the net. You need to put pressure on backbones to actually use the full potential of the current net (and, to be more swift in implementing IPv6).
-= rei =-
"Well, then fire it up and show me what this..." (sigh)
I didn't know the internet was designed by hippie anarchists...when did the Defence Department start hiring hippies?
...a group of scientists calling themselves "Hippy Anarchists" has called for sweeping changes in the telecommunications consultant industry.
"By adding 'intelligent' consultants, we believe, the system could work faster, avoid stupid-ass quotes in large newspapers, distinguish between their assholes and a hole in the wall, and generally live up to its promise as a profession that might, on occasion, provide useful information to their clients".
I think you'll find that a more insightful perspective comes from replacing the word "Internet" with the words "radio and TV".
.com, .org, .net in exchange for .???
The electromagnetic spectrum used to 'belong' to geeks (called amateurs), before business decided there was money to be made there.
I think there's a lot we can learn from how those geeks of yesterday fought for, and won, not control, but continuing use of portions of the electromanetic spectrum. Those "amateur bands" are free of commercial use, while the rest of the radio spectrum is (largely) free of amateurs.
One reason the commercial interests agreed to leave the amateur bands alone is that, like today, those geeks were employed by those commercial interests and much of what those geeks figured out (on their own time and at their own expense) was used by their commercial employers. Open Source is not a new idea. Radio amateurs (HAMS) have been doing it for more than a century.
We may need to adopt the use of a communications protocol not supported by commercial browsers. We may have to give up 'WWW', in exchange for 'GEEK'. Or maybe we'll give up
But if you want to know what's really going on, follow this link for the bigger picture.
Morris
There's an easy solution to this. Just charge more for anything that's sent with the urgent flag. If it's email, for instance, you could charge users a penny for each KB that's sent with the urgent flag. An ordinary person who doesn't abuse the system could send the occasional urgent email and not notice the cost, but spammers who wanted to do so wouldn't be able to afford it. Similarly, you could charge double price for IPv6 packets that have the priortiy flag set; just count the total packets, the packets with priority flag set, and multiply the monthly bill by 1 + priority/total. That, IMO, is what they mean when they talk about applying to basic laws of economics to the system. Let people have their priority service but make it cost them in some way so they don't abuse the system.
The weakness of the idea, though, is that it's open for another type of abuse: forgery. Real spammers aren't going to worry about extra charges for priority email, since they're forging headers and don't expect to be presented with the bill in the first place. Similarly, the Code Red and Sircam worms aren't going to have any compunctions about using high priority flags, either, since the designers aren't the ones who are going to be footing the bill. But if that makes people take security a bit more seriously, so much the better.
Karma below 50 again. Thanks Karma Kap.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
These are the laws of thermodynamics, not of economics. For economics, at least, the first two are 100% dead wrong. The whole thing that makes capitalism work in the first place is that you most certainly can win. If I have something that I think is worth $100 and you think is worth $200, I can sell it to you for $150 and we're both ahead of where we started. I have money that I feel is worth more than the object I started out with, and you have an object that you think is worth more than what you payed for it. That's a win/win situation. In fact, there's no reason for anyone to engage in a voluntary economic activity (i.e. not paying taxes) that doesn't leave them ahead of where they started out, so the fact that people are constantly buying and selling things is strong evidence that they think that they're getting ahead by doing so.
Karma below 50 again. Thanks Karma Kap.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
ok, if another website goes down, there's nothing you can do about it. But if your connection dies, then your ISP is probably your only link to the internet, so they should know something. It may be something beyond their control (maybe one of their connections is having problems), but they are where you connect to the internet, so if your connection isn't working (and it's not a problem on your end), they should know what's happening. Maybe they can't solve the problem, but they should be able to tell you where it is (at least more accurately than you could find out yourself)
---
They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
But of course - it's their god-given right to take all your money and control your life! What else would you expect from the people destined to be the true masters of the universe?
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They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
>not having a clue who their ISP is
if they expect a working connection they'd better know who their ISP is. This might be a case of managers trying to do everything instead of the tech people who were trained to do it.
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They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
The funny thing here is that what they say they want to do could easily turn into the stupides thing ever - re-inventing the whole internet. They don't like the way things are, so they want to start from scratch. And we all know how well that works :)
I just hope they never get around to trying to do this the smart way.
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They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
It's like napster against gnutella - the speed of a centralized server (which has to be a very good server for this to work) against the open target for problems it causes.
This 2 minutes between post thing is great for generating traffic, because I keep clicking submit until it goes through!
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They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
The hardest part was getting past the 'reinstall windows' tier of support
:)
Try insisting that they have to re-install all their routers and wiring
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They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
In this case, the person is complaining that they are too stupid to know who to call when something goes down. Let's say someone accidentally cuts through a backbone and most of the sites they access don't work anymore. When this happens, they can call their ISP, who can call their provider, until they get up to the company that controls the backbone, that should know when it goes down. Even if some of the sites do still work, the ISP can be a good source of information, because they know how to get information from higher places (even if you wanted to call the backbone owner to ask about the status, how would you know the problem is there? The best reason to call your ISP is that they can find the problem if it's with them or pass it on to the next level if it's not.)
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They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
As I say below, even when some sites are still working, calling your ISP can help (unless you feel you can analyze the entire north american portion of the internet from your computer). Let's say a few routers go down somewhere, and some of the sites your company uses regularly are cut off. After you know your connection with your ISP is good, you call them. They find that they problem isn't on their side, so they call their connections. It keeps going until they find where the problem is, and knowing this helps you know what to do (try again, wait a while, use the 'TCP/IP over avian carriers' protocol). It may not always work this well (depending on what your ISP things of you), but putting the question through the same route that your connection goes can save you time and get an answer. Of course this may not be the best thing for an end-user, but for a large data-storage company it's a great way to find the problem and know if there are any solutions and when it will be fixed.
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They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
Taxes aren't all that bad. Would you like to remove all taxes and pay the full price (divided among users) of every pulic service you use? Would you like to have a special device in your car to bill you for every 50 meters of road you use? This is not the way to get privacy - you would have to be tracked everywhere for billing. Sure, some people pay for things they don't use, but others get a lot more than they pay for.
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They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
One of the people says "If something goes down, you don't even know who's accountable. The Internet is, like, 'Who ya gonna call?' "
hmm... maybe START WITH YOUR ISP!!!! It's really not that hard to figure out - they are responsible for connecting you to the internet, so when there's a problem, call them! I wish he would go compete in the darwin awards olympics. What a fucking idiot!
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They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
To quote the article:
"The Internet is an important cultural phenomenon, but that doesn't excuse its failure to comply with basic economic laws," said Thomas Nolle, a New Jersey telecommunications consultant. "The problem is that it was devised by a bunch of hippie anarchists who didn't have a strong profit motive. But this is a business, not a government-sponsored network."
Bleh. First off the Internet is based on an idea the military came up with (ARPANet), so it wasn't devised by a bunch of "hippie anarchists". Secondly, it wasn't designed with business in mind, it was designed to propogate information. This is a grand case of a supposed expert not knowing what he's talking about.
As said before and most likely again, the issue shouldn't be changing the Internet to fit businesses, but rather changing the businesses to fit the Internet. Yes, a lot of ideas failed. That doesn't mean the Internet is useless. It simply means you have to look at what it can offer and use it for that. It's a learning process, but so many higher management types don't want to take the time to do the neccessary research. They want results, and fast, so they make the techies throw something together with a poor business model and a poor support structure. And guess who gets blamed/laid-off when the whole thing goes south?
Electronic Frontier Foundation for online civil rights information
the Internet for a profit has resulted in calls to modify the basic structure of the Internet itself so it will "obey basic economic laws".
then they can build there own damn NET! call it biznet. Get all that damn commercialism off the internet.
The internet was designed to allow an exchange of information, NOT an exchange of money.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"The Internet is an important cultural phenomenon, but that doesn't excuse its failure to comply with basic economic laws," said Thomas Nolle, a New Jersey telecommunications consultant. "The problem is that it was devised by a bunch of hippie anarchists who didn't have a strong profit motive. But this is a business, not a government-sponsored network."
first of all, I would say that basic economic laws have failed on the internet.
Hippie anarchists? yes all those hippie anarchist that work with veries governmant agencies.. sheeesh. How about Idealistic Scientist who actual created something to be the conduit for those ideals? How about a government project that became open to all? The internet was not created for business, it's most basic structure is designed to be open.
Get a clue. With the current internet structure, there is a business model that works. The unfortuante thing is nternet business have been run by the wrong part of the product chain.
the people whoi can really make money, and save money for the consumer are the manufactures.
for example, if the company that prints the final copy of a book decides to not only sell to the next person in the chian i.e. middleman but also offers the book through there web site at the same cost they sell it to the middle man, they would make a killing on inter net sales. there the people thatcan make a book so much cheaper then B&M outlets it would be worth waiting 3 days for the book to arrive. hell they could probanly sell it for 5% more then they sell it to the middlemen, and still have a boat lod of sales.
what this means is the business chain changes, not basic economic laws. Of course when ever something this entrenched starts to change, it is opposed by those making money in the current chain. It will take a company with bold and dynamic leadership to make this work, but it can be done.
If anyone out there is looking for someone who can lead a company in this direction, and create a positive revenue stream, send me an email:
dadinportland@yahoo.com
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
so it's the fault of the Internet's structure that the crappy business models like CueCat and Pets.com fail? It's the weakness of the infrastructure that drove users to Napster and now Gnutella? It's the major flaw in "openness" that pamphletware and vapour don't derive a profit?
big business can go build their own internet if they want a totally controlled, pseudo-capitalist entity that will force users to roll over and get screwed. But don't blame us if no one shows up..
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
If this is indeed valid contact information for this capitalist bastard ^H^H^H^H^H^H person, then yeah, send him an e-mail telling him how wrong he is! But be articulate and polite, so we don't see an article in the LA Times where he says "The Internet is basically populated by ranting jerks and script kiddies, as well as those anarchistic hippies."
Freedom: "I won't!"
Correction: You have to earn at least as much as you spend.
Money is to business what food is to humans. If you consistently eat less that you use, you starve and die. If you consistently eat more than you use, you get obese and have health problems. The obese companies/organizations, the ones that are trying to overcome their size problems without cutting down on their intake relative to their output, are the ones that are causing a lot of our troubles.
Edward Burr
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
To mark this article down as flamebait -1. Really do you actually think there will be any sort of discussion other then "this guys an idiot" out of our group? For my opinion on the actual article please read everything that is moderated up because some moderator got pissed off and moderated everything that was anti-this-article.
A good scapegoat is nearly as welcome as a solution to the problem.
-Earthling
-Earthling
"I'm sorry, I had to; the irony was just too thick."
I've remarked in the past that the reason that people are so disappointed in the Internet is because they're expecting something that works like the telephone.
The article here echoes my point. Businesses are complaining that the Internet is (1) not reliable enough, and (2) not fast enough. I get the impression that they're primarily concerned with real time audio and video, two applications that are particularly sensitive to speed and reliability problems.
We cannot give these people an Internet that's good for their needs without throwing away the net as we have it now. Perhaps it's very good that Michels (whoever this guy is) says in the article: "We don't have any control over the Internet". Mr. Michels, it's by design. Even bright people don't have control over the Internet. Business suits should think about what they understand and leave engineering alone.
-- Stanislav Shalunov
Thinketh the businessman (or his lackey): By adding "intelligent" switches and other devices, they believe, the system could work faster, avoid traffic jams, distinguish between high-priority data and other material that can wait, and generally live up to its promise as a worldwide communications and entertainment medium.
So, on a system designed to be open for everyone's use, you want to decide the priority of transmissions. I wonder who's going to have higher priority under your new schema: you selling an underwater douche kit to some lamer for $14.95, or me researching a paper on Astrophysics for a college class? These capitalism-for-higher-profit-at-all-costs types make me sick.
"What we elect to call imagination is mere combination of things not heretofore combined." - Frank Norris
QOS and all the other things the suits need are already in place in IPv6. It's just a question of how they'll be applied. Existing service providers want to charge for QOS as a utility. Unfortunately, that means only a small subset of the corporate economy gets the benefit. This is an attempt to build grassroots support among the suits to provide QOS another way, a way that will benefit more corporations.
The way the world works today, you can buy bandwidth depending on your pocketbook. For instance, my cable provider has bronze, silver, and gold plans with corresponding amounts of bandwidth and prices. Cable modem is faster (and more expensive -- most places) than ISDN which in turn is faster and more expensive than POTS.
What the backbone providers and ISPs want to do is meter QOS. For an extra ten bucks a month, your pr0n will wave its card at the tollbooth and sail on through, while the HOT XXX TEENS destined for those of us with lighter wallets will wait in line.
You think the net is slow now, wait till this happens.
The announcement is designed to change that. Under this vision, if I may be permitted to connect the dots on something that's poorly articulated in the LA Times article, people who click on www.bloatedweasels.com will be given gold service if they're the top-level managers (i.e., they'll get really fast downloads), silver service if they're regular customers (a little slower), and the rest of us will be given bronze service.
Since this is considerably less onerous than what the backbone providers have in mind, I'm for it.
Since it will take approximately fifteen minutes before /. and similar sites manage to give gold service to everybody, I'm for it again.
Beyond which, the "laws" of Adam Smith are based on one particular slice of economic phase space. They rely critically on control of scarce resources to maximize output or profit. On the Net, the resource most often bandied about -- ie., conent -- has no marginal cost. (There is a fixed cost to make the first copy of it, of course -- research, editing, whatnot) -- but not marginal cost. The "last item made" costs nothing.
Nolle is really whining "I don't know how you can make money on the Net. And who's going to pay for a consultant with no answers? This must be fixed! Boo hoo!"
Then he babbles on to say
Leaving aside the reasonable counter-contention that perhaps its hippie-anarchist roots are precisely the source of the Net's strength, let's address that final sentence. "This" is a business. What is "this"? The Net as a whole? That's entirely laughable. That's like saying "The highway is a business." Or "Kings County" is a business.The Net can be a medium in which business is done. It is far from a monolithic business of its own... which is great. It's a mechanism by which different businesses -- and sometimes even the forgotten citizen -- can interact and ease transactions. So let me shout it from the mountaintops: The Net is not a business! It was never meant to be. It never should be."
On the other hand, considering the origins, it actually is a government-sponsored network. That's a fact, jack. It might have grown beyond those origins but they're still there. And they should be retained, as well.
Let us now turn our attention to Michael Roberts, former chairman of the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers,
This, to me, sounds a lot like "War is too important to be left to the generals". (A philosophy that worked, oh so well, in the early 20th century.) Apparently Mr. Roberts would like un talented engineers to maintain the Net. (Of course, it's far from surprising that someone associated with ICANN would -- shocker! -- support more centralized control of the Net and its namespace.)The really sad thing is, these people -- by proclaiming themselves experts -- will convince the average citizen that business should warp the Internet into whatever generates the highest short-term profits. *sigh*
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Not even that. Why can't I ever get live chat support from a company? I don't want to wait on hold; I just want an answer to my problem, and text is generally better anyway. It's unambiguous wrt punctuation and spelling (I recently had the joy of listening to the Qwest tech tell me "Type 'set', s-e-t, space, 'vci', victor charlie indigo, space, 32, 3-2. Then press 'enter'.").
Companies whine about how much phone support costs. Fine. Junk your phone center, get 3 guys and an IRC server. You will be able to respond to many many more people at one time (I routinely carry on 3-5 chat sessions simultaneously), your customers will be happier, and you will save money.
And speaking of word-of-mouth: Never ever ever purchase DSL from Qwest. They are incompetent, broken, and take forever to call me back.
--
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
They keep talking about traffic jams, QoS, etc. Isnt ipv6 suppose to fix most of this?
Business wants to take over and kill something that's revolutionized the world. Why am I not surprised?
____
Skivvy Niner? Email me!
HEY! Look left just ONE MORE TIME!
Time to play that time honored American game: Who you gonna blame?
I blame this on the IT guys, just like I blame them for everything else.
EC
while reading the article I kept having to remind myself they were talking about the internet ... and not the highway infrastructure.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Another factor is people. Not only the marketing bullshitters, not only the CEO's from hell, but also the "oh-so-clever-programmers-who-think-they-can-do-al most-anything". First think, then do.
People would use internet for purchases, in their supermarkets already had SQL servers and delivery services (like pizza). People would buy things and cars online, if the companies had a working, not a marasmatically "cool" model of presenting their merchandize.
Internet could have been the coolest entertainment medium (and still can), plus information source, but only if the companies would use their brains correctly and listen to their own engeneers instead of PR whores and consultants.
Well, yeah, I guess we should have "carefully managed" Adolf Hitler's viewpoint of the world and avoided that whold WWII deal. Get out of the ivory tower and come join the sturggle for what's right. There is right and wrong. There are ideas and values that hurt society and ideas and values that help society. Which side are you on?
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
Gotta love David Gilmour, huh?
-Corvidae
(yes, it is a totally shameless plug for a flundering sourceforge project)
[pink beam of light]
Damn, I wish I had mod status right now! Well said!
Translation: So now it's the turn of the suits, the MBAs, the marketing types, the politicians, the moronic pinheads of the world, to try and take over the net and turn it to their purpose.
Here, have an Outlook Virus.
"The Internet is an important cultural phenomenon, but that doesn't excuse its failure to comply with basic economic laws," said Thomas Nolle, a New Jersey telecommunications consultant. "The problem is that it was devised by a bunch of hippie anarchists who didn't have a strong profit motive. But this is a business, not a government-sponsored network."
F you. Why don't you do what the educational sector did and create your own network. Call it I3, and tell people that it's like the Internet, but nothing on it is free, ie all content must be subscribed to.. I'm sure people will be signing on by the thousands..
These guys invited themselves to our party, they don't like the music so now they somehow feel that they have the right to change it.. How rude. If you don't like the music, then leave.
If the Internet was what this guy wanted, then people wouldn't be on it. I'd be wondering how much it would cost me to get hooked up to something like guerilla.net..
Why do I keep typing pythong?
Last time I checked I still was having to pay my ISP. And the ISP I work for was having to pay another provider for access to their backbone. And that provider had some complicated deal worked out with other major providers that allowed them so share data on their networks, ensuring that they would get paid.
And now some suits are crying because the net is not making them any money? They want to change the way the net works to better allow for big businesses to provide me with data?
People tend to forget that the entity that is the net is ultimately paid for by the consumer of the net. The government and educational institutions might have foot the bill in the early days but it's been a while since that has been the case. Right now we the internet consumer pay for it's upkeep.
However, if you invest a truckload of money putting something on the inet, and then lose it due to poor management, flawed business model, script kiddies, etc, you have just experienced nothing more than anyone who has ever opened up a business before. It might fail.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
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"To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking: Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!"
Wasn't the first ARPANET connection between UC Berkeley and somewhere on the east coast via phone lines? Or am I thinking of something else...
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"To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking: Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!"
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"To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking: Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!"
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"To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking: Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!"
"If we admire the Net, should not a burden of proof fall on those who would change the basic assumptions that brought it about in the first place?"
I was going to just write off the article as SoCal tissue, but my eye was caught at the end by this:
*BOGGLE* Oh indeed; lets have those Harvard MBAs configuring Cisco 8100s, shall we? This is a former chair of IANA! He should know better!If you are a hippie anarchist and would like to let Mr. Thomas Nolle how you really feel, a little research in Google provided me with this information: Nolle is president of CIMI Corp., a technology assessment firm in Voorhees, N.J. He can be reached at (609) 753-0004 or tnolle@cimicorp.com
It annoy's me when my cable connection goes down, but, I do understand exactly why it does go down, too many line splices and generally shitty quality of network administration. My ISP's DNS server crashes about once a day for about an hour, there SMTP server dies all the time, their news server crashes with sending large amounts of message headers, and its all running on windows. So, who do I blame for my internet being messed up once in a while, corporations. Why would I be interested in them "improving" my internet experience.
Spring is here. Don't believe me, look outside!
The great thing about the Internet is that no one person can change it to meet their own needs. In this guy's world, who would decide what was "high-priority data" and what "other material can wait?" The one whose originator is paying more money?
I'm glad that these people have little chance of changing anything. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
Anyway, her net worth is estimated between five and ten million. The majority of that is revenue from her web site, not her film career. In fact, she has made so much money from her web site (basically charging people to look at her pictures -- she's in the studio every week), that she has basically retired from the film industry.
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
I can see internet3 coming down the pipeline. Businesses can pay the way towards developing a 3rd network suited towards there needs. internet stays the way it is, open. internet2 grows to help facilitate the worlds educational needs.
I beg to differ. If I desire to run a private mail server for myself, and a little webs ite for myself, I shouldn't have to pay the insane fees that are rquired to co-locate a machine, nor have to live under the restrictions of remote web hosting. I have co-located in the past wehn it was a business reality that I need a highbandwidth, 100% uptime line with 24/7 Monitoring for something I am doing and thats worth the $$$, but for my personal mail there is no reason I should have to do that and it should be my right to do so. I should have the right to negotiate my service agreement. Esspecially when I have only one method of access available to me. I live in the US and I have some rights to act. I also have the right to ask that my rights get some defense.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
I repeat, it is simply my desire to run my own mail server, and web host for my own personal purposes. I have plenty of expirence running these services, I was an internet user before there was ever a web, I remember using archie for god sakes. My Cable modem is the only choiuce I have other than 56K dialup for internet connection in my area. I run my own mail server, because I know that the only reason its gonna be down is if I take it down. I can have as many addresses as I like, for whatever purposes. I can store as much mail as I like so long as I don't run out of disk. The same goes for my web server, I can post what i like, when I like, not have to worry about service restrictions. For what i do with either of them or my FTP for that matter, 39.95 a month and 500K of bandwidth is good, I don't need to pay outragous fees to co-locate my server somewhere where its out of my control. I still contend it should be my right to do what I want with that line.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
I am not the an all knowing seer, but you had to figure this was coming, and we have heard rumblings before. Its been appearent, in things like the road runner services sending montly news letters about the great things you can find(for a fee). Its inevitable that eventually the network providers, would want to become contant providers and start showing preference for the content they wish to provide over the content that an intelligent user could search for on their own.
The Time has come for us to start demanding freedom of connection. Once the ISP has given us a line and an IP(Via Cable/DSL/Whatever) we should have everyright to do what WE want with that connection. If the world in this article comes to pass then and ISP would be looking at our packets for service type. Then saying "well thats a Quake packet no need to rush with that one, this packet thats coming through showing the lastest commercial for Chevy Trucks(who our database says paid us this month) via Realaudio(Who is the exclusive preferred video content provider for out network) is much more important. The way it should be, for the most part is, and should remain is equal consideration for all packets. Big Business please get off the internet, the real internet users(not the AOL lamers) have more important things to do. The true probelm is that its hard to get to the backbone, and because of that we have little control of what happens on the way there. Things should get opened up more, and that would solve some problems. it should be my choice what traffic I give and take and what i do with my connection if i want to run a web server, and a mail server of my own(which I do, in violation of the terms of service with my cable provider) then I should be able too. They really peved me as it appears they recently blocked my server from being able to answer DNS queries, which took my domain down for several days while I was away on a trip. They are the only game in town for high speed internet, and its annoying to not beable to do what i wish with my connection(verizon will not do DSL to far away, refuses to ISDN(to slow anyway), and refuses to create the infrastructure for anything else so i am stuck with my cable modem. I hate to involve the govenment, but perhaps its time for some consumer protection laws reguarding the internet.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
"The Internet is an important cultural phenomenon, but that doesn't excuse its failure to comply with basic economic laws," said Thomas Nolle, a New Jersey telecommunications consultant. "The problem is that it was devised by a bunch of hippie anarchists who didn't have a strong profit motive. But this is a business, not a government-sponsored network."
:)) and start thinking about the whole system. It's a pyramid, folks, and the money starts at the top.
I hope that bastard is hit by a stray Webvan truck on his way home. How do these people get jobs? On a side note, I am also an "expert" and would like to be paid accordingly (I mean why not, I know various "hip internet terms" so I must be smart).
I think this individual read the back cover of a "1000 businesses you can run from your car for under $100" and decided he was an economic expert.
Actually, the Internet does follow economic "laws" (actually there are no economic "laws" just theory and statistical data). It's called price elasticity of demand. Demand is high because the price is low. If you raise the price, people will still buy, but probably not quite so much. The more you raise the price, the less people will use it. And there go the network effects (economic term, no pun intended, although I guess it really isn't a pun anyways) you'd be getting by having millions of users on the 'net.
So now you've got a giant fiber network around the world and no one's using it. Good job, you've proved another economic "law." You can't sell something people don't want. Welcome to the world of dot-bombs.
Companies like <Backbone provider> might make some money on QoS traffic but don't expect some company on the east coast making money off of me (on the west coast) simply because I want to use the Internet. Only internation corporations will be able to make money, and my guess is that they already are! Backbone providers aren't expanding their networks because it will please a bunch of "hippie anarchists" they do it because there is a profit to be made.
I think this "telecommunications consultant" needs to finish his BA (or is it BS
No matter how many times I punched that $(*&# monkey, I never did get my $20. Obviously, something here needs to be fixed.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
The internet was designed to be a research tool, used by accademia. That should never be compramised to suit the needs of businesses. Businesses need to learn to use hte medium as it is. I am all for adding additional infrastructure and standards (like XML for catalogs, etc) but restructuring the internet is rediculess. If they wanna create their own protocol (Business Transfer Protocol anyone?) then I'm all for it.
:) )
Just remember where the internet came from, all you big shots out there. (And no, it wasn't Al Gore
Buisness does'nt see why they should respond to consumer demand unless they can control exactly what the consumer gets.
The Internet is generally stupid
Gotta love the American freemarket system. If you can't make money get the government to regulate. When you are making money and have near total control complain how government regulation is un-American.
And the best part is your tax dollars pay for the whole process.
By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more. - Albert Camus
Business wanted to have the regulation of the media (electric utilities) the way they wanted, rather than the public (governmental) regulation that was in place. The new regs were based on capitalist principals, where the best system is supposed to come to be through "market forces". This is what I meant. If that isn't what happened in California, could you explain what did, so that I'll better informed?
If that is what happened, what's the difference between that and what they are proposing for the Internet? Businesses always want to stack the deck in their favor, but that doesn't mean they are capable of it when given the chance.
science is a religion
My religion works too. There is an all-powerful God, who made the universe as He saw fit.
Science is an attempt by mankind to figure out how it works in the physical plane. To people that only believe in science, science is the religion that explains their world.
science is a religion
How many people do you know who abuse the priority flag in the email they send? I can think of a few (and yes, email does get through faster that way).
science is a religion
Businesses that have traditionally been able to control their prices to maximize profit suddenly find themselve unable to do so. With near infinite supply, price controls are nearly impossible. That's why O.S. works so well and business has had such a tough time on the net. It's hard to be successful and greedy when what you're selling doesn't cost anything to reproduce.
Bandwidth is not free, and I can understand a market for that. The information on it is free to reproduce, and businesses that have grasped that have done well (barring lawsuits). Hopefully, people will realize the benefits of privatization don't apply to everything (compare with California electricity) and won't cave in to businesses whose only care is their profit, not public good.
science is a religion
So basically he's calling defense scientists working for DARPA a bunch of hippie anarchists... heheheh... nuthin like talkin outta your @$$ :)
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
Heh. Nice rant. I was following along nicely until I hit your signature. You're not biased on this one, are you?
K45.
This signature has eleven vowels.
The Internet has basically catalyzed the formation of a virtual direct democracy, albeit in its nascent stages. When ordinary citizens can easily announce their complaints to the world, when citizens can easily organize campaigns against errant corporations, and when grassroots movements (such as drug policy reform) are growing like they've got Miracle Grow feeding them, you just have to know that something is up.
The "brains" in the big corporations see all this coming at them in spades, and thus, unsurprisingly, they are rabidly coming up with schemes to reverse this powerful trend.
Along with the nascent Anti-Globalization "movement" (I cannot call it a movement until the organizers discover what their focus should be), we are seeing the beginning of a major power conflict between the common citizenry and corporate behemoths.
This is a conflict that the common citizenry *must* win. Or else it's 1984.
Steve Magruder
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
This reminds me of some kids up the street wanting to get in on my game of (insert game here). They refuse to play by the established rules and can't adjust their style to my game. I tell them how it's played and the rules are set.
So then they get frustrated and continue to break all the rules, but no one else cares, and the game continues.
They eventually lose the game, despite having played for a tenth of the time I have, and go away crying to their mommies and daddies.
Well, if they want to win, they can make up their own game and stay outta mine.
Well, I say, Thomas Nolle is a consultant living in New Jersey but that doesn't excuse his total and complete lack of a clue ...
It's sad to think someone pays this guy for his ideas when they could be paying me to watch TV instead.
I'm sorry, but I'm paying for some of that pipe too... who is anyone else to say that my email to my mom containing a picture of my son is any more or less important than some banks finanacial data or someone's pr0n download.
If companies want better reliability, build private networks... nothing is stopping them.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Remember that vast majority of the infrastructure of the net is controlled by private companies, running on hardware almost exclusively from a single source (Cisco.)
Truer words were never spoken. The simple fact of the mattr is that *ALL* modern communications systems are susceptible to this type of control. The ARPAnet was a *military* creation, and the underlying redundancy required to survive a nuclear attack can simply be controlled by turning off the flow under their control--they wouldn't have designed it any other way. To assume the "Internet" is any different is at best foolhardy.
Regarding economics: why is it that everyone accepts this pseudoscience as a valid discipline? So a bunch of Chicago-trained aristocratic apologists for the status quo trot out their charts on M1 and M2 and we're supposed to believe them because hack staff writers in the media indulge in reckless appeals to authority in *all* their reportings?
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, The Histories
Apparently, commenting is all this guy does.
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We want some answers and all that we get
Some kind of shit about a terrorist threat
- Ministry
What about something that supplements the existing internet, like I2? Business gets their smart fast controlled network, and we get our free (slightly) slower less accountable one. That way everyone's happy.
--- On the other hand, you have five fingers.
if company's have a big o'le stock of lawyers who are changing the face of the internet away from being for information exchange and towards being walmart... what are we supposed to do to stop this? how do we say no to the lawyers and work to prevent the future commercialization of the internet? because if we don't do anything... they will win.
Yeah I agree, people using the internet primarily want to exchange information. The average person uses the internet to find out more about his hobbies, to communicate with his friends etc. , only a small percentage of time is spent shopping at online stores. Nobody wants to hang around Amazon, EBay, etc. all day. I think the internet is a bad medium for things like tv, video, phone etc. anyway, centralized broadcasts are much more efficient.
Ever hear of the Lynx browser? Works great, and Java-free too!
actually, i used lynx quite a bit on my first internet account, a solaris shell that didn't even support ppp connections. (i later compiled slirp to get around that limitation, and learned quite a bit in the process)
i don't object to graphics at all... they can be very useful, and sometimes (as with sites like heavy.com) can significantly enhance the experience. but i don't like the trend of stuffing as much flash and such onto a page as possible, just because it can be done. text still works as the best disseminator of information in the most platform-neutral format, which is why my web page doesn't have anything on it more complicated than an occasional image and some avoidable frames.
--saint----
Attention corporate whores:
I write to you as someone who's been on the Internet a fairly long time. I'm not the archetypal grungy Unix guy from the basement, but I remember cursing when my favorite gopher holes were replaced by web sites. I don't write my own device drivers or build my own hardware, but I try to learn from those who can.
That's the point of the Internet, you see. Learning.
I don't want your advertisements shoved in my face. I don't want banner ads or flash filled sites funded by this week's trendy diet cola. Hell, I don't even want graphics all that much. I want information.
The Internet has the potentiality to be the greatest repository of information in the history of the world. You're trying to turn it into the digital equivalent of the crinky paper fliers in my Sunday newspaper.
I don't want it. Very few people do.
I wake up in the morning and there's a Pepsi ad on the radio. Then there's one on the television when I watch the news. I figure I'll escape to the movies, there's one there as well. What the hell would I want to look at more ads for?
Speaking as a .org-owning netizen, you can take all of your "economic responsibility," fold it until it's all sharp corners, hold it in the palm of you manicured marketer's hand, and shove it straight up your ass.
You want streaming video ads and the like to every desktop in America? Build your own fucking network. That's not what this one is for.
--saint----
The idea of one network to meet the needs and interests of the public, the academic community, and the commercial sector doesn't really work, and is bound to provide only marginally satisfactory performance to all three.
The academic community needs a place to exchange ideas and information as freely as possible. The public needs a place from which it can get the latest music video, maybe play some Counterstrike, read some e-mail, and check the news. The business sector needs a place in which it can provide a reliable service that has 100% uptime for every person who wants to use it, while providing secure storage and protection of important corporate data.
The academics, at least, understand this. Thus, Internet 2.
As other posters have pointed out, the whole idea of the internet is to share information. But things evolve, and change. As long as business interests are the large players in the internet, control over information flow will naturally continue to tighten. In an economy based on information, secrets become crucial, and facilitating the relatively unrestricted flow of data and information that makes up today's internet is not only counterproductive, but questionable due diligence.
So the needs of the academic and research communities will still be served, even if they have to build their own playground. The needs of business will be served because they have the money necessary to remodel our playground.
Private users will probably just have to carve out the best niche they can. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a resurgence in the Compuserve / AOL private network strategy in the coming years. While private users may make up the bulk of internet traffic, there's no real way to coordinate them to the point of building their own network in any reasonable way. Things like this cost money, and nobody's willing to pay for it.
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
the article being discussed here is about Quality of Service - nothing more. The reporter who wrote it was looking to sensationalize it by discussing the potential abuses that could result from installation of QOS capable routers, but when it comes down to it QOS is a good thing where the advantages outweigh the disadvantages 10 to 1.
It will allow large scale carier grade IP telephony, a host of high bandwidth services and untild flexibility, although it does have the potential to obscure the idea that I (joe customer) have paid for bandwidth and should be able to do with it what I please. This is disappointing and potentially dangerous but it's just a matter of reading through the terms of service before signing with an ISP. Realistically though, this is no different than is the case now - if you didn't read the contract carefully, you might get screwed. What do you think Asynchronous DSL is? YOu get a lot of bandwidth down and a little bandwidth up, because the ISP doesn't want you hosting a website off your residential DSL. They want you to pay for the business package for that. There's nothing new here, just reporter sensationalism. That's all there is to it.
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
Plus, someone should tell him that the "laws" of economics are wholly unlike the laws of physics
Actually, they're quite similar, in at least one respect:
If you can break it, then it wasn't a law to begin with.
Living better through chemicals
Letter: The Internet is an important cultural phenomenon, but that doesn't excuse its failure to comply with basic economic laws," said Thomas Nolle, a New Jersey telecommunications consultant. "The problem is that it was devised by a bunch of hippie anarchists who didn't have a strong profit motive. But this is a business, not a government-sponsored network."
I would be ecstatic if the internet remains forever out of the grasp of "basic economic laws". I'm not so naive to think it will, though, because of rapacious corporations bents on having cultural phenomena bow to their profit motives. I'm definitely not foolish enough to believe that the Internet was "devised by a bunch of hippie anarchists" since it in fact sprung from the Arpanet project in the US military. But I guess "telecommunications consultant[s]" don't need to know history, since according to cyber-libertarians history ended with U.S. liberal capitalism.
I havent read the whole stories, this is a respond to the topic.
I think the internet is created with communications in mind and not a thing to make money out, probably the first design only costed money, which it did i guess....
Why do people always try to make money, they also do it with the phones, telemarketing rings a bell, do you think that makes money in the end ? i have no idea, but i keep turning them down and i think in the end things like that will die and only a couple of people make big bucks out of it.
So commercial people forget the internet and leave it just for communications...
One of the complaints, that of the "dumb" internet, is directly caused by business not being willing to shoulder the costs and time required to fully implement IPv6. The faults with TCP/IP are directly attributable to business resistance with rolling out the changes that we've been talking about throughout the 90s.
But what do I know, I've been on the Net ever since the early 80s.
Face it, they want the taxpayers to pay for it, even though we already paid for the Net in the first place, and they're just trying to wangle subsidies for their own nefarious schemes.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
The Internet is an important cultural phenomenon, but that doesn't excuse its failure to comply with basic economic laws
And there it is. The internet has slammed right up against the face of capitalism. Capitalism is the national religion of America. If it doesn't involve money, it isn't American. So when something as un-capitilistic as internet comes along, the proud American capitalists amongst us become angry and upset. The notion that the internet needs some 'excuse' to not comply with basic economic laws drives home just how pervasive capitalism is in our society.
What's missing here is perspective: Since when does everything have to revolve around capitialism? That's what this yo-yo missed. Yeah, the internet isn't capitilistic. Tough. Get over it. Move on. Same with the GPL. It doesn't suprise me one bit that MS and others would call the GPL "un-American". It IS un-American insofar as it's not capitalistic.
What's needed here is a broader appreciation in America for things in life that don't have to do with money. What's the point of life, after all? Happiness. So long as we're happy, it doesn't matter how we got there. And I think there would be many more happy people out there once we all start to realize that money isn't everything.
I can see these suits brainstorming for other ideas...
"I hate it when the weather is bad! Why don't we just re-wire the earth, so it will only rain when convieniant for our buisnesses!"
"I hate the way I have to stop for all these lights when I'm driving my car. Why don't we have a service just to raise half the roads up into the air, so we wouldn't ever have to stop! Somebody get my venture capitalist on the line!"
"This concept of linear time just doesn't fit into our buisness plan. Johnson, I want a buisness plan for a company that would reverse time, thus allowing us to rent it out to customers at overly inflated rates. Have it on my desk by yesterday."
--- obligatory line so you don't skip the last part of my message!
Is anybody else out there starting to get dangerously depressed with this ongoing assault on freedom of information? I swear, it's enough to make me want to just unplug, buy a bunch of (paper) books (while you can still get them, that is) and just take the wife and guitar and move to some island with no phone, no fiber, no DirectTV. The USA is just fscked. Realistically, I don't know that we can fight this. The Content & Control companies will end up turing the Net into "57 websites and nothin' on." Oh yeah, with individually-targeted ads and consumer monitoring through video surveillance. How long do you think we have left before even the illusion of this being a free society is abandoned?
The funny part? Two years ago I would have thought this sounded paranoid.
When Hitler returns, he'll probably be the president of the United States. Or maybe he'll even be a cyber-hippie like one of us who's so obsessed with online rights that he'd sacrifice offline rights for them.
We may have a leader who sacrifices freedom to save the environment. For example, he may shut down power plants at night, or forbid auto transportation at certain times.
My biggest concern is biotech. "Our generation" (born after 1965, before 1990) is so obsessed with cyber rights that we're ignoring biotech. What's up with Celera, Monsanto, and all the stem-cell and cloning guys? A lot of today's hippies are uneducated about biology and prejudiced against biotech. After earning our B.S. in C.S. and working a computer job for a few years, we pretend that we've suffered to learn enough to hold a job, and refuse to learn anything about biology, and hate those who do. Well guess what? Our kids are going to learn genetic engineering, and create their own nations of fantasy creatures, storybook plants, and 140-year-old humans.
Excuse me? The for profit company providing their e-mail is responsible for the weeklong outage, not the network. What a wonderful point in an argument that the Internet should be privatised.
True - but then that is their job - to hunt out the good prospects from teh bad - and like all of use amatuer investors - they failed miserably!
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
Was it stupid business plans? Venture capitalists with unrealistic expectations?
I guess it was only a matter of time til failures started to blame the network that gave them the opportunity to succeed.
Let the lawsuits begin as usual. God how I wish some people would just accept responsibility for their actions and get over it!
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
After years of fruitless efforts to make money selling goods and services over the Web, many entrepreneurs and other businesspeople are starting to blame the system's fundamental design for their failures.
And those failures certainly wouldn't have been because of a poor Internet business models, now would they?
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
This is what it comes down to: the desire to send their packets ahead of, and even to the exclusion of, yours.
That allows all sorts of social control to be exercised in the name of an icy cold "efficiency," as defined by executives and politicians. The democratic experiment of the Net will quickly be brought to heel in that scenario, and taught to surrender to the thirst for profits.
No thanks! Big business has already polluted our politics, our environment, and our media. It must not be allowed to subsume the Net in its perverse corporate culture, too.
A painter doesn't complain that his canvas is too rough, or that paint isn't tactile enough, or that the colours that he mixes are too unreliable to match his vision. He just paints, and whether the painting is a masterpiece or a failure is built in how he paints it, not in the source.
The internet is a canvas, and it's a rough one -- there are holes broken by patches of smoothness, low pings breached by high ones. The brushes are IP Protocols, very simple things built on buffers and packets. They don't stream well, or lend themselves to flawless point to point conversation. There are security issues. And the paint is HTML...a dirty sort of paint made for painting houses. There are display issues. There are compatibility issues. It is difficult to rely on, because people can handle things pretty much however they like. A color that perfectly matches an offline swatch will look different on a monitor with a different contrast setting. People don't always get HTML...they don't understand links or buttons.
The internet is a set, understandable material: why are businesses blaiming their own failings on it? "We can't get it to do tricks for us," they say, but they're asking it to do the wrong tricks. Webcasting? This isn't TV, it's internet...it's made for text and graphics, it's TTY to the extreme. And companies that understand what the web is -- a vehicle for interactive information exchange -- are doing quite well on it. AOL, for example, and ebay. The problem is that a lot of businesses don't want to paint on the canvass they've got...they want to sculpt! They're building up layers of paint and pulling the threads out of their brushes in an attempt to make the internet do what it wasn't designed for and isn't ready to do.
Besides, ownership isn't the answer...we've had non-tcpip information services in the past, and they've had very limited appeal. If you remember the old modem nets, the biggest problem was the lack of uniformity. You couldn't send mail to Bob@AlbanySuperChat if you used HundsonValleyInfoCOnnect. You had so many problems due to the fact that not everybody want to use the same computer or the same network. But all owned infonets assume this, and in the end are doomed to failure because of their closed protocols. Do you think television would have survived if each network required you to buy an expensive proproetary TV from their network or "partners"?
The internet is an ever-changing entitiy...speed enhancements and new concepts liek IPv6 will eventually lead to a network that is both streamlined and open. Corporate entities building a new network from scratch will result in a needless expenditure of technology for uncertain (and probably low) returns. Only through open standards can an information solution be truly pervasive...otherwise, it's just more plastic & light.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Although the comments in the article like hippies creating the internet etc is totally absurd, as many posts before me pointed out, it does bring up an important point.
The internet today is slow, and it doesn't live up to the promise of being smart as in if a router goes down traffic is automatically routed elsewhere. Traffic from one point to another doesn't take the fastest way either; traffic goes where the routers have been configurated to let it go.
Anyone who knows if Cisco or anyone else has anything up their sleeves when it comes to "smarter" routers and stuff that actually considers this?
That right there is a major flaw in the article. The main complaint is that they can't broadcast their latested crap to everybody on the planet from the same MegaServer(tm). The problem is, they can't do it with any other media either. That's why we have local TV and radio transmitters, even if their just shoving the same "Survivor" crap through our heads.
All it would take is a network of repeaters ala Akami and they'd have at least as reliable a system as they have now, if not more.
Mountain(slow link) in the way? So the broadcast sucks for those people.
Fiber-seeking-backhoe take out a line? Happens all the time with any sort of land line. (My cable(TV&modem) was attacked by a backhoe just last week)
Environmental interference(Water, storms, wind, bad cables, trafic overload)? It happens
Person wasn't available to watch it immediatly? Gotcha there.
Rather get it perfect than realtime? No way with conventional delivery systems. So you may have to wait till a few minutes after the live cast finished to have it all. But then you can watch/listed/experiance it in it's entirety without worrying about any of the above problems.
With multicast aware routers(not even worrying about QOS) the digital stream flows over the IP part of the (cable) network as smoothly as an NTSC channel.
They can't acheive that level of quality and reliability with the current intrastructures. Satalite outages, storm interference, hell, even digitial decoding artifacts in the analog channels
Of course, that's all for the massive webcast senario. Just respecting the TOS field and LARTing idiots setting thier pr0n transfers to "realtime" would take care of most of the latency for true realtime stuff.
- RustyTaco
You're right. AOL is the model for the "pay-for-use" internet. But the true Internet, is a common-policy based collection of independant networks. Apparently I'm the only one who remembers the early days of connectivity when everything was a long-distance call (unless you lived in a major metropolitin center) that was arbitrarily disconnected due to crappy infrastructure and Ma Bell's desire to earn that high-coin call setup fee. Compucrap, AOL and the rest of the pirates kept modem pools filled with "last year's" modems, so the connections would be as slow as possible and rack up those per minute charges the was de rigeur standard at that time.
,FIXs whatever. Buy your own T-1 or Fract T-1 from your baby Bell.
Academia driving the Internet? Pish-tosh! They had the internet forever and it never grew beyond a few doctorial thesis and MUDS. Joe User saw the wide-open spaces of a true Internet and demanded access. Now if it's slow and crowded, so be it. Switch providers to someone with a bigger shorter pipe to the MAEs, SNAPs, NAPs
Just don't let a freaking idiot bean-counter have the reins.
Remember, those that can...do. Those that can't...teach. Those that can neither do NOR teach...become accountants.
All of these business trolls that claim that the Internet doesn't follow normal business practices are the same that exclaim the greatness of Microsoft to upper management who then force their IT department to use inferior products. Why are people still interested in Windows architecture when its been proven so unstable? ... "THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX". It doesn't take a new buzzword to figure this one out.
People need to realize they're shooting themselves in the foot. Instead of bitching about the hippies that built the Internet and how poorly it is put together (I STILL don't understand that), buy good infrastructure. Maybe then your network won't be down because some script kiddies VB Scripted you to death and you won't be slowing up the 'net.
Knowledge = Power = Money, so why the hell is everyone bitching if the Internet is a free exchange of knowledge? If you're so damned savy
It amazes me that so many business people have flailed about trying to figure out this new media. All I've seen "business" people add to the internet are "shock the monkey" banner ads and use of the media as a flat static catalog. So its great to see business pointing its finger this way and that as a manner of misdirection for their own failings. Maybe we need New Business not a New Internet.
how many marketing people does it take to screw in a lightbulb? I think I lost count...
I see boom times ahead for f---edcompany.com with turds like these in charge of the economy.
One, yes it was created by a bunch of people that wanted to give a little something to Universities and didn't really (IMHO) care all that much about monetary wealth. Two, if I'm not mistaken, wasn't the 'Net (or at least part of it) grabbed by the government for their use, thus becoming government sponsered?
So, just where is the problem? You don't see businesses using the phone as their only means of marketing. Sure, you can order products over the phone, but they don't use it for advertising. The 'Net is a great advertising tool just as television is, but if Big Business Inc. is expecting to use it soley as it's own marketing and sellign point they should really look for a more viable way.
The 'Net, right now, as a way of selling goods is a novelty, and businesses better realize that. People use it, without a doubt, but seeing as how, as a consumer shopping center, it is still in it's infancy most people are still very reluctant to use it (I would suppose it would also help if they kept the "Evil Hacker" scare tactics to a minimum, and it would probably be better if they "found" ways to keep they 'Net more secure first, wait, that sounds familiar).
Why should I wait a couple of weeks or pay extra for over-night shipping for a product as a home consumer (mmm, home's taste goooood . . . sorry) when I could run out to the store within 5 miles of my house for something. Granted this works best for people in cities or otherwise indutrialized rural areas, but whatever. When I go to pricewatch looking for deals I look for stores in my area first (I'm usually willing to pay more if I don't have to wait).
I guess Internet2 is looking to have a bright future.
"From of old, there are not lacking things that have attained Oneness." - Lao Tzu
What most of this slashdot crowd seems to not recognize is that the Internet is not something that they are entitled to. The Internet that we have now is nearly 100% owned by various private companies. It transmits on telephone lines owned by telephone companies, using routers made by Cisco which are owned by various ISPs and so on. The Internet is not public property (thank goodness - then the government would control it).
There is no grand "purpose" to the Internet, whether it's for information sharing, money, entertainment or anything else. The Internet is whatever these private companies make it to be. Fortunately they've recognized that their customers want an open system and so that is what they have. If a company did something with their portion of the network (e.g. censor sites) that the majority of their customers disliked, then they would lose these customers and money.(obviously not in their self-interest) That's what basic economic laws are. As long as you customers keep pressure on your ISPs to keep the Internet open, then it will remain that way.
However, there is no "right" to an open Internet. Free speech means you can say whatever you want - with your own property or with the consent of the property owner. You don't have a right to a "free" Internet as much as you don't have a right to use a television station's equipment to tell the world whatever you want to say. The people who produce the necessary portions of the Internet are entitled to control their property (it's theirs after all), and you only get to use it by mutual consent. (you pay them what they request) If you don't like what these compaines offer, then don't pay for it and you don't get to use it either. But, please, don't say you have a right to tell these companies what to do with their hardware and software.
Telecom executives say that without a major redesign of the Internet, such eagerly anticipated applications as video-on-demand, Internet telephony and Webcasts of live entertainment events will never be economical.
More like "without a major dump of money into getting fiber optic out to every last mile of every house, so as to provide a fast (relatively unclogged) data pipeline with which to carry these so-called eagerly anticipated applications."
Seriously, they can make the control of data more conducive to their 'business' models, but even after that, they will be *many, many* years from being profitable. Why? Because people aren't going to give them money for those services while they are still stuck behind a 56k modem. I suppose this would be their "lie-n-wait" strategy, which would probably mean that only 3 or 4 top companies (with enough money now to weather the tide) will be around to "give us what they know we need".
I see a lot of this as a result of poor marketing of the 'promises' of the Internet. And by poor, I mean *way overhyped, way too soon*. All the great services can (and probably will) be done, however the timeframe (which should be used to develop business strategies, not undermine the transport structure) promised by rampant marketeers over the last decade was just not feasible. The result? A lot of non-techies got overly-stimulated at what they were going to get with this Internet-thingee, but they didn't get it when promised. So, like many people nowadays (when they don't get what they want as quickly as they get their fast-food), their attention turned elsewhere...disregarding the Internet-world as a 'fad'. This is unfortunate, because this lull in attention (or excitement) towards it is just what big-Corps need to redesign it to their own liking. They can then market it again as something different, and the masses will all go googly-eyed over it again (or maybe they'll be forced to use it...who knows).
- A non-productive mind is with absolutely zero balance.
- AC
When will they Learn!
The Internet is for INFORMATION SHARING!
Let me say that again... The internet is for SHARING INFORMATION!
-Floating in my tin can... far far from home.
Look what this fool wrote.
The Internet is an important cultural phenomenon, but that doesn't excuse its failure to comply with basic economic laws," said Thomas Nolle, a New Jersey telecommunications consultant. "The problem is that it was devised by a bunch of hippie anarchists who didn't have a strong profit motive. But this is a business, not a government-sponsored network."
Why not drop him a line
http://www.nwfusion.com/columnists/nolle.html
tnolle@cimicorp.com
(609) 753-0004
-Im standing next to a Mountain, Chop it down with the edge of my hand.
I reiterate - since when was profit a right? If a corporation can't make money on the internet, maybe they shouldn't be in the internet business. I know that I can't make money selling ice cream, and therefore I am not in the ice cream business. Someone else who can make money in that area will make a better go of it. But I have no right to a profitable ice-cream business.
Profit is a privilege, and not a right.
The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. -Einstein
I don't know if they are /.'d yet, but here is the text of the article:
Taming the Wild, Wild Web
Corporations contend the Internet's freewheeling design kills moneymaking opportunities. But others fear controls would curb open access.
Quote
"Some of these people, though not all, are a category of folks who never left the '60s."
-- John C. Klensin, chairman of the Internet Architecture Board
By MICHAEL A. HILTZIK, Times Staff Writer
Bud Michels has given up on the Internet.
"We don't have any control over the Internet," said Michels, president and chief executive of Maryland-based CSP Inc., which helps big clients protect priceless corporate data in the event of an earthquake, computer network outage or other disaster. "If something goes down, you don't even know who's accountable. The Internet is, like, 'Who ya gonna call?' "
That's an example of how the Internet's leading virtue, its unruliness, is increasingly getting cursed by business executives and economists as its worst flaw. After years of fruitless efforts to make money selling goods and services over the Web, many entrepreneurs and other businesspeople are starting to blame the system's fundamental design for their failures.
Businesses are growing so frustrated by the unreliability of the public Internet--the network most commonly used for Web surfing, e-mail and other familiar functions--that many have moved their most critical applications to alternative semiprivate networks.
That's an expensive option, however, so some big corporations think the answer is to change the Internet's basic wiring. By adding "intelligent" switches and other devices, they believe, the system could work faster, avoid traffic jams, distinguish between high-priority data and other material that can wait, and generally live up to its promise as a worldwide communications and entertainment medium.
But doing so almost inevitably means bringing more of the network under commercial control. For consumers, the change might mean faster downloads of video clips and Webcasts. But it also might mean a raft of fees for special services and the appearance of "gatekeepers" with the power to keep certain Web sites or content from appearing on home computers, just as cable systems control which channels can be shown on their subscribers' TVs and at what price.
The business world's discontent has increased as the Internet economy has unraveled over the last year. That's not surprising, given that the network was first mapped out more than 30 years ago, when it was devised as a coast-to-coast system connecting universities working on projects financed by government grants.
"The Internet is an important cultural phenomenon, but that doesn't excuse its failure to comply with basic economic laws," said Thomas Nolle, a New Jersey telecommunications consultant. "The problem is that it was devised by a bunch of hippie anarchists who didn't have a strong profit motive. But this is a business, not a government-sponsored network."
Others detect a hidden agenda: an attempt by big business to stifle some of the cultural empowerment that the Internet represents.
"This is the past trying to kill the future at a time when the future is down," said John Perry Barlow, a former Grateful Dead lyricist who is co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a defender of free speech online. "And it's happening in ways that are generally invisible to the public."
At the heart of the debate lies decades of history. Before the Internet, the model of a communications network was the one that belonged to AT&T, this country's undisputed telecom monopoly until its dismemberment by court order in 1984.
AT&T had built a "smart" network connecting millions of dumb devices: telephones. Services such as call waiting or teleconferencing were operated by intelligent switches embedded in AT&T's circuits, rather than in the phones.
Founders Purposely Built a 'Dumb' Internet
This centralized architecture had its advantages, not the least of which was its vaunted 99.999% reliability--the "five nines" standard that may have been Ma Bell's crowning technical achievement.
But it also reinforced the AT&T monopoly. As undisputed owner of the phone network, the company dictated how it could be used by customers, who were forbidden to connect any phone to its lines except those that AT&T manufactured and sold. The phone company decided when and how to roll out new services and how much to charge. Innovative features had to pass muster with AT&T's engineers, who often rejected those they thought would encourage competition. Among the rejects: the Arpanet, the government-funded network that evolved into the Internet, which AT&T obstructed for years.
Mindful of these consequences of a centralized intelligent network, the founding architects of the Internet built its antithesis.
Rather than a smart network, the Internet is dumb, essentially a neutral pipeline ferrying digital bits from one end to another--say, between a computer and Amazon.com's Web site. By design it is blind to the nature of information it carries, be it a digital copy of a song, a calendar holding someone's daily meeting schedule or a 3-D computer game. But it can service a limitless variety of smart devices: PCs, hand-held computers, Internet-enabled TVs, Web cams and more. Almost any invention can be attached to the network as long as its output is digital.
Meanwhile, because the Internet is not owned by a single entity, its quality of service is left up to thousands of firms ranging from telecommunications giants such as WorldCom Inc. and Sprint Corp., which operate the backbone--the cross-country data highway--to neighborhood Internet service providers that may be run by high school kids with a high-powered server computer and a leased phone line.
A packet of data is likely to traverse several of these segments. If traffic backs up at the transfer points, the system either slows down or randomly jettisons packets of bits to clear the jam.
If these bits are part of a Web page or an e-mail message, they can be easily re-sent. If they are part of a more complicated application, such as an Internet telephone call, the conversation will be reduced to gibberish.
These factors also weigh on the Internet's ability to deliver speed and capacity, which is why during heavily promoted Webcasts most potential viewers get shut out.
"With bits on a dumb pipe, I can't do a major Webcast event," said Milo Medin, co-founder and chief technical officer of At Home Corp.'s Excite@Home, the leading provider of broadband Internet access over cable lines.
Yet, precisely because it is configured as a huge web of interconnecting pipelines, the Internet is almost universally accessible and resistant to local damage, political censorship or the designs of corporate landlords. In just over three decades, it has grown to serve more than 400 million users worldwide.
"Thanks to people who had the foresight to keep the middle stupid, we've been able to discover new, totally unanticipated applications like e-mail," David Isenberg, a telecommunications expert and former AT&T Laboratories network engineer, said at a recent conference at Stanford Law School.
Explosively popular applications such as the instant messaging system ICQ and the music file-sharing service Napster were developed privately by amateurs and allowed to find their own audiences on the vast World Wide Web.
Many communications executives complain, however, that as the Internet has evolved into a ubiquitous public utility, its shortcomings in service quality and reliability have lost their charm, which is evident to anyone who has waited a seeming eternity for a Web page to load or suffered through a weeklong outage in an e-mail account.
All that could be addressed by changes that would make the Internet faster, more reliable and more profitable for some companies. But they also would make it less universally accessible and more resistant to innovations that do not conform to new standards.
Whether the open model and the business model can comfortably coexist is debatable. As with any culture war, a wide spectrum of opinion lies between the two extremes.
Traditionalists Versus Business
At one end are Internet aficionados convinced that the network's historic openness is threatened as surely as the habitat of an endangered species is by the encroachment of land developers. They argue that the Internet is essentially a social phenomenon, the value of which lies in fostering free speech and breaking the historic stranglehold that telephone companies and other media companies have had on public communication.
"Some of these people, though not all, are a category of folks who never left the '60s," said John C. Klensin, chairman of the Internet Architecture Board, which oversees the network's structure.
Klensin is equally critical of executives irked by the difficulty of making money from the Internet the old-fashioned way by controlling the customer's access to scarce resources and services. These people, Klensin contends, need to look harder for novel ways to exploit the new medium.
"We haven't fully explored the range of business models and opportunities here," he said. "That process will be significantly other than painless."
But instead of contriving new businesses that make do with the Internet as it is, many new business plans involve tampering with the network's electronic innards. Some of these changes would permanently alter the way people use the Web by allowing private companies to set themselves up as gatekeepers to the Internet, charging users for new features and services or for those that have been customarily free.
For example, Excite@Home has made numerous deals allowing information and entertainment content from such providers as Fox News, Bloomberg and cable channel Comedy Central to be transmitted to @Home subscribers at especially high speed. This is done by placing the premium material on @Home's computers--which have relatively direct connections to subscribers' homes--so the material does not have to traverse the clog-prone public Internet to reach subscribers.
Critics say that system in effect allows Excite@Home to control what content reaches its subscribers, a perversion of the Internet's democratic principles.
The Internet service provider, however, argues that its subscribers remain free to surf the rest of the Web without interference, and that @Home is merely improving access to material that might prove especially popular.
"By [the critics'] logic," Medin said, "I can't make one thing better without making everything else worse. The fact is, I'm creating added capability on my part of the Net." Giving Walt Disney Co. material preferential treatment, for example, would not mean @Home would block its users' access to Disney rivals, he said.
"If I were to block all access to Time Warner, that would be a different story. But if we did, our subscribers would scream bloody murder," he said.
Telecom executives say that without a major redesign of the Internet, such eagerly anticipated applications as video-on-demand, Internet telephony and Webcasts of live entertainment events will never be economical.
"The potential of many new technologies has not been realized because the Internet hasn't delivered the necessary performance," said Greg Davis, vice president for marketing and product management at Core Express, a company that leases fiber-optic lines to provide high-quality Internet service to business clients. "A lot of opportunities have been left on the table."
Others say that the Internet's architecture can be improved without destroying its traditional values, and that some upgrading is essential to improve the network's fit with the demands of modern media and commerce.
Companies Are Having to Pay for Reliability
The changes Nolle envisions would give more users better service at a reasonable cost, he said. Today, businesses needing absolutely reliable service must bypass much of the Internet by routing digital traffic over their own private lines, a solution that can cost $500,000 or more a month. Others buy hybrid services from such companies as Michels' CSP, to which customers pay varying rates depending on the grade of reliability they need.
"We use the Internet today only for customers who don't need up-to-the-second data recovery," Michels said. These are clients who can survive a temporary network glitch that sends their transmissions on an error-prone cross-country detour. "If something happens [to the network] in Philly and all of a sudden you're being routed through Kansas City, that's a huge number of hops" during which data may be lost.
Many network experts believe that the Internet will have to change to accommodate enhanced services such as @Home's. The question is whether this means the traditional network will become a victim of its own success.
"The existing open Net is so firmly implanted in education and research that it will continue there as an open Net indefinitely," said Michael Roberts, former chairman of the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers, a public body that oversees the distribution of Internet addresses. But he added, "It's too big, too important, too political to be treated as something for only a band of talented engineers to preside over."
But any changes in the network's basic structure will face numerous obstacles, including resistance from traditionalists who believe that the Internet is popular precisely because it cannot be controlled by big companies.
"The [Internet] is in trouble because it threatens so much of the establishment that it's provoked a backlash," Isenberg said.
For information about reprinting this article, go to http://www.lats.com/rights/register.htm
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
What we all should remember is that the nature of the Internet and the reason for its existence is to expand the knowledge and knowlege capacity of mankind. This has always been the identity of the Internet, and it will not change. Business applications of the Internet are peripheral, and always will be.
The reason is that the Internet will always be controlled by GEEKS, thinking people, stewards of the 'net. Business people are never going to have an edge on the common anti-authoritarianist slashdot reader. We ARE the Internet, pop-up ads aren't.
I don't think there is any harm if good methods for getting paid for content on the internet is developed.
Those who doesn't want to pay can just go to other free sites.
This would I think make it possible to produce high-class content instead of all the crap that the internet is today.
To help delay or perhaps stop this we should start taking action. The most important thing I can think of is to use Freenet and other open source privacy tools.
Gee, I must be thinking of some other Internet then - that government-sponsored one.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
I don't see where home users are paying the same as businesses. I can guarantee you that at my office we pay at least 8 times what I pay at home for Internet service; NOT including what we pay for website hosting. What I decide to do with that connection is up to me, if it means running my own web and mail, and even to go as far as (hypothetically) running my own business' website.
I also don't see this happening very often. Your packets, under the scenario we're discussing, might get lower priority but they'll still go through. If you want higher priority you have the same option everbody else (including the businesses) does. Otherwise you can still host your own mail server web server (on most services) - I know many users who do.
People absolutely do want to make money and I don't blame them for that. In many cases that money making on the back end is what helps to keep the price down on the front end. Same reason you can watch "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" (or whatever) for free.
Again, just being the devil's advocate here -- I absolutely support users who buy bandwidth being able to host their own servers if they want to and hope to see increasing competition in the market so that users have more choices and aren't necessarily stuck with one provider and that provider's agenda.
-Coach-
Perhaps the world's greatest tragedy is that ignorance is not impotence.
We can complain about that, but really our alternative is to take our business elsewhere. Indeed, they may be the only high speed Internet choice we have in that neighborhood but...since when is high-speed Internet a right? [ducking]
It's like saying I should be able to watch any movie I want to at the movie theaters down the road -- even if they aren't showing the film I want, I should be able to bring them a tape and have them play it on their big screens. It's their screens and they'll show whatever movies they think people want to see -- regardless of what you as an individual want to see. Your alternative is to stay home and watch it on cable or rent a video -- and suffer with the smaller screen size, lack of fancy sound system and microwave popcorn.
Just as with cable modem, if you don't like their service your alternative is to get another ISP -- which might be a 56K dialup, but at least you don't have to watch whatever film the cable modem ISP wants to show you, to mix the metaphor.
The trick, in an open market, is convincing another provider that your viewpoint is right and commercially viable -- that enough subscribers would join their service (and pay for it!) to make it worth their while. If Verizon thought they'd make enough money they'd extend DSL to your neighborhood. (and mine)
That said, I don't care for the cable provider pushing their own content at me at the expense of the content I want to get to. Fortunately that hasn't been a big problem for me yet. Yet.
-Coach-
Perhaps the world's greatest tragedy is that ignorance is not impotence.
Companies can complain all they want to. The internet grows as it's number of users grows. "The Internet" is really just a network of networks, pulled together by several "backbones." These backbones are fine and they are robust enough, the problem is when the local ISP or whoever puts up their half-assed networks. That, my friends, can only be addressed ISP to ISP, so the businesses that want more reliability, well put on your net police uniforms, go visit those ISPs, and get to work!
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~ now you know
I agree with what you say. But...
Everytime I get a live chat person, particularly from places like AT@Home, they are total retards and say my question is too complicated and I should call.
I can't blame the real techs for wanting to be sequestered and not harassed, but companies continuously pad themselves full of total idiots. I say I'd rather wait on IRC or on teh phone a long time to get to a knowledgable person, than get to some idiot right away.
Mylex had good support whenever I called them, just to tip a hat to someone in bed with Lady-Good-Customer-Service.
HP just laid of 6000 people. I just mentioned that because its funny. Down with Carly.
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
Somehow no matter how much they are dying to screw us over, we just won't cave in. They whine about reliability, what a crock. TCP has its flaws, but I always marvel at its robustness. There was a study done on Internet delivery in Serbia/Croatia/Warzones of the time, and it is a military grade protocol.
Companies: Yes we see your shit banner ads. Yes we see your books online. Yes we know how much FedEX really costs and how much you fuck us on S&H. The Internet does't reduce your TCO because we want to TALK to you on the phone, not have some total shit web-help-crap. You cannot can your customers jhere.
With high availibility the world over and several methods of encryption, there is nothing wron besides the fact we don't all get a personal T-1.
Companies: Revelation. You suck, your buiness model sucks, and your product sucks. You hired too many marketing people that know nothing and you pay them. They tell you to "leverage" the Internet, because you have no cash left for R&D, customer support and other important things.
Companies: Fire/outsource your stupid marketing. Let word of mouth help you, if your product rules, places like Tomshardware crop up and sell stuff for you. Ask Asus about stuff like this. Asus probably spend $5 on marketing for every $1000 Intel does. Yet I use Asus, cheaper, faster (in General) and more feature laden than Intel's own boards.
Companies, we will boycott you if you try to undermine us. And I will take the grudge to work - and cancel any collective-monopolist attempt to control us.
Note: I have banned NEC and its technology wherever possible from all companies I have worked for because of a bad service incident. I'll die remembering how the treated me that one time.
We won't turn a blind eye and we wont forget.
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
No , I don't think I'm biased. I'm not going to say I fancy myself to be like the early radio hobbyists, nor am I like a VC. But within months of discovering the 'net (I'm a late bloomer), I knew that an online radio station would be very cool. Preferably a "pirate" one. Of course, my "idea" is a few years late, and P2P has rendered a site like mine pretty friggin' useless. It's just a hobby, and makes me happy.
The internet will become whatever those people with enough ambition and money want to make it. I laugh heartily at all the slashdot crowd who claims some special right to the internet. Trust me, the reason the internet wasn't successful before commerical enterprise took it over was access. Unless you went to a four year university with a computer science department, no one had internet access before 1990. The reason that anyone with a modem and a phone line can find at least some place to dial up is because businesses saw a need, filled it, and made money. No force.
Now businesses see another need: Providing profitability other than just plain service. Right now, like the phone companies, there's no real way to get money. Sure, hotornot.com might make some money since they started charging, but nothing more than Miss Cleo makes on a telephone psychic hotline. There is a possibility for more than just ad driven profit on the net, (like TV is limited to ) and there's a possibility for it to be much more classy than miss cleo.
Many people are probably going to be mad that the internet is going to change. Well, when commercial traffic was still outlawed for the internet, the few people using it felt it threatened them. Little did they know that the internet would flourish. Tell people who met loved ones through online personals that the net should be free of commerce. Tell people who's businesses have increased sales 50% because of their web page that the internet should be free of commerce (this is true for the company I work at: We have thrown out all our yellow pages). Tell the millions of people who have bothered to make the internet more than just 3l33t IRC chat rooms that they can't have what they want. Your claims to something you didn't make is as ridiculous as a king's claim to a peasant's life, regardless of his choice.
Go back and recompile the kernel you didn't write, on the hardware you didn't design, and continue to reject the economy of capitalism and the freedom that economy stands for, even though it made your social mal-adjustment easier through high school and gave you a linux admin job.
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
You know, maybe this isn't such a bad idea. All the stuff that these guys are griping about is primarily a b2b affair. I suppose they could set up their online shopping malls up in internet3 as well, so when somebody was actually getting online to buy something (loging on to internet3) that would be the obvious time to advertise to them. So, maybe we can get all those idiotic animations and popups and sponsor messages off of internet1 (where they are eating up bandwidth) and onto internet3 where they belong.
But let's go one further. Businesses using internet3 should pay taxes to support internet1 so that everything on internet1 is free. Why? Why it's that Intellectual Property they keep talking about. I seem to remember that e-commerce was a johnny-come-lately to the scene, which means that the internet was someone else's idea
friends don't let friends teleport drunk
i have a really kewl observation about this article.
;-)
in order for me to share these thoughts with you, i request that you mail me a check for 2 cents c/o aol-timewarner, nyc, usa.
thank you for your interest.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
In other words - the rich elite gets the better connections.
QoS allocations on the net can NOT be trusted to mere users. It is something the providers will have to do. The only thing users will do with it, is abuse it. (always demand the best, fastest, most bandwidth they can get their grubby hands on.)
IP was never meant to be used on a scale like we use it today. The whole net structure reeks of filthy hacks. A total rewrite of low-level net protocols would, from a strictly theoretical point of view, be preferred.
+++ATH0
+++ATH0
If business needs a better solution, then have them create TCP/BP (Business Packets). They can concoct their own standards (Or as more likely - standard*s*.)Let's see how robust of a system(s) they come up with when deprived of the organic development that made the internet possible (and was a direct product of the openess of academia and research).
I'm sure that AOL/Time Warner, WorldCom, etc would *love* to provide the infrastructure and Porn can finance the whole thing.
And best of all, that gets the AOLer's off th net....
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Once: you're a philosopher. Twice: a pervert.
Now, I'm quite poorly-read on such things, but wouldn't better multicast support, on the backbone and for the end-user, take care of network congestion for planned webcasts?
This is exactly what the mbone does, and it's been implemented for years. It's just that most ISPs don't want to upgrade their routers to support it. If you're lucky enough to have an ISP that supports it, I recommend you check it out. You can pull in streaming video of empty classrooms and stuff.
What happened was actually much more complex than waht th emedia syas (surprise, surprise).
CA decided to remove the monopoly on production, but maintained it on distribution and transmission, and required the plant owners to sell the plants. In exchange for getting back their total investment (via a bond deal), the utilities agreed to cap prices until the bonds were paid off(that's a simplification, but OK for this discussion). They also were required to meet all demand, even if prices went above what they were getting.
Utilities were also prohibited from entering into long term power purchase contracts - which would give them price stability. The CA legislature mandated spot purchases, thinking (can we say that about politicians?) that spot prices (i.e. what it costs right now) would drop.
What happened was CA demand kept rising, but no new plants or transmission lines were built. CA is really like two islands - North and South, with small interties (bridges, so to speak) to bring in power. So you have limited capacity in state, limited ability to bring in power, and no price incentive for consumers to lower use. Instead of supply and demand, you had artifically low prices, and utilities that were required to buy at whatever price and sell at a lower one. The suppliers ramped up prices to meet demand, and the utilities were left holding the bag.
Actually, market forces worked - once the utilities started running out of money, scarcity (brownouts) replaced price to keep demand in line with supply.
Interestingly enough, the very politicians that touted their deregulation scheme as the greatest thing since, well, cheap electricity ran as far and as fast from it as possible. Even the "Father of CA deregulation" was demanding a paternity test to prove he wasn't really the father.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
If it's a business, they probably have a dedicated t1/t3 line. What they mean is, what if something more then you can handle goes down like somebody cuts a fiber optic cable in the middle of nowhere. Does this sound familiar to anyone? Anyways, since the internet is uncontrolled, their isn't anyone person to call if the internet suddenly crashes. You have to go through the infrastructure and find who owns what and actually get them to spend money to repair it. It is not a big problem because most people handle their own. They have a valid question and their really isn't a good answer.
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Just because a bunch of people believe or do something stupid, doesn't make it any less stupid.
Maybe they would be profitable. From personal experience, why would I stay at one site when I can go to pricewatch.com and find the exact same product on another site for two bucks cheaper. Give me a reason. The entire idea is based on Consumers Compulsion to buy something so their are going to be fewer sales without a salesman convincing you that you REALLY REALLY need this. Third, their is the time factor. I ordered a package a few weeks ago on the internet and 18 days later, it arrived on my door step. Thirteen were lost during shipping and it took them five days to ship the product. This is a time barrier. I want the product now but I want it at your cheaper price. Shipping is another problem. The WV sales tax is 6%. If I bought an $100 product, it would normally cost me $106. The fact is, I probably pay more then 11.95 on the internet plus the money doesn't go back into my state to be recirculated. It's kind of a lose lose situation. Pay more and get less return. Business wise, they are suffering from Super competition where the only way they can stay in business because it is hard to build is loyal set of customers is to actualy sell your products below retail in order to try to get a few loyal customers so they can raise the price.
They need to try to get past these barriers before trying to restructuring the internet or maybe both at the same time. Restructuring is probably not going to increase profitability significantly. Fixing the said above might.
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Just because a bunch of people believe or do something stupid, doesn't make it any less stupid.
It's cool being considered someone who is stuck in the 60's. If I'd just been alive then maybe I wouldn't have gotten stuck.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
As I look over the posts in this thread, I see a lot of people complaining that Big Business is being greedy, that it is trying to take power away from the users with no respect for anything except its own bottom line.
People say that like it's a bad thing. It isn't - in fact, it's the basis of the capitalist system and free competition. TNSTAAFL - There's no such thing as a free lunch. You want these companies (sprint, etc.) to continue running the backbone of the Internet? You want them to maintain it? Fine, but don't expect them to do it for the love of mankind. They do it for money, and if the money isn't coming in, then yah, big business will do whatever to can to make more money. That means controlling supply of services, manipulating prices to manipulate demand, and all sorts of "dirty tricks".
You don't like what Big Business is doing to the internet? Well, I don't like all of it either, neccessarily, but it's not illegal, or even unethical. Business is just doing the same thing it's always done - trying to find a way to make money from new technology. They did it with radio and TV and cars, and they'll do it again. The appropriate response is not to complain that your rights are being violated or some such nonsense - they aren't. You have the right to freedom of speech. You do not have the right to demand someone else pay to publish your speeched, or for you to see someone else's free speech. If you don't like what's being done to the internet, either write the companies, don't use the internet, build your own internet and convince people to use it, or just accept that economics isn't fair. I know none of those options are pleasant - and that building a new internet is probably hard to the point of impossibility - but those are the only options you have.
USA Intellectual Property Laws: 5 monkeys, 1 hour.
I'm the stranger...posting to
Uh, for everyone's information, Internet2 is going to give them exactly what they're looking for... And get this, it's being developed by academics! Holy pocket protector, Batman, the nerds are helping the corps!
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One more post on the journey to negative Karma history!
OK, so here's my thesis. The way the internet is set up now, your average Mom & Pop shop that could and should profit from the internet can't. The little sandwich shop down the street from me should be able to have a menu online where they can take orders, and it should work. I should be able to use the internet in my town here just like I use my phone: call my barber for an apointment, call in the pizza order, check the store hours, etc. I don't care too much about mega-corps making money on the net, but I do think the Mom & Pops of the world should be able to profit off it.
OK, that said, what if internet use were modeled after telephone system - where "local" browsing was free, and "long distance" browsing cost something? Then all of a sudden instead of being served up the vast eden/wasteland of content that the web is, your average user will be steered to surf LOCAL content. Suddenly, there's huge incentive to create that content. Huge incentive to create USEABLE and USEFUL content. Now the local Mom & Pop will want to put up a website that WORKS for the COMMUNITY. And people will USE it! Imagine if you really COULD order that sandwich from the place down the street from your office, then walk down and pick it up. "Prank" security becomes a minor issue for one thing - after all, who's gonna pay to make long distance crank phone calls?
Now I'd assume that companies can still run "toll free" websites so you can still surf the greater world. After all, who's gonna pay to surf Yahoo?
OK, so this is not perfect and has horrible holes in the logic, but the fact is you're never gonna beat the big corporations.
Yes, the telephone and the internet are both constructs by which immaterial concepts (sound & data) are exchanged. The similarity ends there. Why? Because sound and data are dissimilar in a crucial way.
In both cases, the product is free, or nearly so, to reproduce. A sound, once made, can be made over and over again in many ways. So it is with data. However, while sound is free to produce, data is quite expensive. In the case of research, music, essays, etc... a lot of time and effort goes into the creation of the product.
In economics, this is what is called the fixed cost - the required cost of producing even one unit of a product. The marginal cost - the cost of producing each additional unit, is the key here. It is free to reproduce data, so the marginal cost is zero. Thus, economic law dictates that the price of the product should be zero. Any economist can tell you that if the price of your good is so low that you cannot even recoup your fixed costs, then you are better off not producing. This means that the only data that belongs on the net - where the cost is necessarily zero - is that data which cost nothing to produce. This is not a perfect model (because externalities, such as philanthropy and such make it possible for "expensive" data - that which has a non-zero cost to appear on the internet.) Nonetheless, until companies understand this basic idea, they will not be able to use the internet successfully (because they will never wholly succeed in making the reproduction cost of data non-zero.)
Virtue finds and chooses the mean.
Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea
I think you're making some generalizations abut our generation taht aren't exactly viable. Yes, there is a subset of the young professional set right now that does indeed follow your description. But I would say that most of hte people I know in our generation are more apathetic than anything. We do NOT have a politically proactive generation, we have one that tends to distrust government, large corportaions, and the people with the money. However, that distrust is often expressed by uninvolvement, not by any sort of real action. With that tendency in mind, it would not surprise me if the political leaders that arise from our generation follow in the traditions of the entrenched parties, because they are the only ones who will get the reinforcement to succeed. And that reinforcement isn't going to come from their peers, it will come from their elders and the small subset of our generation that buys into the established views.
There is a real issue here, though:
Who pays for the transport, i.e., the backbone? In the early post-ARPA days, the National Science Foundation paid for the backbone, through a project called NFSNET. However, because NSF didn't feel it was appropriate for the government (yes, the same government so many /.ers love to hate)
to pay for the bandwidth for commercial intents, the backbone was transferred to private operation. I think this was a huge mistake. A global information network is fundamentally a public good, and ultimate control of it should reside with the public, not private enterprise. People looking to make money should pay to use a public medium to do so, but control of the medium should belong to the public, much like the FCC licensing bandwidth.
If we really are in a free market (which I doubt, because they don't exist), then as long as there's a substantive demand for free information, someone should want to sell it to us. But I do think it will be hard for anyone to match the kind of money that media giants or B2B powerhouses can throw at having routing done their way.
This brief history of the Internet is good reading. It includes a definition of the word Internet. Perhaps there could be publicly controlled routers managed by wiki?
A free market is based on the idea that people make free, rational choices about what the decisions they make. This never happens, which is why free markets don't exist.
Why would anyone bother with subliminal branding and other marketing tricks if we were just going to spend money on the most "rational" thing anyway?
this one's taken.
I think that a re-working of the existing internet is not what is exactly being called for. An extension of the internet to be used for business purposes is highly feasible. For the mega-corps of the world to unite in the creation of a third internet (remember internet2) would be useful. Not only could it be built to accomodate b2b transactions better, but a governing body just for business could be constructed to help in transactions between J.Q. Public and Omni-Corp X.
If you want to get on internet 3 (maybe with its own special TLD; .exploit, .cash, .gimme, etc...) you submit to the internet3 consortium. Main focus, generate cash for companies. Eliminates; cyber-squating, businesses only have control over trademarks in the internet3 TLD and maybe .com not .net, .org, .horse, etc... More distinction for customers that they are going to be dealing with a corp while surfing the internet3 TLD (not that there is confusion now but they will expect pop-unders, massive banner ads, etc.. while on the internet3 TLD). The companies can regulate what is more important on internet3 while not lousing up the great (original) info super highway. The internet (as in the original) may be able to become more like all the people with pie-in-the-sky ideas want it to be like.
Go home script kiddies!
I am willing to assume that our civilization is not progressing to the point of an Orwellian dictatorship as of yet. Of course with all this bullshit going on with Dmitry and the DMCA it is a bit difficult to get that idea out of my head. Nonetheless... Why do we call the internet cyberspace? The seemingly obvious reason is that the internet is very much like a parody of the actual universe. Instead of a street corner you have web sites and communication facilities--its a bit like being able to teleport yourself to any person's home or office, grab a few of your buddies and have a nice stimulating chat at a whim. It is utterly ridiculous to think that the internet must be obedient to the 'laws of economics' as he puts it. The internet doesn't follow these laws any differently than the real world does--businesses exist, those that do it right thrive, those that screw it up don't. Supply and demand rule the game, etc. Just like the real world the internet is a *compromise*! It is not made to do any one thing perfectly, and as a result everyone has to suffer just a little. Businesses don't necisarrily get the best paved roads or their own freeways. And the CEO of sony doesn't get to go faster in a traffic jam just because his trip to a conference is more "important" than my trip to the beach. Why then should a corporate webcast get assured better bandwidth? Business should stop complaining about the limitations of the internet and start using it for what it is good for. The information superhighway is a public road.
Thus, the real question we should be addressing is this: how would a newer, more censored, more expensive, but ultimately faster and "cleaner" Internet threaten the user-base and existing support for the current Internet? Even if our existing forum for the free exchange of ideas wasn't completely taken over by The Man, the existence of a more appealing alternative forces a long, painful period of stagnation on the first Internet. In the end, it could have the same effect as a violent restructuring of the Internet as we know it.
If you think I'm wrong about the probability of this trend, you need look no further than America Online. AOL has proved that people will jump at anything that is a) user friendly, b) well marketed, and c) has catch-phrases like "You've got mail!" The user-base AOL has garnered since its inception demonstrates how afraid many people are of the "raw" Internet, and how they cling to portals to hold their hand. Consider for a moment, what would have happened if AOL had, in addition to its superficial appeal, a stable, high speed network, with promises of security and support that were actually fulfilled? This is the specter we face in a new Corporate controlled Internet, and it will be very appealing to not only the public at large, but also to all the script kiddies, techies, haXors, and, yes, slash-dotters out there as well. Who wouldn't love to be connected to a network that has all the aforementioned features?
The price we'll pay is in the civil liberties of the medium. I don't think that we can achieve the Internet advancement that Big Business wants without the system being controlled BY THEM. There's always been a sort of give and take between technological advancement and personal freedom. You decide which is more important. I'm open to debate on this subject - let me know how you feel!
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Spiral out... keep going.