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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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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.
"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..
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 ?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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
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.
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!
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
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.
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
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"
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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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.
Well, let's see, it was *my* tax dollars that paid to develop and build the Internet, years before Corporate America had even heard of it.
:)
So yes, I feel pretty damn entitled, thank you.
:M
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.
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.
"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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
...
---
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
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.
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.
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
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."
Oooh, what's your user name over there?? :)
-= rei =-
"Well, then fire it up and show me what this..." (sigh)
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)
...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".
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.
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!
---
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
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!"
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
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
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.
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!"
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 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!
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
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
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.
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?
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
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
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!
There are ways to maximize uptimes and availability. How often is yahoo not up(ddos attacks excluded)? or CNN? maybe this guy has a hotmail account, and developed his perception from it's availability.
- Dan I.
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
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
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.
I see boom times ahead for f---edcompany.com with turds like these in charge of the economy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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