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The Death Of The Open Internet
Crackerman111 writes "There's an article up on Economy.com's The Dismal Scientist that's sort of a follow up to the /. post a few days ago that talked about how businesses want a new profitable internet."
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Every trained user is a potnetial hub and the more hubs the harder it is to knock out. Think of the Radio Relay Leauge's field day . This kind of activity is just what the military desires. Central exchanges that can be knocked out or co opted work backwards.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Highway systems are not meant to turn a profit, they serve public as well as military interest
Thats why it is a good analogy - the communications infrastructure and TCP/IP protocol were never intended for "turning a profit" either, they are merely generic transport mechanisms, like the roads. The best someone can hope for is to make money laying the pipes, like the companies that make money laying the roads. The whole point is precisely that the Internet isn't "meant" to turn a profit - the people who designed the original ARPANET didn't go out to build an infrastructure for making money. Good communications infrastructure in an area should also encourage growth. If I buy a chair and I bring it home in my car, the chair manufacturer doesn't charge me for the transport of the chair on the road - I can (within limits) carry whatever I want on the road, and its nobody's business - the road is just what lies inbetween the two endpoints which are actually the important part of the sale, that is, my home, and the chair manufacturer. Same should apply to the Internet, if I order Duke Nukem 1 from 3DRealms and download it from their site, the fact that the Internet was used for transport of the software is arbitrary and irrelevant, what mattered was what happens at the endpoints, i.e. the transaction between seller and buyer.
While I don't condone the attacking tone of this post you are responding to I would reccomend to you the article: Jerome P. Kassirer, M.D., "Federal Foolishness and Marijuana," New England Journal of Medicine, January 30, 1997, Volume 336, Number 5, p. 366; here in one of the most respected journals of medicine you will find that there is increasing frustration with the federal jihad against marijuana. Unfortunately the federal government is more greatly empowered to "beat up" on doctors than doctors are to "beat up" on the DEA. It would be nice if you would educate yourself on the full range of opinions available on a topic before shooting your mouth off.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
This is a spin on a Nicholas Petrelly quote from last year when he said Information does not want to be free, people want it to be free.
Unfortunately, even though he is an open source supporter, he is still a bit lost in the world of intellectual property.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
New Crappy Internet (NCI) - well I like it - this name has definitely got my vote! As a business person I too am looking at ways to make money from the internet but any lack of imagination on my part IS NOT the fault of the existing Net. I guess many people in business are greedy, shortsighted and have the inability to imagine a world where their interests are not number 1; classic example - Microsoft!
Probably by stealing their cars.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"But set those aside while I attack your basic premise: your argument against license puts use of mind-altering substance under the same category as sex with minors, drunk driving, and speeding. The difference is that there has never been a succesful attempt to demonstrate a compelling social harm resulting from marijuana use. It has in fact been convincingly argued that the negative social consequences of drug prohibition far outweigh the potential gains even if prohibition were succesful, which it is not. Not allowing adults to choose whether they prefer a little smoke versus a bottle of beer for recreation is one thing. Refusing to allow the distribution of clean needles even when it has been repeatedly proven that it slows the transmission of AIDS, a compelling social benefit, and has no impact on drug use (junkies shoot up whether they can get clean needles or not) is quite another. But we get it forced down our throats in one package.
Twitter, I apreciate what you are trying to say but I cannot agree. The bureaucracies of status quo power will ALWAYS attempt to trivialize the liberties that they seek to retract while inflating the potential dangers of their abuse. You need to decide whether you value liberty or only the liberties you personally choose to exercise. You would also do well to educate yourself about the real costs and values of the "War on Drugs". A great many liberties unrelated to one's choice of "recreation" have been lost in the name of this lost cause.
One could argue that for most the internet is merely a "recreation." Don't be surprised when that argument is used to strip away your right to a free voice. You can choose not to speak up when someone's freedom is taken away because they choose a liberty that you don't value. Don't be surprised if there is noone left to speak up when they come for you.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
To get the real message here, we have to replace every instance of the term "intelligent network" with "telephony network". So we see that what the businesses really want, is a high bandwidth telephony network.
And that's almost what we got. The ISO protocol suite with X.25, requiring all kinds of telephony switching infrastructure all the way down, restricting networking pretty much to remote access, almost won over TCP/IP. And it wasn't the dirty Yankees, it was the PTT monopolies of Europe collaborating with ECMA, shoving it through ISO and marketing it heavily at the US. Michael Padlipsky did a wonderful job advocating for TCP/IP with RFC's 871, 873, and 874. One of my favorites from him was when he was speculating as to why ECMA was pushing for such an inefficient CPU-intense protocol stack: ```... the "M", recall, is for "Manufacturers"''
I doubt TCP/IP is going away. Ever dial 10-10-321 or any other 10-10 service? All IP telephony. Telcos are investing billions into IP networks, and they'll sell it to anyone with money to burn. They have everything to lose by tossing that out. And until they can figure out a way to make one-way wires, DSL and cable are still going to enjoy upstream speed too (people do send attachments and such).
Now they may try to filter out everything not using their proprietary software, but I don't think the government for example would like its purchasing list for email and other communication software circumscribed like that, so it'd only happen at that all-important Last Mile. Watch that space closely and don't take shit when they start restricting it -- complain loud and long to them, not just slashdot.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
>Businesses pay taxes, yes?
Businessses can afford to pay accountants and lawyers to find obscure loopholes in laws so they don't have pay taxes, yes?
And ordinary citizens can't afford this, yes?
so citizens have their taxes increased to counter the money that governments lose from tax avoiding corporates, yes?
errr...no. AOL charges, what? $24.95/mo? I have heard that their cost for providing service is less than $5/mo/subscriber, all labor and bandwidth costs included. Giving them, even pissing away money like they had two dicks, a clear income monthly of nearly .5billion US$. They actually do NOT need banners and advertising to make a profit...There are probably other, more sinister reasons...bwuaahahahahah!
"To be fair, I was left completely unsupervised." ~Anon
No, I missed that. Thanks for pointing it out ~Z
We dance to all the wrong songs.
--Refused.
your absolutly correct, you don't know what they are talking about. AOL is exactly what they are talking about, a private network that has limited access to the internet. the problem with this approach is that a great deal of the appeal of the internet is the open access to an almost limitless database of information and ideas. if the open internet really does die, you won't be reading /., you'll be stuck with mindless AOL chat rooms, and endless pop up ads.
ION has been released for both commercial and residential services, but only in about ten or twelve cities, and only in the US. It has moved very slowly, due to both last-mile problems(the frustration over this is the main impetus behind the wireless broadband campaign Sprint started) and pricing/business problems. When ION was started, it was a major pain to set up a customer(taking a month or more and relying on things like faxes between different business units and groups for exchanging information to set everything up). This manual process was error-prone and a major pain in the butt. Beyond that, they originally used VoIP instead of VoATM, so the voice quality sucked and the initial reviews were pretty harsh. After this arrow in the back, they switched to VoATM and implemented tons of automation in the back end to speed the delivery process and make it less of a pain/error prone. Currently ION services, all the communiation/automation pieces for setting up a customer is at v3.5b and is getting better all the time. It now takes a couple days from order to live instead of a month or so, from a technical standpoint, billing is what takes time in reality.
The scary part about all this? It looks like Sprint is helping build the "smart" networks that we all fear will take away our freedom on the net. They plan on introducing tons of net-based services, like a digital valet. An AI which lives in the network and has inputs at your office, home and car and is controlled via a little PDA you carry around. This AI can feed you video streams from your house if someone comes to the door and can do other things like turn on and off your alarm system to let them in to deliver something. This AI can do much, much more than that too. All of it at the expense of anonymity of course.
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
If doctors thought that weed was useful, they would say so and beat the DEA up. I listen to my doctor and I hope you can find one that you trust as well. It might help your wife, but I suspect a nicer husband would do better.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I dare say, as my post will probably be last in line, that I don't get my news from agencies with no line to feedback them. The Dismal Scientist is just that, dismal. It's depression, and "we got you now". There is no journalistic ethics pervading their stories, as they just throw quick quotes and some numbers, and a few links to "real technical terms" like "computer", and think they know Internet && the Economy. They don't. They couldn't figure out why the tech is in a slump- but I bet I know. It's old regime, business "as we(the owners of big multi's) like it", and not how the real internet is supposed to be. They wanted to brute force B2B, that didn't work. They wanted to brute force IPO's like "junk bonds". They do tech implementation like an elephant does brain surgery. Their old way of doing business will not work on the internet. It just won't work. As for them profiteering from my bandwidth? Only healthy if I have a healthy overhead of it too. :-)
I basically agree with you. QoS is necessary when you have a streaming flow which you want to have control upon: if people come to think about it, the reason why a large buffer has to be set up when hearing radio on the net is that it's easy to get average 28.8 Kb/s, even here in Italy :-(, but it's more difficult to have constant bitrate. And to do this, you must allocate bandwidth at all steps of your path.
There is no real gain in having QoS when browsing Internet or sending email... The real power of IPv6 is that you may have your "real" address. If UMTS will ever be deployed, this will be the killer app, which will make the need for addresses surge!
ciao,Several points:
1) The problem isn't with the internet as it stands today, but with the application of the internet. It's not the anarchy on the internet that caused the dot-com.death -- it was stupid business practices.
2) "Businesses are growing so frustrated by the unreliability of the public Internet" (from the LA Times article) So What! Do I (meaning correct-thinking, techno-saavy america) want to turn every last scrap of online freedom over to corporate superpowers? The Government, austensibly, is supposed to be "of the people, for the people..." and like that. Corporations are "for the money, because of the money, and all about the money". They only answer to the ledger book (spread sheet, I guess). Do you want to put them in control?
3)"Thanks to people who had the foresight to keep the middle stupid, we've been able to discover new, totally unanticipated applications " (again from the times)
Damn Straight! Remember the scare the "Halloween Documents" put into the "anarchist hippies" (psssst - that means ME and YOU) with Microsoft wanting to control the protocols on the web, make them no longer a commodity (that means something that anyone can supply - in case you didn't know) So M$ would have control of web communications with their protocol. THIS IS WORSE!!! This is giving over the protocol, the router, the switch, and even the wire.
4)"Whether the open model and the business model can comfortably coexist is debatable" (Times again)
Screw THAT! They can coexist, as long as business doesn't try to bend over the public and cornhole them and expect the public to thank them for the innovation (See the history of AT&T). No - there won't be no mega-corps if the whole world followed the Open model, but....HEY! wait a minute!!! That's not a bad thing at all!
5) "Telecom executives say that without a major redesign of the Internet, such eagerly anticipated applications as video-on-demand, Internet Telephony and Webcasts of live entertainment events will never be economical." (again)
Uhm - this might be an unpopular view but...Do we really need that crap? Is it worth handing the keys to the internet over to the blackest pit-spawn of the nether-corporate planes?
6)"Companies Are Having to Pay for Reliability" (Times again, this is a bold-faced heading to a section)
Really? Oh those poor soulless bastards! They have to PAY for something? Like I do. OH the INJUSTICE OF IT ALL! Maybe we could get like....Prince and U2, and Micheal Jackson and a bunch of other musicians from the 80s to do a benefit concert for them...like a Billionaire-CEO-Aide benefit concert. Thos poor billion dollar corporations have to PAY for reliability like I do. damn. It just ain't right.
So, in closing, I'd like to ask that when you go to the polls this november, remember that honesty and integrity count, and that I promise to do the job....Oh wait, I'm not running for office....
But - if this hideousness happens in our dimension, or a nearby paralell plane, boycott the bastards. Don't use their crappy product.
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.
So who's left to defend the net as it is right now? Nobody. Remember: there's no difference between "national interests" and corporate interests, because today the corps and the government are essentially the same thing, different only in name and appearance.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Call this the 'pluggable protocol' model. It also allows for multiple special purpose protocols to operate at the same time. There could be a protocol designed specifically for MMORPGs, for example, that was optimized for minimizing latency.
... you can try generating your own ethernet frames if you want, but unless you've developed the perfect AI that knows what you really mean with such packets and routes them appropriately, you're going to have a hard time working without some standard platform.
Ok, first make it routable. That's IP. (use IP6 if you want it sans cruft).
Now you need to address a target on the system, by a number perhaps, since you can't just have every process on the target system inspect every packet. You need to be able to send a chunk of data to a process on a system. That'd be UDP.
Now you need to make sure your data arrives. RDP (TCP's less-talented cousin that died in its crib)
Now you need to make sure it arrives in order. TCP.
Just for fun, let's allow people to add arbitrary metadata to a really low level of the protocol by sticking extra headers on the packet. That would be IP6 again.
And guess what, TCP and UDP don't even have to sit on IP (it's just unlikely they won't). It's a protocol graph, not a straight line stack. In short, it already is pluggable. You just need root to start generating anything below raw IP
It seems it's pretty modular and "pluggable" as it is. In fact it was designed that way. Reinventing this particular wheel is not likely to make it rounder.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
That's true.
But today, when new road construction happens (and not construction to widen an existing road), what do they do?
They often turn it into a toll road. Ostensibly to "pay for the construction". But of course, that construction was probably already funded by taxes already. And the money collected doesn't actually go directly back into the road -- it goes into the "general fund". And I wouldn't doubt that some of that is diverted to "interested parties", like perhaps the contractor that constructed the road to begin with (indirectly, of course, after being suitably, um, "processed"), and the politicians that managed to make the deal happen to begin with.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
But can a 13 year old make it impossible for you or anyone else to reach your home by these roads for days or weeks without any significant risk of being caught?
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
IRL, we pay (in part) for highways through gasoline taxes (a lot). If "per-byte" fees were used, we might see less napstering, pop-up ads and other bandwidth hogs change in their nature. If the "client" pays, the change would be away from napstering and other client-driven uses, if the "server" pays, then the change would be away from pop-ups and spam.
The question is, how long can techies suck resources from businesses before the businesses realize that banner ads on a web site are not nearly as cost-effective as buying a NASCAR vehicle and participating in the "rolling billboards" they call races? A lot of the shakeout is due, in part, to the growing realization that a computer screen (no matter how interesting) is not as good an advertising environment as a TV (the user has too much control on the computer). To get attention you need bandwidth and attention-dominance, otherwise TV ads would be constantly scrolling across the bottom of the screen while we watched the "entertainment".
[disclaimer]I use an old-technology browser so I don't have to put up with many of the ugly features of the New Web Order (NWO).[/disclaimer]
Look at what a success it is for learning new information and sharing information? I can find out just about anything I need to on the Internet, and I can find out about companies' products on the Internet, too. Plus get software updates. If you can't make a buck on the 'net, you're doing something wrong IMO.
If you sent him an email complaining about unfair moderation without telling him what it was that was unfairly moderated then his response seems perfectly reasonable.
If your email was just enquiring after his health with no reference to moderation though then his reply would seem a little odd.
What exactly are we supposed to conclude from just the reply?
"the gov is funding our research in the feasiblity of using [...] Military Area Networks"
That sounds logical, indeed. NOT.
What I meant was 'a single QoS per call' - I didn't phrase that bit very well.
Scaring? I thought I was humping your grandma. A bit dry, but a good dolup of KY fixed that problem. Hrmmm.... saggy tits, wrinkly skin, dry vaginas, life doesn't get any better than this.
No. I was replying to a post.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
THe author believes that the 'network' part of the internet will supercede the 'host' part of the internet technology-wise, and compares this to our land-line phone system layout.
This is misleading -- the entire purpose of the telephone network is to connect your phone to someone elses -- that's the real value.
On the internet, the only reason for the network to exist is to provide access to the content on the hosts.
Both will be important.
aXV1cTswMDR5dS9wc2gwYnFxew
They need to have all the advertisers and prawnographers deported to the Andromeda Galaxy. That'll improve network capacity by more than enough.
Yeah, sure. Geeks will rebuild the Internet, but they'll leave all the pr0n behind. Somehow, I doubt this.
Who paid for the Internet? Taxpayers? HAH! Porn sites have consistantly been the single most profitable enterprise on the Internet, before and after the "Age of the Dot-Com". They are the oldest and most secure method of making money online, and they have the most experience.
The infrastructure of the Internet is indirectly funded by pornography. Broadband connectivity, streaming video, high compression codecs, etc. all have their roots in pornography. ISP's are more than eager to run fiber for a garunteed-to-be-profitable triple X site. "Web portals" can only dream of the traffic porn sites get. And that traffic requires a lot of hardware and support personnel. These operations, too taboo for the Dow, fund the big players that Wall Street eats up.
And, amazingly enough, porn site banners are among the most effective, always testing new (and often insidious) ways to attract customers. You want to see how the new Internet is going to work? Check out the way the porn sites are handling the current Internet. (Here's a free hint: a video featuring Britney Spears sucking donkey dong, whether you have it or not, is worth about a gajillion click-throughs.)
I don't make a profit and I am fine.. fuck the profitable internet.
while europe and other parts of the world will start having unmetered access north america will have everything metered access.
The problem with your argument about the cost of a long distance call is that the actual bandwidth is a small fraction of what you are paying. Raw bandwidth in bulk quantities is at least an order of magnitude cheaper than what you pay for that call. You are mostly paying for operational costs, overhead, marketing, etc.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
You go on to say that centuries down the road, a more enlightened America will decide that similar separation ought to apply to business. Business, after all, being the new Church, should not have privileged or systemic influence over the State. It sounds great on the surface-- "Finally, the Corporate whores^H^H^H^H^H^H Suits at Exxon can no longer install an unelected & curiously unintelligent man as President on their whim!"
However, even based on your own argumentation, there's a fatal flaw: the State can now no longer infringe on the free exercise of business. At least, if we're keeping up with your analogy in terms of Church and State. In fact, what we've basically accomplished through this wonderful corporate secularism has another name: laissez-faire capitalism.
Call me confused, but, didn't America try that approach extensively throughout the 19th century? I believe it was Mark Rosenfelder who described those times as: "Filth in our meat, shantytowns, racism, 'No Irish need apply', company towns, union-busting goons, monopolies, corruption scandals, a punishing business cycle, old folks living in poverty, failing banks, Boss Tweed, gunboat diplomacy..."
I'm not suggesting for a second we're much better off at this present date... but, "Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me." I suppose it's too much to ask of our enlightened future America to think of the mistakes of the past ;)
Separation of "business" and State in this manner, as you describe it, is also self-contradictory-- how precisely do you plan on separating the two one the one hand, when we've just gone ahead and given business an unlimited license to act as it pleases on the other? We need to think this through a little more clearly-- we should perhaps start looking at the actual sources of distress and poverty in our society (yea, in our World) and address those issues on a more fundamental level. Perhaps we need to rethink our concepts of economics, of labour, of government-- and build a more free and more fair system from the ground up.
Just my two cents...
BRx.
Life after capitalism? The participatory economics project
Remember when Homer says, "phhpt, 'Internet' -- is that thing still around?" thats only funny to you and I, most people dont understand it as any more than another medium to buy products.
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Thankyou, and have a nice day.
Yes. Well if you hadn't realised that before then you're pretty stupid. All companies do with the internet is use it to advertise. When have you gone to a company website and had it provide you with INFORMATION and not have it try to sell you something?
Why can't companies have their own internet? Let them! I think what we're actually talking about is a corporate www. Sure, every day I'd log into 'adnet' to see what corporate bastards are trying to push down my throat. Companies don't realise that their very presence on the internet is rather unwelcome. People hate ad banners, they hate having to buy things (not because they have to give their credit card number over the net, but because most other stuff on the net IS free). If they made a more corporate version or changed the current system so that it was more easy to market products over it, people simply wouldnt use it as much.
Mind you, I'm sure that if the current open web dies we'd make up something else similar.
ghaa.
that felt good to read... almost like first-handjob-good. Kudos to your melon.
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The real question is whether the telcos can get DSL sorted out. DSL is a mess at the central office right now, because a DSL install requires physical wiring inside the central office. Telcos hate this, because physical wire management inside central offices is labor-intensive and gets messy after too many changes. Broadband to the home needs to be implemented in a way that requires fewer manual wire terminations. Eventually, DSL, or something like it, will just be built into the CO switch, and every line will be DSL-capable. (For many switches, that's true for ISDN now, although it's not marketed much.)
For an article by someone who knows that they're talking about, see this article in ISPWorld.
Whatever happened to the CDN's who were supposed to distribute net content across the Net? Did they run out of dot com customers?
You are right up to a point, in the way that people make money off the road system but not *from* the road system.
Air travel is also a good analogy - it's hard to lay new roads, whereas creating new flights or flying larger planes is relative simple (just like lighting up dark fibre, or creating extra channels on existing fibre with better technology on either end). Also, private companies don't build roads, whereas they do run the airlines and airports to some degree (depending on the country).
The thing to remember is that if people want the Internet to survive, it will - it's incredibly decentralised. It's not a problem that the Internet's routers may be carrying (a) high-QoS business traffic and (b) digital TV as MPEG2 over IP, as well as (c) today's Internet traffic. IP routers are getting very good at carrying different types of traffic with differing QoS goals - the only impact is that the routers and links are much bigger, and that the (profitable) business and multimedia traffic helps to cross-subsidise the standard Internet type traffic.
(nt)
No, it's the same approach everyone else is talking about, just a different application of it. I already use this approach on my system, for example, to insure that Telnet/SSH traffic ( interactive sessions, low bandwidth ) gets priority over FTP and HTTP ( typically large downloads, high bandwidth ). That gets me fast response in terminal sessions without really hindering FTP/Web performance.
But the tool can be used both ways. Look at who's screaming for and pushing for QoS: businesses who want to sell things to you. You hear them talking about the larger, more intrusive ads as being better because they're harder for users to ignore. The fact that they interfere with the user seeing what he came to the site to see doesn't even come up. Those same companies are also the ones starting to pay ISPs to handle their content and otherwise give them preference. If you give them a tool that they can use ( or abuse ) to make their ads come up first and fastest, what use do you think they're going to make of it?
Businesses are willing to pay for virtual private networks using IP and (often) MPLS, with QoS. However, these VPNs will run alongside normal Internet traffic - the only impact is that the service provider makes a lot more money from business class traffic, so they can afford to cross-subsidise the consumer market in most cases.
This is already happening, of course - the key point about QoS is that Joe Consumer has no interest in paying for this, generally. However, he might pay for cheaper voice calls, or video calls from a PC/PDA - these may well require QoS.
The reason ATM QoS failed was that it is circuit-oriented and telco-style - you get a single high-grade QoS from end to end, by making an 'ATM call' - and requires ATM everywhere. IP QoS is mainly based on prioritisation at choke points, e.g. the last mile connection, and doesn't have to be everywhere - some networks deliver QoS at the edges but turn off QoS in the core network, because that has so much bandwidth there's no point. ATM would pay the same per-call queuing costs, and signalling costs, everywhere - which is why ATM QoS per-call (using SVCs, switched virtual circuits) never took off. I work for a company that originally planned to map IP onto ATM QoS SVCs - now we do IP QoS and VPNs using conventional IP routers, for which the market is pretty good.
This isn't really a good analogy. Highway systems are not meant to turn a profit, they serve public as well as military interest. Good highway systems encourage growth in an area. (Didn't you play SimCity?)
I think actually what they want is profitable COMPANIES. Strange that they are blaming the Internet for their inability to make a profit.
What, me worry?
Film at 11.
screw them. its as much mine as theirs and i like it the way it is thanks. go sell your balls somewhere else.
"i was saying gnu-rd"
I say, let the businesses have their internet, and watch it crash and burn. If they haven't learned yet, maybe this will teach them.
Got Rhinos?
Yeah, I can just imagine it...
The Future: All roads lead to McDonalds.
My theory is that eventually this evolve into 2 Internets. One used by businesses and *maybe* individuals. The other is the existing one that will be used by the Internet underground, or those who cannot afford the New Internet.
I belong to the ______ generation.
Admittedly the article has a point, but I do not believe that the point was that "the open internet is dying". I think rather that the point is that "the internet is not a pool of liquid money". This is a good thing. The massive influx of commercial interests into what was once a primarily academic network was, to many who used it, kind of like watching a horde of lemmings descend on a garden. Look at all the damage done in the last 5 years! The destruction of the Online Guitar Archive (OLGA) was the first shot in the many salvos fired by the corporations that came to infest the Internet in the battle to dominate what people saw and interacted with on the net. The lack of financial potential may well save us. Without money, would there be a DMCA? Would there be massive RIAA lawsuits? Would we have elaborately engineered "streaming" media formats that don't let you save video to disk? Would we have millions of sites full of crappy fixed-font "Flash" that only windows users with 1024x768 resolution can read?
Down with the commercial Internet. Up with content and open standards. Look at the power of the site you're reading - created entirely with flat HTML. Broadband isn't the revolution. This is the revolution.
Since this is the case, It would be a stretch to say these "Companies" don't realize this. Which makes me thing there must be some other motive behind sectioning off the internet....
Burn Hollywood Burn
What a depressing peice of trash this was. The usage of the internet is dwindling? No shit. I can't believe the /. crew would find this newsworthy. Slow day? The author of this article gives us hardly any news, just a sort of haphazard substitution for insight that fails wretchedly. Oh, here's a bit of real news: apache lost ground according to the most recent netcraft survey. Read it if you're into that, information stuff.
We dance to all the wrong songs.
--Refused.
I thought all roads lead away from McDonalds! (with apologies to Terry Pratchett for adapting his joke...)
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
The Death of the Internet As We Know It
.Net initiative put Microsoft directly at the center of the application delivery process. The consumer identification routine built into Windows XP, called Passport, makes them the gatekeeper at the end point, as well.
By Wes Basel
08/2/01 12:00 PM ET
With the Internet boom seriously busted, the shrinking cadre of true believers clings to broadband technologies as the last hope. A pure form of this vision would blame the slow rollout of broadband by local service providers as the trigger that initiated the collapse. The problem is that broadband over the existing Internet is neither economically or technically feasible. What began as a deliberately decentralized network to promote the exchange of research ideas and data became a poor network for commercial applications.
The Internet is a dumb network with smart terminals. The network itself functions automatically through pre-determined algorithms of routing and formatting. Once the network is built, there is no internal intelligence required for each transmission. The intelligence of the network is concentrated at the endpoints, the personal computers and servers at the terminus.
For this reason, attempts to bolt the Internet onto less intelligent media outlets in the home, such as TVs, stereos, and cell phones, have resulted in ungainly hybrids. Consumers find such Frankensteins clumsy and inelegant, and requiring too much personal interaction to operate. Adoption of web TV and other such services has been disappointing. Wireless Internet services have also been a nonstarter with U.S. consumers.
Furthermore, the capacity of the Internet is still far short of being able to beam video-on-demand and other such broadband ideas to a significant portion of U.S. consumers. The Internet was designed for text delivery. As a basis of comparison, digital e-books require a few megabytes storage space, music CDs are 650 megabytes, while video DVDs are 8.5 gigabytes. So even if there is 80% unused capacity in the current Internet backbone, it is too small by a factor of 100 or more.
Finally, the decentralization of the Internet and thus lack of control by any group of operators promotes its lack of reliability and responsibility, even as it promotes the high pace of innovation. On this non-intelligent network, security is dependent on the end-user, and thus subject to the vagaries of system administrators and amateur home networkers. Consumers and copyright holders alike remain rightfully cautious of letting loose too much data onto the net, as there is no reliable method for tracking its dissemination and use. Viruses are easily written and released, and unwanted email and privacy intrusions are difficult to prevent.
Economically, the difficulty in assessing tolls for distribution drove the Internet backbone into commodity-status. Operators compete primarily on price, since they have no method for guaranteeing quality. The result was a business with very high startup costs and low margins, the opposite of a desirable outcome.
By contrast, the telecom network is the opposite: a smart network with dumb terminals. The intelligence and thus control of the network is contained in the switching technology, allowing the operator to ensure and contract a given quality of service. This allowed the pre-breakup AT&T to promote their famous "Five 9s" performance, 99.999% reliability. The ability to control access and routing also allowed higher margins, and thus profitability, despite the high startup costs.
Changes to the net are already under way. Cisco and its competitors are designing new switching technologies, allowing greater control of the pathway. Business uses concentrate on virtual private networks and other methods for secure, high quality internal company nets. Consumer initiatives are focused on authentication and identification schemes operating on the existing Internet, and proprietary satellite or cable delivery technologies. Thus, the Internet is evolving into a smarter network, which will allow easy access by dumber terminals.
The portion of any network that provides the most profitable business opportunities is the intelligent portion, because that is the portion generating control and thus allowing pricing based on quality. In the telecom age, the prime monopoly arose as the network provider, AT&T. In the Internet age, the prime monopoly was the gatekeeper to the PC, the Microsoft operating system. Now as we move to a smarter network again, Microsoft is trying to move their operations onto the network.
With the network getting more intelligent, high-quality end-to-end connections become a possibility. Workable consumer and business broadband services could result, although the capacity constraint remains. Such services would not require a universal operating system and associated software understandable by all the end-users, rather it would be more efficient to design the link-up and download software independently for each application.
The plethora of development tools and consumer services offered with the latest versions of Microsoft operating system upgrades is a direct response to this movement. The development tools that make up the
If successful, this strategy would make Microsoft the monopoly network provider of the next decade. Whether it would be more beneficial for consumers and the overall economy for this monopoly to be averted, or allowed and then regulated, is an uncertain public policy question. Uniform standards would promote the development of such applications and thus be an unqualified good for the economy. Yet, the potential for non-competitive pricing practices is large.
Furthermore, the total loss of the open Internet would seriously dampen innovation. An open, decentralized network, placing the intelligent components directly into end-user hands, has been the ideal model for innovation. Even in the telecom age, most of the major innovations actually occurred from the usage of the telegraph, which in its early stages was a very unintelligent network with very intelligent terminals. Wire news services, stock ticker tape, wire funds transfers, intercontinental cables, all arrived before the telephone system. It is likely that some small part of the open Internet will survive, if only among the technically literate, but a renewed level of public and research support may be desirable to maintain this modern engine of innovation.
I think it is really funny how some suits are complaining that the internet "doesn't follow economic laws." Think about that for a moment, if we discovered something that didn't follow the laws of physics, we'd quickly go back to the drawing board because it would be obvious that our understanding of physics was flawed. Not so with business types I guess.
The greatest strenght of the intenet is its decentralized nature. It reminds me of the form of govenrment the founding fathers tried to create, one where no one person or group had too much control and anything that one group did could be countered by the others.
So now some suits don't like the fact that they can't exploit people online they way they have been able to do traditionally. Well boo fucking hoo. There is plenty of money to be made online, just look at Amazon or Ebay.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Unfortunately,
While businesses may want a profitable internet (they *are* businesses and thus exist only for profit), the bulk of consumers do not want to touch anything to do with online commerce. Sure, they will pay their AOL bill every month, but unless your dishing out pr0n, you'd better think of a real, fail safe, free method of getting the cash from the consumer to the businesses.
Hell... I considered myself exempt from such blind thinking but then I rec'd a message from the CEO of egghead.com stating that their customer database was breached by a hacker and that my card may have been exposed. Gasp...
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
A push towards a corporatized internet will only lead people to find other means of communication. Who wants to take bets on when every geek house has a wireless tower on top of it?
It is much easier for an 'internet business' to be profitable if they ACTUALLY SELL SOMETHING!! People are finally figuring out that nobody clicks on banner ads, and so advertising revenue is down.
Think about it, advertising on the net is unique in that it is integrated within the content. the closest thing would be magazines where the ads are mixed with the content, but most magazine ads are on their own page.
In radio, you listen to a song, hear a commercial, then another song. They don't stop in the middle of the song to tell you about McDonald's and then play the rest of the song - but that same principle is what internet advertisers are wanting to do.
Bottom line is advertising on the net just does not work very well, especially pop up ads.
Has anyone seen the pop up ads that appear just a bit too far to the right, out of the screen area, so that the maximize button is on the edge of the screen. If out of habit, you click the top right of the pop up window, you will maximize it rather than close it. Sneaky, sneaky.
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
I don't know if L0pht Heavy Industries (now part of @Stake consulting) still maintains this project, but they used to host technical writeups of their progress on establishing a "guerilla" wireless network using radio waves. The "nodes" or transmission stations were designed to be inexpensive and expendable (in case they were siezed or destroyed by the authorities), and were able to acheive some semblance of Windows Networking at speeds comprable to (last i checked) 9600 baud modems. Its been a while since i kept up with it, but it seemed like a viable alternative if "the worst happens" to the internet. Sure, it wouldnt be fast, you wouldnt be able to play quake through it, but it would be free, unmoderated and uncensored.
Granted, implimenting this would seem a bit rash now, but its an interesting thing to be aware of, that it would work. Keep the plans in a glass case with the words "break open in case of fascism" printed on the front..
You actually think that hasn't happened?
Love it or leave it.
K45.
This signature has eleven vowels.
okay, so the article is saying that business doesn't like the internet because no one organization controls it? (or more to the point, MY business doesn't control it.)
okay, so a bunch of people are getting together and making "smarter" equipment so that the internet doesn't need to be so darned de-centralized anymore and "we can reliably promise our customers the best internet experience possible".
if business doesn't like it, well zerbert on them. that's the beauty of this network. if you don't like it, put up your own and maybe hook it up to the rest. and people will see how your network is better, or marketted better in any case, and you will be in control.
there ya have it. bringing old school ideas (making good product and good advertisements) to new school technologies. because the idea of bringing out the lawyers (modern day equivalent to calling for mommy) isn't going to cut it in this playground.
and the Irishman took the fly in his hands and yelled, "spit it out!"
film at 11.30, right after death of the internet
film
OK, this article claims the "open" internet is dying......but as I carefully scan through the article the only actual information besides what is wrong with the internet today is "Cisco and competitors are already designing smarter switches". Now can anyone explain how having intelligent switches that control the path of data better will "kill" the open internet. It doesn't seem to me that just because data will flow more efficiently the open internet will die. Hell, they don't even explain what the "closed" internet is and how it will come about....overall a losy article that is extremely short on facts to support it's position.
"
Find: "terminal" Replace with: "user" Ahhh...now the article makes sense
Uhhh...shouldn't that be dumber users (hopefully with shiny new visa cards)?
You're using her as bait, Master!
"businesses want a profitable internet"
Businesses exist to make money. It's stunning how few people seem to understand this.
end communication
ehm.
My theory about the new internet - the new internet will be as wildly popular as new Coke.[*]
This is my theory, come up with by me.
[*] yeah, corporate Amerika is really in touch with what people want, eh?
I know there is freenet, but has anyone actually thought of/proposed several networks for this? Something like your pornnet, biznet, pubnet, schoolnet, etc?
Aliens? Magnetic Rings?! Bah! Who needs that when we have
The telecom network isn't more "intelligent" than the Internet. The Internet has many times more CPU power than the phone network: A phone switch needs a little CPU time to set up a call, while a router needs a little CPU time for every packet. But Bellcore back in the 1980s coined the term (trademark?) "Intelligent Network" to refer to their architecture for using outboard processors and Signaling System 7 to supplement the feature capabilities of AT&T (now Lucent) and Nortel switches. Isenberg correctly notes that the Internet is different, so he called it the Stupid Network, which is correct as an antonym but not literally accurate.
What the phone network offers (and does amazingly well on) is Quality of Service (QoS), which is a measurable set of performance metrics. The Internet was designed specifically to not use QoS; instead, it shares its resources on an as-available basis with all comers. This is called "best effort" but that's a euphemism for "no particular effort".
Trouble is, people are overloading the Internet with services that really want QoS. Now a decade ago, the telecom industry was foreseeing a way of doing that using Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), a protocol that offers selectable QoS. But the Internet got commercialized and caught on instead. ATM became relegated to a niche technology (it's most widely used inside ADSL networks) but the global ATM network that had been foreseen never happened.
So now people are looking to the Internet to do all the things that it was designed not to do! I don't mean "not designed to do". MPLS, for instance, is the latest saviour-designee, but it can even be implemented as ATM! (Doesn't have to be, though.) So we're back where we were a decade ago, only we have to wave an "Internet" wand over everything or it won't sell.
The problem with ATM, btw, was that nobody figured out a good price model. QoS costs money to provide. When you provide QoS with an "Internet" label, it will still cost money, and the price problems will still exist.
And the nice thing about the real Internet, the one that carries data, Slashdot, Morpheus, non-real-time file transfer, SMTP mail and lots of other good things, is that its insensitivity to QoS lets it, well, ride on top of whatever's out there. It can be hidden in tunnels, treat censorship as damage and route around it, and survive all sorts of abuse. So I don't think that the "walled garden" folks will be able to kill off our Internet. Hell, if they take their shameless streaming commerce and its fans who think of it as "channels" with them, the rest of us will still get by just fine. Or, more realistically, we'll have more, not less, choice. Because the real Internet won't die.
That makes two of you.
Shut up! Be happy! Take only the drugs prescribed by your boss or supervisor! Remain calm! Sports broadcasts will continue as normal!
The enemy of progress is questions.
Tatsujin
Why? After all, the "free market" is what people crave. (Actually, people are only -told- they crave it. The "free market", as invented by the French, has had almost no long-term effect. The old trading Empires have simply been replaced with new trading Empires. Standing still isn't progress.)
The problem with the Internet, however, is that the Corporate Sector never paid for it. Nor did they design it. Nor (for the most part) do they run it. Nor could they, as it stands. It requires far too much cooperation, openness and integrity.
What the Corporate Sector wants is a free lunch. Or, at least, a free launch. A new way to sell their junk and tripe, without any of that R&D nonsense, and without any bills to pay.
If this happens, what -WILL- happen IMHO is that serious "Internet" users will find ways to migrate onto Internet 2, or some comparable tripe-free network.
And, what will happen then is that all the Domestic Users at Home (DUH) will decide that the Internet has lost all the good stuff, and they will switch over to some (inevitable) ISPs that serve this new, high-speed network.
Once that happens, of course, the prawn-merchants and the advertisers will drop the old Internet, and switch to this new, exciting service, where they will get to plague humanity all over again.
Of course, when they do that, the high-power users will complain that their new ultra-expensive networks are too slow, and they'll go and build an even faster one. At THEIR expense.
And, so, the entire cycle will repeat. Endlessly and stupidly.
The high-power users don't -really- need a faster network. They need to have all the advertisers and prawnographers deported to the Andromeda Galaxy. That'll improve network capacity by more than enough.
Advertisers and Web Crawlers are the ones -really- killing the Internet. I've seen guesstimates which place the total bandwidth eaten by banner ads plus web search engines at around 65% of the Internet's capacity.
Sending those BSE-rejects into deep space may well be the only hope humanity has of survival. I only hope it's not too late.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
And you know what? Your opinion doesn't make a damn bit of difference. --M
This article is scary. The author actually says the internet is a dumb network with smart terminals. It's true, the internet itself isn't the most complex thing, but you know what, there's brilliance in that. I think that's why it's so successfull. People like a simple, efficient system that they can use and have some control over.
The best analogy to this is the highway system, especially in cities. The internet today is like the open road, whereas a tightly controlled network would be like the subway system. Most people prefer the open road, I know I do, unless there's just so much traffic that driving makes no sense at all. Roads are simple, they are pavement with a few signs and lights (routers.) You can put just about any traffic on them, some more annoying than others (like 30-something females standing about 5'2" driving Ford Excursions...) People like to drive because they can control what's going on, or at least they get that feeling. People like to have the internet be simple so that they can enhance it as they prefer, not as some company dictates. The subway on the other hand, it has restricted traffic, subway cars. They only go certain places, but they go there quickly and usually on time. It's very convenient, but only when you need to specifically use the subway, IE go to one of it's specific stops. The range, or scope of the subway is therefore very limited, similarly to the way a coroporate restricted network is.
Anyway all this babbling is really just me trying to say: please don't change the internet, I like it just fine the way it is, I want to be able to drive, thanks.
~ now you know
In social systems like cities, regions, etc., mechanisms that allow for commerce and profit-making are A PART of the larger social system. Ie, commerce is a subset of the larger (super-)set of society. Profit-making is one of many things that are a part of social systems. Friendship, education, conflict, cooperation, etc., are also parts that make of a social system.
The Internet AS IT IS can accomodate commerce. In fact, the freer (in the free speech and not the free beer sense) the exchange of information is ... which you would get in a non-big-business dominated Internet ... the better a social system like the Internet lives up to the idea of a marketplace ... where there is free (again, in the sense of minimal restrictions and not free beer) exchange of goods and services.
But just as commerce is a subset of other social systems, commerce should be seen as a subset of the Internet as a social system. Commerce should not dominate and become the be all and end all of the Internet. You can't hope to have a vibrant and viable social system like the Internet if it was solely made up of commercial interests.
it keeps people who don't belong on the internet off of it! and they want to proprietarize their network or access methods? good! go for it! the further removed the masses are from the internet, all the better for research..
what really gets me about this article is how it says that the internet was great for the research community, but terrible for the commercial community.. well DUH!!! who do they think makes the commercial world possible?? RESEARCHERS!! and what is good for one is not necessarily good for the other..
inertia makes the world go 'round, not money..
Science is what advances technology, not marketing!
alas, no use.. there will be war between noblemen and businessmen.. go nietzsche..
vt
US$0.02++
The author basically says in the first 10 paragraphs or so that the current Internet hardware/software infrastructure simply isn't capable of supporting some of the more bandwidth-intensive applications (video-on-demand, smart devices, web-browsing cell phones) that some business-people have dreamed that it could support, and that the so-called smart devices (like interactive TV) haven't really taken off yet either, because they are too unwieldy to use. OK so far, but nothing I haven't already heard or read elsewhere.
But, he makes a very clumsy transition and uses three of the final five paragraphs in the article shilling for Microsoft, describing how the white knights at Redmond were riding in to save the day with Passport and .NET. How M$ is going to contribute to the infrastructure side of the equation is left as an exercise to the reader's imagination, I suppose.
In short, I know economy.com is not geared to techies, but it's not a very good article, just the same.
They also don't reach as wide an audience as a free and open internet, do they?
Take your pick.
So do we need more control by companies, less freedom on the internet?? (well, I knew the pre-web days...so I saw the changing). I don't think so, but coudn't it be possible to gradually upgrade all the internet connections (takes time, I talk long term) so that speed is guaranteed? This for the technical (hardware side)
Now comes the more interesting part: I want coexistence. The internet as we know it and the one companies wish. I think it could be done (but then I'm not a network specialist) So implement a "network" (virtual of course) on TCP/IP that does QoS and encrypts everything that is transferred. How it could be done, I have no idea, but there are bright people around. Usual internet traffic can go on, but for the "uber-network", you pay a small extra fee to access it (and the companies could pay too...after all we have to finance the hardware upgrades described above), which makes life better for everyone. Companies can do business on a firm base, and we can meddle around posting on /. and surfing for p0rn, not that I do that ;-)
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Imagine in how a bunch of people where saying "the phone system that is out there isn't friendly and profitable to business so we need to change it!" Any company that steps out in pulbic and claims this is nutty and so is trying to the same thing to the Internet.
Companies need to stop treating the Internet like content controled media like TV and Radio. It might be possible for things like AOL and MSN but out on the open Internet? Thats as crazy as checking everyone's phone to make sure they aren't talking about how to download "illegal" mp3s.
You can make money on the Internet just not the easy way these guys want it to be.
I don't think it's a safe assumption that the Internet is not a money-maker and that it fundamentally wants to be free. Certainly we would all like to stick with our traditional Internet values, and enjoy a free and giving 'net.
Everything that the free Internet does and facilitates is in direct contradiction with our economic ideologies (at least in the US). The rapid rate of technological innovation has our traditional capitalism busting at the seams. The only thing that holds it together is the massive power of corporations working with legislators to promote huge amounts of new legislation that protect companies' rights to make money for anything.
While this country's ideologies were based on personal freedom, and the separation of church and state, I think that those values are not enough in today's society.
I think a new world leader is likely to emerge in the centuries ahead with ideologies based on the separation of state and business. Think about it, the free market is a wonderful ECONOMIC tool. It provides unequaled productivity and efficiency. However, it does NOTHING for GOVERNMENT. The government should be there to set down the ground rules, things like environmental protections, and anti-trust laws.
Corporations as citizens is an alarming concept. It promotes the idea that business has the RIGHT to make as much money as possible. That is utter BS... the free market should dictate how much money can be made, and the government should dictate how far companies can go to sell their products.
The Internet is a reflection of people's needs to be free and have a realm of expression outside the control of big business. Let companies do what they will to squeeze every cent of profitability out of the Internet. I think the end of American greed-based capitalism is on the wane.
To paraphrase the article 'because the BACKBONE was built to do nothing but shift data, no one can make REAL money doing it, because it is a comodity.'
Bull-Feathers!
The scary part is, changing the basic way in which data moves across the network is in no way going to solve this issue. proponents of MPLS would have you believe otherwise, but the bottom line here is, unless you are going to force consumers to have a dedicated device for all the functions that a PC gives in one box, the edges are not going to get dumb, and let the networks have control over them again. To even suggest that we should go back to an 'appliance' level of sofistication in our technology simply because carriers can not shift thier strategy from the 'network is in control, you are all at my mercy' view is typical of an old time phone codger.
While this viewpoint is becoming increasingly common amongst telco execs who rode someone elses IP network into the 'internet' business, (after all, we ALL tend to equate the unknown to it's rough equivelant in our known universe), the fact remains, if you want to setup a toll booth on the network, you have to build in the access technologies to control it.
going back to a 'circuit switched' methodology (which is basicly what MPLS is going to give you) for figuring out how much to bill is not going to save you from the folks that figured out that the core of a network can NOT ever be congested to the point of dropping data, only the edge of the network is. In which case, you need a means to selectivly drop traffic based on whatever metric your marketing droids can come up with.
Strangly enough, this technology already exists and has been deployed by several of the newer carriers, and at least one of the 'old boys' is moving in the same direction.
Amazingly, it will not require them to change thier backbones at all, and will enable all those 'extra' services that telco-types point to as the big money makers on the voice business.
(so this article is basicly an un-informed rant , IMHO)
Can we translate this into telco terms, so even the densest bell-head 'gets' it? Sure! Just for example (and I know these don't equate 1:1, but this isn't an analogy, so much as an example of how the phone company makes money off you, and how an IP Provider could make the equivalent moneys)
Personal network based firewall = call waiting
optional network address translation = outsourced PBX service
the list is obviously endless of all the applications you can support, if your edge is smart enough to deal with it.
You know it's aways surprised me, esspecially after reading articles like this that there are things the providers have not already done. (Disclaimer: I am NOT promoting these ideas nor do I sugguest ever using them, in FACT please Don't). If the providers want to control content, and delievery, how come they give out real world IP's? They would have much finer control, if the cable modem nets, and home DSL nets were basically giant NAT networks, use one real IP hide the users behind it with private IP's they can get on and interact with the internet(Basic Dumb user happy), the compnay can control what flows on their net(Ie. Good bye servers, and other bandwidth hogs). Then they could charge a higher rate to get a real IP(more Yes infact please more) to the people(Like us) who want real world access, and know Yes we will run servers, no we really are not interested in your extended services, we know how to do that ourselves, and yes we are probably going to take up more bandwidth, please segment us off the main router so we don't slow down the causal browsers. Just a thought.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
This isn't about the failed dotcoms, that was a big bust because of overinflated IPOs and business models built on untested assumptions.
The concern now seems to be reworking/replacing the internet with something that's more suited to delivering content to dumb terminals such as set-top type boxes for streaming video, applications for cellphones, etc. It seems that adapting phones to the web just isn't working, and well, the unpredictable delays/latency in streaming video must not be very impressive to shareholders.
This doesn't worry me in itself... i only worry that Big Business wants to eliminate what they feel is unnecessary traffic (p2p apps/ftp/irc/etc) so as not to impede the flow of profit-generating activity. That's what scares me.
--- it's pelvis to be cube
I don't think we can get away with no corporate involvement or change. Sorry, but the world works based on corporate money. The upside is that they have the money to do things. The downside is that many daily decisions are made by a small cadre of white male republican technophobes. But I don't think that it is the death of the internet, or the impetus to turn away all corporate involvement.
Bascially, we are going to need the corporate investment to continue doing what we love. Many of the sites and the activities netizens do every day are only possible because a large check backs them up. Can I afford to run a large website with lots of content and bandwidth making less than $100G's and having to live as well? Think not. However, the collection of individuals who would be loathe to give up the freedom that the current system offers is hopefully large enough to avoid a total loss to blind corporate interest. Gotta find a balance here folks. Change is un-avoidable, but we need to remember that we have some ability to regulate that change. We need to exercise that ability when it is called for.
Bah
Even if the businesses did try to implement this, they would still get huge resistance from the private owners of infrastructure who are in-the-know. This would have huge legal costs, and would only cause headaches in terms of standards, reliability, routing, legal restrictions, etc.
The businesses (who undoubtably have huge financial reserves) should just wire their own internet. It would be supremely expensive, but they would greatly benefit from owning all the infrastructure, implementing their own protocols, routing tables, etc. And of course Earthlink, AOL, MSN and such would transparently wire up all their lusers to this network, while leaving all of us in peace. We could still buy an account for it if we wanted, but that should be our option.
That way, the businesses would 'own' their 'own' internet for their own purposes, avoid battles with free speech advocates, EFF, slashdotters, etc, and not make enemies because they would be acting at least somewhat intelligently.
That's just what I think, anyway.
</IMHO>
2) Figure out how much revenue you'll generate by selling your product. Again, for the Stanford MBA, "revenue" is "money that someone else pays you". You can figure this out by applying an advanced mathematical technique called "multiplication". Multiply the selling price of your product by the number of units you expect to sell. There are calculators and computer programs to help you with this if you have difficulty. Call this number "b".
3) Compare b to a. If b is greater than a by a large enough amount that you'll make significantly more than just putting your capital in a savings account, you're in good shape. If a is greater than b, you're screwed. Find some way to decrease a or increase b. Do this before you start your business. If you can't do it, the business model is uneconomic. Give it up and think up something else.
This appears to be a bit harder than the alternative: selling $10 bills for $1, then blathering about "failure to abide by economic laws" when the business fails.
Can anyone comment on the changes that are supposedly taking place in Cisco software to make the backbone less dumb?
While corporations' desire to take control of the internet is obviously nothing more than an attempt to stick big-guy costs to the little guy and create exploitable monopolistic apparatuses like Ameritech (aka "Fucking Ameritech") in Chicago (where I live, and do not own a land line), I'm wondering what are the actual concrete details to this alleged "end" and if there isn't some pre-spin reason behind any of the changes supposedly taking place.
There's something about this pattern which reminds me of the Citizens Band (CB) craze, back in the 70's. It didn't fade because some business model came along to make a profit (other than average quality guts shoved in some golden case with an eagle plastered on it, these were only 4 watts input, after all) As the bandwidth increased and sets were offered with USB and LSB (that's upper and lower sidebands, not interfaces) usage still dropped off and where you could once find dozens of models at Radio Shack, they probably only carry one or two slow moving models now (all of which wouldn't surprise me if they were made in 1980 and still being emptied from a Ft. Worth warehouse.)
So as business attempts to restring openness of the internet, locking users into limited formats and routing through services enough to line everyone's pocket on Wall Street, they should be aware that the market is now shrinking (can you say commoditizing? I betcha can!) They'll have that to contend with. Probably only so much success can be found for the new business model and that'll hit a slump down the road, too.
With any luck business will lose interest in the internet and we can all go back to unix shell accounts. =)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Now everybody hum along... "It's the end of the net as we know it... and I feeeeel fine...."
/. brown nosing for more karma **) ... but overall the net is now owned and controlled by lawyers & self appointed self serving entities (ICANN, etc)
Not like it's the same net anymore anyway. You have a few small places where ideas are still exchanged openly (**
Homer Jay Simpson: Oh, they have the Internet on computers now.
this is akin to blaming your car for oversleeping and missing work.
Isn't this voice just the kind of thing that Microsoft is drooling for?
If Cringely is right, then Micro$oft is *just* the company to step up to the plate and make a new internet (TCP/MS) and save us all.
heh..heh..heh... MicroSoft... "reliability"..."responsibility"... heh...
______
Once: you're a philosopher. Twice: a pervert.
Now, I won't EVER have to see another banner ad on MY Internet. I think most people would agree that this one would be better if big business would get OFF it and let those of us with intelligent interests do what we want with it. You want a new network? Good. Go ahead and build your OWN infrastructure. See who follows.
Emacs: for people who just never know when to
no one can argue that one needs a means by which to keep the lights on, butt all this billyunheir buy nightfall bull only worked for a few felons. we're hoping to stryke IT rich, by giving away these nifty shots of rupert murdoch's staff. yes, we know the resemblance is uncanny.
Yea, the internet sure doesn't seem like what it used to be, it used to be more "free" people didn't worry about "intellectual property", everyone did what they wanted, posted what they wanted and it was all o.k., if you couldnt handle it, get out....now we have to worry about what we post on site, we worry about whether our webpages will be considered someone else's property...blah blah blah......anyways thats my little rant.
While making the network 'smarter' would enable businesses to control 'quality of service' in a more direct way, this will also fossilize the network just as it is today, and eliminate future development of innovative uses for it.
Many large businesses have been using dedicated connections to EDI providers such as AT&T which has always used a 'smarter' store-and-forward protocol. The result, has been a charge-per-transaction revenue model that has locked these businesses in over a very long period of time.
Rather than trying to turn the Internet into a 'smarter' network, I suggest that efforts should focus on building a smarter network in parallel to the Internet, using the same wires, routers, firewalls, etc. That way, when the new network fails to provide some needed flexibility (and it will), developers can fall back on the flexible-but-dumb internet. This will also ensure an upgrade path exists when the smart-but-brittle network needs to be replaced with something else.
Call this the 'pluggable protocol' model. It also allows for multiple special purpose protocols to operate at the same time. There could be a protocol designed specifically for MMORPGs, for example, that was optimized for minimizing latency.
The alternatives for future development otherwise are rather poor. Imagine trying to build a peer-to-peer network over EDI. Not pretty.
The real Webmaven is user ID 27463. I don't rate an imposter, because my ID is such a lame-ass high number.
I've found a general rule that works pretty well when reading stuff linked from slashdot:
Never trust any writing that uses the word "consumers"
This writing is pro-corporate propaganda, written by and for corporate heads. Anyone who only thinks of me or anyone else as a "consumer" is pushing further the idea that people are numbers--whos only purpose is to contribute to the all-important corporation's bottom line.
Some people may think that this is the way things should be, but many do not.
Read the article again. Everytime he says that some quality of the Internet is bad, you should read it as "bad for corporations, but good for real people." Read it this way and you'll have an idea of what the article is really about.
Damn, you'd think with a URL like that, you'd at least mention Clifford Performance on the page.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
The internet worked in the old days with slow dialup modems over uucp. There will alwyas be an open internet. You can't stop it.
Hmm.. I've thought about this for a while now. Maybe not enough but..
Even if the current internet turned to complete garbage by some 'new commercial internet', how easy would it be to start a new one. You know, like how the internet started in the first place.
University A: "you know, this isn't meeting our goals anymore, it's no longer about sharing information"
University B: "yeah, I agree. Let's start a fresh link together, maybe others feel the same way and will join in. "
...and so on. You'd have to be more careful of who you let in perhaps. I don't think commercial entities are bad for the internet. I just wonder how easy it would be to start a different internet if the need did arise.
Just wondering out loud....
They want the WEB, lets get it straight people. So let them develop some business specific web browser and have no one use it. Big deal.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/28/20810.html
So is Mark Twain. Ok, so he really IS dead now, but he wasn't when he had to make the claim that reports of his death had been greatly exagerated.
Business wants a profitable internet. Very good. Business can *want* anything they damn well please. That dosn't neccessarily make it so.
It has been said that the best business is a post office box that people send money to. "Business" wants an internet that transfers all of your assets. . . plus 10%, into the corporate bank account simply because you logged on.
Business likes to think it has a RIGHT to make money. It dosn't. I has a right to do business and *attempt* to make money. It is up to the *customer* to decide whether a company gets their business. Even then poor managment can blow it and lose. It is an often ignored truism that the most likely time for a small business to fail is when it succeeds! Can anyone out there say "Osborne"?
I knew you could.
I have concocted a plan for a business friendly, profitable, internet.
Offer goods and/or services that customers believe are desirable at a price that they find a good value.
This is my theory. It is mine. That is why I call it my theory.
I think that gives me the right to name it. I think I'll call it. . .
Capitalism.
KFG
I remember having the idea like 6 or 7 years ago that we should just firewall AOL and its kin off from the "real" Internet to solve all the problems. This would keep all the people that the marketers are looking for in one place and stop the spread of the commercialization cancer at its source. The people who WANT that type of content could just use AOL or whatever and be happy, and the rest of us would be able to find useful information online again (ala pre-Netscape/IE/etc). I know this idea sounds elitist, but I really think it has merit. It isn't so much about saying that we are "better" than the AOLers as much it is about segmenting the networks to deliver different experiences to different audiences instead of just letting the marketing-driven commercializtion to spread over the entire Net. Maybe this wouldn't be a problem if the segmentation of the TLD's had actually been enforced...
I say, let the businesses have their internet, and watch it crash and burn. If they haven't learned yet, maybe this will teach them.
Sure, it will teach them - teach them to follow us. While their internet crashes and burns, they will see that the new net that we start in its place is thriving just as theirs had years ago. At that point, they will start migrating to our net and demanding that we make changes to accomodate them...
Corporations and governments dont learn from history, just look at the rolls that massive banking/insurance/investment companies played in the 1929 stock market crash and look at those companies comming back today. Their attitude will be, even if they eventually destroy that net, we will have started another for them to loot. This needs to be stopped here. Unfortunately, I do not know how.
The ivory tower has never had to reach so h
Rhythms NetConnections filed for bankruptcy this week. Here we go again.
Four months ago, AT&T acquired Northpoint's network but not their customers. This forced Northpoint to shut down their network, and forced all their partner ISPs to scramble to get their customers online with Covad or Rhythms.
Now that Rhythms is bankrupt, I fear a similar shutdown, putting a crushing burden on Covad, which is already so weak financially that NASDAQ delisted them two weeks ago. If, as many expect, Covad dies in another few months, that leaves the Baby Bells and the cable companies.
Excite@Home is looking for a buyer too. Maybe there's some truth to that article after all.
Oh, help! Oh, bother! Oh, help and bother!
- A. A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh
If business wants a more profitable Internet, let them build it. As long as they don't try to tear down the existing Internet, I think this would be a good thing.
Businesses need profit to continue. They thought they could get some from the Internet, but it is not being as cooperative as they thought. This is bad, because all the money being pored into buiding the internet (all those millions going into the fiber, routers, name servers, bandwidth) isn't just free beer. Someone payed for it, and that someone wants something back for it. They are not paying for a playgound, they are paying for a market.
If all businesses suddenly decide that they gave up on the internet and went somewhere else, the fiber would go dark, the routers would shut down and nameservers would stop.
That's not likely to happen; Too much investment. More likely, some variation of Cringely's comments (but not likely MS) will happen, with more control on users, logins, tracing, routine and whatever. It will either be tamed or it will evaporate. It will not survive without good investment, and good investment will only come from somebodies profits.
If businesses think the internet is just a bunch of pirates and thieves, they will either remove the pirates or remove the internet. So they remove the pirates (DMCA. et al). Further control to come.
Say good buy to the wild west, and keep all the good stories around for your kids.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
By contrast, the telecom network is the opposite: a smart network with dumb terminals. The intelligence and thus control of the network is contained in the switching technology, allowing the operator to ensure and contract a given quality of service. This allowed the pre-breakup AT&T to promote their famous "Five 9s" performance, 99.999% reliability. The ability to control access and routing also allowed higher margins, and thus profitability, despite the high startup costs.
Umm, wasn't the entire idea behind a packet network is that it was more robust than a traditional centralized network? If you loose a node in a centralized network, everybody that goes through that node is screwed, as your topology closely resembles a minimum spanning tree. Anybody looking for an example of an unreliable minimum spanning tree should take a look at EFNet.
Even today, if there is a natural disaster somewhere, and everybody wants to call their family in $PLACE to see if they are alright, the phone service in $PLACE goes to pot.
A packet network (like the internet) however, will just start dumping packets. Everybody's comminications will EVENTUALLY (for TCP/IP at least) get through, although the throughput will suck rocks through a swizzle stick. The entire point of a packet network is building a reliable network out of unreliable parts. A centralized network is no more reliable than the parts that it is made of, though. Saying that ATT achieved 5 9's is a bunch of crap.
What the net needs are smarter users. It's not the amount of information that traverses it that is important, it's the ability to sift through it with an educated, objective mind. Joe Sixpack needs to be elevated and then you'll really start seeing some happenin things being done with the net (not on it). The way I see it, our kids are gonna lead the revolution that changes the way /.'ers see the net, not us.
BOSTON SUCKS!
My cat's name is Mittens...
i'm a cyclist. somehow the companies of america have figured out a way to make the roads profiable - and still let everyone drive what they want, and still get where they want, i can ride my bike, they can have their semis and do what they want on their limitedf access roads.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
If they don't see it as a viable option any more, they will pull out of it all.
The internet (as we know it) will die.
But that's fine with me.
That means more people will have to get together to collaborate on projects, you can see your Production lead's reaction when you tell him you created the final killer app.
That means your boss can no longer fire you through email, and may even have to talk to you.
That means that geeks cannot be censored in the USA for using free speech. Your computer would remain inviolate and you'd never have to worry about record companies kicking at your door(Could you imagine the Barry Gordy busting down your door for taping the Temptations off the radio onto your tape recorder?)
Geeks would have to actually meet people and set up LAN parties to play those hyper violent games and in consequence, would actually gain a personality
Our best and brightest would stop trying to get into that niche on the web and begin again to write literature, quality software, develop leadership skills; our generation would not waste their energy on the web, but on worthwhile pursuits.
Finally, the internet will be as it was before: A forum to exchange ideas and philosophies, and not corporate wet dreams
http://cincyboys.blogspot.com/ Everything Cincinnati. Including the word 'Finnih'
The danger is in the regulation of the internet. What the business/government alliance will attempt is to regulate the internet via the FCC probably as if it were a broadcast technology. At that point it could be made illegal to have an independent presence on the internet except in little for-the-public preserved zoos of the public access cable variety.
How will they do this? With the economic threats of piracy and hacking (viruses, worms, site hacking), and with the social threat of terrorism and dangers to "the children." Think the argument that it hasn't destroyed society yet will stave this rhetoric off? Marijuana has been illegal for 70 years in the USA despite a 5000 year history of civilized pharmacological use with no sign of significant negative social impact. Why do we maintain a costly, inneffective and pointless prohibition? Why, it's for "the children."
Keep a close eye on the government, kids, because they're going to try to steal the internet and give it away same as they stole the digital television spectrum and sold it for chump change in campaign donations from the teevee giants. And we'll all grumble on slashdot (as plug-pullin' day fast approaches) that our beloved dumb-pipe internet ISN'T a broadcast technology, it's a private one-one communication network and all communications over it should be protected just like a telephone conversation. Well it won't make a damn bit of difference any more than the DMCA being a crappy piece of unconstitutional legislation could keep Sklyarov from getting arrested.
All I can say is when the time comes we better be prepared to do a hell of a lot better job than we did when faced with the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
The users of the underground internet will all end up being accused of violating the DCMA or some such shit causeing it to be shut down...
You see the new internet is like Jello pudding pop no actually it is more like Kodak film no, actually the new internet is like the new Coke, it'll be around forever. Ha ha ha...
Well, most businesses didn't want to pay for it before. So why does everyone think businesses want to pay for it now?
Those that need it can get leased lines and armed guards and attack dogs with laser fangs and nuclear molar juice in case of capture. People have been doing this for years, and it is in fact quite profitable.
You can't socialize the cost of a network like that. Unless you plan to give it back to society, which is against the religion of these folks.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
The article at "The Dismal Scientist" is complete junk. It's like what you get when you have a philosopher talk about quantum mechanics or cosmology: they don't understand what they're talking about, so it's just hot air.
In a similar fashion, this article is all hot air. All the bits about "smart terminals" and "dumb terminals" is junk; the main difference between the phone network and the Internet is connection oriented vs. connectionless protocols. Both have considerable smarts in the network, and both have pretty high reliability.
"please mr newton, it would be sooo much easier if we didn't have to deal with these silly wings and engines"
Ask and ye shall receive. A nice fellow named Albert gave them a new physics that allowed for time dialation and distance shrinking if they flew fast enough, and under a suitable gravity they also get warped space for free. Great!
(Of cource it was an inside job; he was someones relativity).
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
Hey dumbass, why don't you tell me what comments you think were unfairly moderated? You think my psychic pwoers allow me to mystically know?
I'm not kidding you, this is how he actually replied.
This is one of the better posts on the issue thus far, and rates an "Insightful".
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
I don't mind businesses deciding they want their own casino (with hookers, etc.) but I don't want to pay for it.
Chances are, given the way things are working out now, I'll have to.
Socialization of costs and privatization of profit is a macro-level expression of a kid eating a candy bar, then throwing the wrapper on the street because he doesn't want to find a trash can. It expresses the same level of maturity.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Let's see:
a) don't have to pay per use of the roads (mostly)
b) don't have guaranteed quality of service (traffic jams)
c) can't make money from the roads (unless you are a roadbuilder)
d) some people make money shipping stuff around though
e) some people make money building stuff to use the roads
f) some people make very small amount of money telling you were to find things (map makers)
g) roads cost tax money to build and run, yet don't directly make ANY money!
Yeah, and the people who pay for the roads don't usually make money back from them! All these roads are therefore a commercial failure, and we need to privatise all of them so that businesses can make money. It's obvious! How could I have missed it?
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"A little disjointed, but I'm not a writer.
/. articles seem to be different topics but they all boil down to the same thing don't they?
This is not a choice. The existing internet will be altered to provide greater control to the content providers, leaving you with less control. There will not be an Internet2 that is seperate from this one. I really hope a lot people can realize some important things before it's too late.
In every New Industry (electricity, cars, etc.), the initial cost of entry is pretty low. As companies grow and become successful, they swallow up the smaller ones and begin to "shore up" their position in the market. They will deliberately do anything to raise the cost of entry for anyone who tries to follow them. That's what Internet2 is really all about. Making it more difficult for a couple of hacks to do they're own thing and be successful. It means small local ISP's won't have access to popular content, which will eventually put them out of business.
That the internet is dumb with smart terminals favors the individual user. I can do what I want and I don't give a damn what AOL wants to shove down someone elses throat. A smart internet means eventually I will have choice between AOL, Earthlink, or MSN. I'm actually surprised at my own anger and frustration regarding the direction the world seems to be moving.
The attack is on several fronts. So many
No one has a right to make a profit from the Internet. It's just fine the way it is, and the big Corporations already make enough money.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
How much would radio and tv advertising go down if it required users to directly interact with the AD, i.e. click on a banner. Most advertising is done for awareness, not immiediate response Androk
Boy, I hate it when somebody starts with utter BS: "What began as a deliberately decentralized network to promote the exchange of research ideas and data became a poor network for commercial applications. "
That's was NOT the intent of the work at all. It was a scalable communication network designed to survive even massive disruption caused by nuclear war.
The web was designed to provide a means of interactively linking documents and references.
What business wants was entirely immaterial as they were were too busy saying it wouldn't work or utterly, nonchalantly not involved.
What they want now is a seperate, secure network. Authentication, and commercial traffic in total security.
But they keep skimping on the basics so they are victims of M$ security hole exploiters.
The sooner they wake up to the fact that the "Internet Worms," viri and other parasites that are gibing their pocket books the runs, the better off we will ALL be.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Yeah, I wish they would build a net. Instead they want to ruin this one, as you have noticed. If you want to imagine what they will do just turn on a TV. There it sits with some 60 broadcast channels largly empty thanks largly to Federal Laws backed by folks like GE, Westinghouse, other large advertisers and propaganists. Ever wonder why there were 60 broadcast channels, but only three or four broadcasters forever? It's all about control. If these folks finish, you will wish you had something as cool as AOL.
Look to the military and national interest to combat this mess. There are the military advantages of the internet as it exists and the case is not at all like TV. Distributed, dumb nets are nuke hard. Contoling mechanisms are weak. Philisophicaly, military folks should like the internet as it is too. Restrictions on publication and control of this new publishing media are simply UnAmerican. Weak OSes from MS have weakened things enough. I expect many of these efforts to be thwarted.
More wires, damn it!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
. . . is a profitable highway system.
On second thought, forget I said that. I don't want to give those bozo's any ideas. We have enough friggin' toll roads already.
My point is that the Internet is infrastructure. It's there to support whatever means of information exchange and/or commerce that can be devised to fit. It's been doing quite well so far. Just because the dotcom bubble burst doesn't indict the open and (relatively) public structure of the internet.
What Big Biz really desires here is pay-per-byte.
The real thing with this quality of service is that major content providers will be able to strike deals with backbone providers. Select content providers will see faster, guaranteed access for people consuming their content, and smaller content providers, who can not afford to bribe backbone providers, will see small and dismal access rates. Gigabit+ speed if I'm visiting msnbc.com, 300 baud if I'm visiting abcnews.com. The ultimate killing machine for small businesses, and the guarantee of the end of competition.
The guarantee of access and speed (via Cisco's slick new routers) will allow moneyed monopolies to create even greater monopolies on the Internet. Limiting access speed is an effective method preventing consumption.
You can have your poorer competing product, but only at the rate that the richest competitor allows you to consume it. Thus the monopoly controls not just what you consume, but it also controls how you consume competing products.
There is no logically way of make a new 'Internet'. The physical lines are laid that carry data and they will always be. What we need is another network. A user could choose to log onto the network they wish. The new network, would be regulated though and even independent. Network could compete with each other even. I can only see a sort of VPN currently being setup. I am very intrested in setting up another 'Internet' and would like to become more involved. Can anyone help me?
If Linux were downloaded on the Internet then everybody would make lots of money and the world would be happy okbye
--
$ chown -R us:us yourbase
Ah - you almost brought tears to my eyes bringing up OLGA. What a sad travesty that was - and indeed, it was the first salvo. I remember thinking at the time how absolutely ludicrous EMI's accusations were. Now, well... That's par for the course.
However, OLGA does live on - and they are seeking support in order to stave off future legal bullying. In any case, I'm glad I don't have to pull out all the archives I 'backed up' before they went down...
Culture is more than commerce
As long as this simple fact stays true, and I see no reason why it won't, this guy's vision will remain a pipe dream. Think of it this way: would you pay extra for FancyNet? Didn't think so.
sulli
RTFJ.
1> Getting devices on and off the net is cumbersome.
2> The bandwidth sucks and is getting worse by the day.
3> The reliability is poor and there's no one to bitch at when it goes down.
4> The anon nature of the net is a two edge sword: yeah no one really knows I download naked pics of supermodels, but them I'm completely helpless when some spammer decides to flood my inbox with make money fast messages or wants to DOS my servers.
The internet was never designed to be doing what it's doing today.
All these pursuits are a concept separate from "the Internet", they are things people do with the Internet. The Internet is a medium which enables certain kinds of expression.
The Internet is infrastructure, just like roads, as has been mentioned already. The reason society funds roads is because they're multi-purpose and elevate the pursuits of everyone involved. Roads are platform-agnostic (as long as you follow a few simple physical rules, you are ready to rock) as well as purpose-agnostic. It is these two things that make highways so damned useful.
What's funny about the "Information Superhighway" metaphor is that most people used it (and cracked on it) without really understanding it, but it had the core of the Internet's promise contained in it. To say that the Internet's value was only contained in silly dot-com only businesses is to say that the entire point of the interstate highway system was to create motels and Cracker Barrels. But that isn't true- the value of the highways is realized when you want to go visit your friend in Philadelphia, but you live in Baltimore. It's realized when you have to truck a shipment of goods to another city. You could take ten million tiny little toll roads through a million little municipalities, but that would take forever and be a pain in the ass. No one benefits from that, just like no one benefits from a fragmented, incompatible, gate(s?)-infested Internet. These folks don't want an Internet, they want 65 different Fidonet-alikes. Well, that's not infrastructure.
The true value of the Internet is when it makes us all more capable, universally. If all goes well, it will become so universal we forget it's even there. That is the promise that TCP/IP has been thus far fulfilling. But if it doesn't go well, it will be as bad a loss as if the interstate highway system had been junked.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
post
I meant Compuserve. Crossed mental threads.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Because the real Internet won't die.
What if the Department of Commerce has a hand in the new Internet, "blesses" it as being official, and criminalizes any open Internet or open wide area networks?
Such would be possible if the DMCA were expanded to cover any medium which had a significant amount of unauthorized intellectual property or access devices for such being sent over it. Or if it were treated as an unregulated public nuisance. Such as a person can get sued or jailed for intentionally leaving available things that can cause trouble, i.e. "attractive nuisances".
The gov't could very well argue, and the American sheep, uh people, accept, that "only criminals need an alternate Internet."
Don't say it can't happen. People like Judge Kaplan and his supporters, want it to. And they have more money. And money buys political influence in great part because it pays for political ads. Which seem to be the only thing many Americans vote based on - very few voters even know or care about the issues.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
That's a great post, if you leave that stupid drug stuff out of it! There is a difference between liberty and liscence. Liscence is the enjoyment of your liberty without considering the consequences to others. Sex with minors, driving under the influence, excessive speeding are all acts of liscence. Marijuana, which serves no real purpose but recration, falls into the liscence catagory. People get upset when you blow it in their face, and defending it here detracts from very real concerns you have about your liberty.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
What do you think those blue signs next to the interstate with corporate logos on them are? Normal countries have little symbols to indicate road related services, such as gasoline and hotel, at exits. Here we plaster all that ugly stuff up and let people erect huge billboards that blot out the sky. Thank you Bill Clinton, you sellout.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Soon, the internet will be commercialized. But I don't care, my school is on Internet2. No AOL, no porn, no pop-up ads and I can go back to using lynx.
That man is a Annonymous Coward, and therefore has nothing relevant to add to the discussion! The fact that you're recommending he be modded up just proves that you're a shill for him. Hell, I found numerous camoflauged links to goatse.cx and compugeek.net in his post.
Yes, I'm sure AOL sells "priority TCP/IP routing" to places like amazon.com and such. But what does that gain me? It slows down my other surfing and AOL has a tiny number of users compared to the internet. Test this when you do your next USENET article search on google.com by limiting results to @aol.com addresses. Who wouldn't want this?
it can con citizens into paying for through taxation.
Good point, but god I only WISH it was a con. At least then we'd be able to resist in some way. As it is, it's rammed down our throats whether(sp?) we like it or not.
Oh, and despite what others have said, the drug refs were right on.
Politics, Culture, Food?
I work for a profitable ISP selling big dumb pipes. It's amazing how few companies out there figured out the whole profit thing. Did those kids drop out of B school before they got to this point?
I am confused by the posts...are we in America? I thought this board didn't have bigits on it. They are changing things...typical responce "I'm taking my internet and going home." I liken this to movies critics, anything that is not a "art" film is junk. techno eletism (sp?), every one should use a unix terminal with a command line..what crap. Why not try and bring the net to the masses. Since you are not doing it, the corporations said, hey we can do this and make money. Oh well..this is a free country, take a deep breth everyone. -This space for rent-
yeah whatever. But Spamalamadingdong does need to be harassed mercilessly, I'll give you that.
I had this half-serious idea, not sure if it would be feasible on a global scale though. Currently, communities are setting up their own wireless "freenets"--essentially suburb-wide LANs--that bypass the corporate Internet entirely. Some even have links to the big bad wired 'net, too. How feasible would it be for one suburb's freenet to be linked to another's via wire/laser/microwave, and to another, etc., crisscrossing the country? Naturally, access speeds to other places would depend on their distance from your current location, but I'm sure something could be worked out. (Hint: Multi-routing would be helpful here)
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
to make this analogy complete, though, you'd need to publish an article saying "roads are dead!" Then you'd have to find a way to get home...
sulli
RTFJ.
I love it when people don't do their research. This guy has just thrown the whole idea of a protocol stack out the window, and with it the whole spirit of a content agnostic/packet switched network.
To get the real message here, we have to replace every instance of the term "intelligent network" with "telephony network". So we see that what the businesses really want, is a high bandwidth telephony network.
He even mentions the fact that changing the network paradigm doesn't defeat the real problem:
With the network getting more intelligent [telephony like], high-quality end-to-end connections become a possibility. Workable consumer and business broadband services could result, although the capacity constraint remains.
What these people want, is a high bandwidth, application aware telephony network, for which consumers must not only pay connection/duration fees, but for which consumers must also buy many pieces of application specific hardware.
So as usual, instead of more education, we get more profits..
Michael Gentili
- He's just some guy, you know?
so basically what you saying is... The goverment should control the internet and that our tax dollars should fund access for anyone who has a computer. Ok that may sound like a good thing but... Now the infrastructure is reliant on local/national govt agencies for maitnenace and upkeep(usually leased out to private firms.) So in your neighborhood you get basic 336-52k, but you could get up to as much as 128k on the larger nets. but if you really want to shell out the cash you go on the toll net and have no traffic problems.. On top of all of this you would have to have a license for your computer to permit this, not to mention electronic papers for goign overseas! Thankyou but no. I do not want the inernet to be like the current road system we have.
I sig therefore I am...
The design of the internet was intended to be a network that would resist control and failure caused by an enemy. Interesting how what was perceived as an enemy in the 1970's and early 1980's (the other side's military) is quite different from what is considered the enemy in the late 1990's and 2000's (ubergreedy capitalists intent on controlling information for profit purposes).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Worst. Internet. Ever.
Couldn't agree more... death to the carpet salesmen! The Net was going on just fine before their entrance, f*ck em'.
>so basically what you saying is... The goverment should control the internet and that our tax dollars should fund access for anyone who has a computer.
That's either or thinking. The world isn't either-or.
Or is it?
Yes? No?
Yes, or No?
Yes and No?
Or Yes, No and Other?
Which?
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"I don't get this. Everyone is talking about QoS like it's the fifth sign of the apocalypse, but isn't it part of the IPv6 spec?
Is all this dark talk of a new, separate internet simply a reflection of the fact that IPv6 is a good idea for everyone?
Fuck, I want QoS. I want a static ip address. I want multicasting. I want to run a million-listener radio station over a 128 k uplink.
Maybe businesses should be focusing their attentions on Microsoft and the infrastructure folks who are holding us back. . .
Did you read the survey, where they attributed the result to two large facilities switching from Solaris to 2000?
Not because the people don't want what you say they want. They do want it. But they can't have it, because they have no power anymore.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Actually, it was just getting going in Britain in 1991, and it was called 'packet radio'. You could buy a two meter transciever and a packet box, and you would become a node point, effectively a router and client all in one. I had just bought the packet hardware when this new-fangled internet came to undergrad popularity levels.
AFAIK, the packet box is still unused at my parent's house.... although, I wonder if anyone is still using it - any slashdotters?
However-I've come to discover that the great majority of users use the internet not as a medium of expression, but as an escape from thinking.
I only say that there will be more pursuits in the qualified context that most users, the ones who have not embraced the internet as a "Road" regard the internet like an television, and their computer like a word processor/web surfer
But I agree with you 100%
By the way, your ideas, and your writing is beautiful. Have a real talent and all of that.
http://cincyboys.blogspot.com/ Everything Cincinnati. Including the word 'Finnih'
But I'm willing to wager that the quality of service, and the most bandwidth, will go to those with the most money and control. The fact that they're asking about it means they're already forming World Domination Plans (tm). I would like you for telling them to fuck off. However, if Cisco figures out how to do the whole billing with some slick little IOS, then your arguments are gone. It may not take a slick little widget -- it may just take congressional interference, probably under the guise of protecting innocent children from anonymous villains; and thus is born end-to-end packet tracking and logging.
I mean, everyone with an OC3 or a T1 more or less gets treated the same as anyone else with an OC3 or a T1. What if you're a user on MSN. Will Microsoft guarantee you the same access speeds to non-Microsoft content?
Methinks not.
Fortunately the same shortsightedness and petty infighting that has resulted in America having the worst and most useless wireless telephone system in the world will prevent this quasi-initiative from getting off the ground.
It will *never* happen. The worst case is that they will confuse issues for several years, and divert vast amounts of and resources from where they'd really be useful. Oh, and possibly cause undeserved collateral damage to the reputation of the legitmate Internet.
"By contrast, the telecom network is the opposite: a smart network with dumb terminals. The intelligence and thus control of the network is contained in the switching technology, allowing the operator to ensure and contract a given quality of service. This allowed the pre-breakup AT&T to promote their famous "Five 9s" performance, 99.999% reliability. The ability to control access and routing also allowed higher margins, and thus profitability, despite the high startup costs."
How does seting up a monopoly help the general consumer? Yes, ATT would love to have a private Internet, but the end user gets the shaft. I think the author of this article was a little myopic (ohh I actualy used a word I learned in ECON101). The Internet is something you need to look at from a macroeconomic level. 95% of the worlds population could care less about the share price of M$,ATT, and AOL.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
Its true that right now we have telco/switched style and decentralized/routed networks.
Its also possible to have the best of both worlds: decentralized/Switched.
Using MPLS, or even better a rehashed ATM which drops its QoS and extends cell sizes to say 1500 bytes fixed, this could be the real Infobahn.
is not to regulate a private monopoly, nor to break it up into multiple private systems. Regulated monopolies (which tend to be natural monopolies) are difficult to regulate and are politically unpopular at the current time. On the other hand, if the system is broken up into many incompatable private systems all vying for a bigger share of the pie, the result will be a system that is difficult to use because of all of the closed, proprietary standards which will be incompatable with each other.
What the Government can do is to ensure that the new, intellegent pieces of the network are built using open standards that are not controlled by either a single or multiple corporations.
They don't have to do this through legislation either - that would be difficult and politically unpopular. They can, however, do it by using their considerable purchasing power. If the government decided not to purchase access to or equipment for, or fund research on any intellegent network technology that was not based on open standards, they can go a long way toward ensuring the development of such standards. The US Government is the largest buyer in the world and has such huge purchasing power that companies would develop open systems in order to get their business. With the largest buyer around insisting on open technologies, most everyone else would follow along.
Eventually, yeah. Most of the users will be hackers, crackers, and warez d00dz using defunct cable and phone line networks. Someone will eventually shut it down.
I belong to the ______ generation.
According to the article the bubble popped because 'broadband tech did not roll out quickly enough' -- the internet companies were so hyped up about the future that they forgot it takes time to deploy technology. In their business plans, the internet was supposed to be ubiquitous by now, embedded in your toaster, etc. Instead we are still pulling pages with web-browsers (how `nineties!).
Those companies that made that bet are now dead... those that continued to develop technology focused on the more immediate future, that is on -useable- TCP/IP and HTML-based applications, have survived.
In all the hype, we forgot that these things take time... all those business models might be valid... someday, maybe in 10 years.
The fault is really with the investors, I think. If they had put -less- money in to start the new economy it would be different - instead of burning up 10 years worth of operating capital in 2 years, we would be able to extend the research/development time to meet the growth of technology to support our projects... instead of building an empire of websites which fall short of requirements, we would be rolling out well-researched IT products 7 years from now.
My eyes kind of crossed there for a minute. You're blaming Bill Clinton for McBranded highway signage? Can you explain the context in which that makes sense?
Get a clue guys, the interent is not about money, it's about communication http://www.cluetrain.com
My theory about the new internet - the new internet will be as wildly popular as new Coke.
You might be closer than you realize - New Coke probably served it's purpose well (possibly to cover up a planned formula change from expensive sugar, to sweeter corn syrup in the origional product; or as a means of attracting massive amounts of media attention as Negativland suggested on one of the tracks of Dispepsi).
Announcing a NEW! SHINY!! network with lots of NEW! SHINY!! content would catch the eye of the overstimulated, media saturated, passive good little consumer we are all supposed to be. Get AOL or MSN on board, running your special protocal, with maybe a lone proxy allowing communication with the oldnet (Old BAD! see how slow it is? Ohhhh! Shiny Link!!!) Simplify it, and make it gradually as passive of an experience as you can.
That's how you kill off the old net...
I want a fscking winning lottery ticket for a change!
until (succeed) try { again(); }
... and then slowly connect the loose ends from town to town and end up with a net that will put the current one to shame - or several nets. You know, if the whiners in the business world were smart, they'd think of this themselves. It's a while off, but it'll happen.
It would work, but packet, as it currently is, isn't as useful as the unregulated 802.11 stuff in the microwave bands...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Had no business model to begin with that was (a) realistic of (b) intuitive?
1) First off, lets look at Pricewatch and the businesses that sell through it... How profitable are they? Do they rely on massive ad banners and annoying popups? Nope... Do they rely on word of mouth amongst geeks? Definately... Are they profitable? Well lets see now, most of the companies that sell through them are definately making some form of profit, ans thusly, so are they... And yet they never blew a budget on TV spots... Which brings me to part 2:
2) Most dotcoms are idiots if they think putting an ad on broadcast TV will bring in new business... Why? Because most of the public that watches TV that have a net connection either knows they don't need the services sold, or the public without a net connection aren't going to pipe up with "Gawrsh, look maw, we gotta get one of them thar $1,000 Dell compooters and order stuff from the supermarket in the next town, instead of driving a few blocks to the store locally!"...
They seem to believe that they can make millions back on billions of advertising dollars wasted... It just doesn't work that way, and they blame the net for their own lack of foresight... Okay, do any history buffs here remember how long it took for other industries to become profitable?
Print media: Technically it took close to 300 years for it to become profitable on a par with what the publishing industry makes today...
Automotive industry: It took close to 30 years for it to become what it is today...
Airline industry: Up until the mid 20's, there really wasn't an airline industry, the shipping industry held a massive stranglehold on travel and tourism, until aircraft became more capable of extended flights and carrying multiple passengers in a reasonable fashion...
Shipping industry: That took almost 200 years to become truly profitable (enough that you no longer required government ownership/funding to operate your business)...
Telephone/telegraph: That's another that took a while to catch on, but more due to the time it took to lay hundreds of thousands of miles in cable and wire to make it a feasable money making product...
Radio: Another 'fringe' industry that took close to 30 years to become profitable, from Tesla/Marconi to the first networks...
Television: Technologically one of the longest media groups running from start to profitability, invented in 1939 and taking 15 tears to just make into a consumer market, television took close to another 20 years to just become profitable enough to justify a TV in every home, and a network in every city...
And yet, here is a new technological product that most dot coms are thinking will be worth billions in less than what, 5 years??? What's wrong with these people It even took Microsoft 10 years to become truly profitable, Apple virtually happened overnight but frequently is insolvent... IBM took almost 20 years to get up to speed after starting with early electromechanics (typeriters, punch cards, et al), and recall that it took them 10+ years just to build the first PC, which in itself also took 15 years to properly become a consumer market...
If some dotcoms got their greedy fingers burned by dipping into the pie too early, then it is in fact their own damnned fault for having unrealistic views and goals of the future... The ones who spent x million on advertising a product that is basically worthless must have been business school dropouts, especially those who blew humongous amounts of their profits on useless nonessentials, deserve everything they get... Just look at some of what's been reclaimed by the repo men, antique pool tables, massive amounts of office space, $10K+ plasma screen monitors, etc... The first rule is, don't count your chickens before they hatch... If you don't know how much money you'll make next year, don't spend the money you don't have!!!
Hell, I'm a high school dropout and even I know this, what's wrong with these guys?
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
> but it does require the sectioning off of the internet.
Odd, I type any address in the AOL keyword bar and up it pops up in the diminished MDI windowlet that is basically just embedded IE. I don't use a single premium service. I am annoyed that I don't get POP mail, but I sure don't see a whole lot of "sectioning off". With AOL you pay for, well, vapid content you could probably get by customizing a yahoo page to always show entertainment news as the front-page item (that's what really repulses me about AOL). I'm not saying they're not into lock-in, but AOL would lose most of its customers if it told them one day they couldn't use the web. As for port blocking, I telnet to weird ports all the time and can even portscan (though I was a little afraid that they'd take it as "hacking" and nuke me).
AOL might have something like half the ISP market sewn up, but they're becoming more and more a glorified website, and that's what their customers seem to want. Seems to me the Internet is winning even against this juggernaut.
(No I don't use AOL by choice, I'm broke and using another's account, beggars can't be choosers.)
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
I pay all my bills via the net and feel that banking is one of the areas in which the Internet work well. Another would be stores that sell data (ie a mp3 store, a 3ivx store or a software store), this is possible now when more and more people get broadband access.
A great problem to day is that it really isn't practical to submitt your creditcard number everytime you want to buy something. Not to forget that people doesn't usually trust the Internet enough to send creditcard numbers over. There must be a global standard for electronic bills (you buy something, a e-bill is sent to your bank, you log in to the bank and approve the bill).
People need to get more respect for commercial values. But I do agree that some companies goes to far. In order for a commersial Internet to work there need to be competition. Competition is lacking especially in the music and movie industry (you listen to an artist because you like his/her music, you do not select an artist because he is better than another).
But there are more urgent problems like the ISPs power to shutdown users because other users don't like them.
Socrates once said: "Money is not the basis of greed, but rather greed is the basis of money and all other things good for man."
Mattias Holm
mattias.holm@NO.contra.SPAM.nu
1) They have admitted that Sun's "Network is computer" was the right idea (without mentioning Sun though). Itlooks like an article paid for by M$ (who allegedly has a solution to everything).
2) I think the word "consumer" should be made an expletive because it signifies a creature with a VISA card and no brain.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
Before I begin my rant, I'd like to comment on your .sig -- With OS X you'll have your command prompt & GUI. Just wait until X.1 so you can actually do something useful.
Now then...<rant>
What will business do to create a new 'Net in their own image?
Probably start from the bottom -- the physical layer. Create the fibre/wireless infrastructure in only the hottest markets -- NY, LA, SF, Seattle, DC; thus screwing the lesser markets until the NewNet® profiteers feel like wiring to another city that might get them more $$. If you need proof of this, look to see where the cable companies wired first, lately, not yet, and never will.
</rant>
DrQu+xum: Proof that the lameness filter doesn't work.
"For the children", or "scarce resource", or simply "you can't be trusted with that choice" is what is justifying it right now, in all the various prohibitions of all governments. Their real reason may be control, but they use rationalization to keep from loosing their jobs to an actually informed population. It used to be "devine right of Kings", but that went out of fashion.
This issue of open access is not new, it's been discussed online since I've been reading discussions on various networks starting in 1983.
"The Internet" as we know it is a wonderful example of unanimity. If you don't like your service, you take it elsewhere. If you don't like /., you don't read /.. Or use Microsloth. Or AOL. If you don't like it, you don't have to use it.
Open access means you choose what you do and do not use. If you don't want the tax man's services, he uses force. You pay anyway.
The corporate/government alliance does not want you to have that choice.
As the parent of this posting suggests, watch for what rationalizations are used for taking this choice away from you, as so many other choices have been taken away.
The marijuana metaphor is a good one. Useless, expensive, abusive prohibition of something that harms no one.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics