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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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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.
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
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.
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.
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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.
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'
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.
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.
Actually mate, there's something similar going on right now in many cities. NYC Wireles is a public wireless LAN, built and maintained purely by the people who use it. Additionally, myself and a few others in St Louis MO are building PuMA Net (Public Metro Area Network). All of these systems are running 802.11b, and are capable of very fast speeds. The prices aren't down yet, but who says you have to buy the antennae? You could always learn some math and start building one on your own. Wireless NICs will assuredly go down in price soon enough, which will make expendable systems easy. Just take all the 486s your local church or other org is throwing out and start putting together some repeater stations. Even if you didn't have repeaters, 802.11b has been used at up to 20miles or more provided the standard conditions are met.
Now, picture this with me.... PuMA Net is going to be a completely free network. You can choose to donate to keep things running smoothly, but for the most part the network is run by the people who use it becuase they ARE the network. In the (unlikely) event that the internet either becomes closed or is killed off somehow, the PuMA Net would prevail, BBSs would spring up only now at lightning speeds and more interesting interfaces. Someone would start up a DirectConnect Hub on their system and we could all be sharing files and information that way. Now, picture PuMA Net spreading. with a 20 mile radius (currently), you can have a decent distance between repeaters, and users. For every user on the outskirts of the network, we come closer to another network that may be 40 miles away. Stash a repeater box in some decent area, run some CAT5 up to the roof where an omni antenna is, and you're set......
Conclusion:.....PuMA Net and other public access wireless networks are guerilla networking. We just haven't got to the part where the gov decides it's bad. That's because it's not in full use yet...Just wait.
PuMA Net will be integrated with access to the internet. The idea behind the current design is to have several systems acting as gateways, allowing users to access the internet as needed. Since the initial design is small, we have not included plans for load balancing, etc. Once we get more users, we will procure more dedicated bandwidth and balance the loads to allow the fastest access possible for each user. However, it will also be almost entirely self-contained and could be disconnected from the Internet as needed (i.e. if the Internet became a problem such as a "closed" commercial environment).
Some of the existing 802.11x systems do have webpages online spelling out the details of their systems. However, PuMA.Net does not, because we are still procuring equipment and testing locations. We will, however, publish a website from a server within the network.
Additionally, it may be interesting to point out that OUR system is not going to use repeaters for the time being. If you're not within 20miles of a node, you're temporarily outta luck. This is mostly due to the government's research restrictions. (Yes, the gov is funding our research in the feasiblity of using 802.11b, and W-MANs [Wide Metro/Military Area Networks])