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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 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'
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.