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."

Comments

Profitable Internet?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think actually what they want is profitable COMPANIES. Strange that they are blaming the Internet for their inability to make a profit.

AOLization

[zpengo]

An Internet driven by business, for business, would hardly have the appeal of the net as it exists today. It would be nothing but banners, keywords, affiliate programs, and all the other garbage that already makes the web so annoying.

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.

Death?

[sllort]

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.

If it isn't broken, don't fix it

[leereyno]

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

Re:The net isn't stupid, it's differently robust

[segfaultcoredump]

exactly.

The article mentions that the end node are where the intelligence is. that is quite wrong.

the pc's at the end don't have a clue as to how to get a packet from point a to b, they just send it to the default router and hope that all goes well.

the routers are where the intelligence resides on the internet, all 100,000+ of them. (some more intelligent than others)

if anything, the internet is an example of a decentralized intelligence. There is no single point of control. there is no single point of failure. there is no single person who can thus guarantee that stuff will work since they dont control everything from point a to b.

now, ATT was able to have 99.999% uptime because they controlled the entire thing. Many of the larger ISP's also have what is very close to that same level of reliability _within their own network_. Once it leaves their network it is out of their hands. ATT does not take responsibility for QOS of calls to china and ISP's do not offer any SLA's for packets that leave their network

The backbone can support all that various business wants it to, they just dont want to pay for it. Think about it, a single long distance call from New York to San Francisco cost about $0.05 a minute (us) That gets you a dedicated 64Kbps link from point a to b (assuming the old uncompressed telco data rates where a T1 carried 28 voice channels). Now, what does a typical dialup line cost? $20 a month? That would buy you 400 minutes or a little under 7 hours. How many hours of surfing does the average person do per month on their 56K line? I bet that it is a good bit over 7 hours, prob closer to 30+ (not counting slashdot users. I racked up over 550 hours in one month once when i was telecommuting and only had a dialup. the isp was not happy with me).

So, using the telco networks price as a guide, if we all want dedicated, guaranteed access, we should be willing to pay for it. Thus, our 30 hours per month of internet access should a) not exceed 64Kbps and b) cost about $90. Want to do video @1.5Mbps? That will cost you a bit more :)

Forget Superhighways! Let's look at Real Roads(tm)

[WolfWithoutAClause]

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?