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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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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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
Before discussing laws of economics, let's remember that most business types think that the DJI is the economy, or at least an indicator of it. That's wrong. Just plain wrong. Many of these people forget that the science of economics is generally the study of margins. Perhaps even more importantly, most economic assertions are based on several assumptions, many of which are 'broken' on the internet.
If anything, the internet opens a wonderful world of the study of applied or real-world economics. One of the failings of economics is the assumption of complete or total information. IOW, each party in a transaction has complete knowledge. In the real world, this doesn't, or rather, didn't, exist. With the internet, each party in a transaction does, or at least, can, have all the information they want/need. This is the chance to study that assumption, and see if it is valid.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
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
This is a veiled refrence to cisco's many MANY attempts to impement some form of TAG switching into IOS...
:) )
Basicly, by adding another tag onto the data, it is supposed to allow one to better control the actual path/shunt to a diffrent queue than a pure destination based forwarding system.
In other words, it's ATM. But since certain companies made sure that ATM and IP would go head to head, it has become a political and marketing necessity to re-implement ATM (which, BTW, has extreamly awsume standards, but no one has been able to completely implement all the features, meaning multi-vendor ATM networks don't really exist)
Rather than simply saying 'map IP application to ATM QoS, and let the ATM switched handle it until it hits the core', the larger IP router companies claimed ATM could never forward as fast as IP, there was a tremendous 'cell tax' on putting QoS info overhead onto IP, and you should just by Packet over Sonet infrastructure, and forget this whole QoS mess...
Until one little company actually managed to map IP applications to indivdual ATM SVCs... then cisco had to backpeddle and come up with Tag Switching, which has evolved into MPLS, which is a re-implementation of ATM, but using a higher overhead protocol (IP) to do it...
Companys that are starting with a 'green field' are implementing MPLS today. even though it doesn't completely work, it has enough features to warrent a good look. and because the router vendors pulled focus off of ATM, no one ever spent the money to build a 10 Gig ATM interface (that I know of, they all stopped at OC48).
The good news is, all this re-engineering/re-implementation is going to keep a lot of us in green for at least the next 5-8 years while the carriers flush money down the toilets trying to make all this stuff work. (and it WILL work, but the 3% extra usable capacity they get is going to drive the cost of the network up another 20%
There are other interests that would support the internet, but it wouldn't be a mass media. Would you like it if only educational, government, and military sites existed?
YES! I can say with relative certainty that few things would make me happier. Maybe I'm just desperately behind the times, but I miss the days when with a fair amount of speed and accuracy I could do all of my browsing in Lynx (or at least with images off in netscape). As it stands, the commercialization of the web is a mixed blessing... sure it has brought us useful information (in some cases) but at what cost (literally and metaphorically)?
More related to the parent post, there is a school of thought in Culture Studies which draws an arc for any given fad which traces it's origins from underground movement to mass media frenzy and back again (witness "grrrl power" in the late 90's to today). I hope we will find that this is for the internet the final slope of that arc. Let the suits have their "business friendly internet." Maybe then they'll leave the rest of us alone.
Perhaps one thing to look at would be how the various permutations of Windows have split off. everything is supposed to become easier and easier for the user: keeping up on the latest patches, audio/video codecs, drivers and what not. Further, this tactic is emerging into the ability to install and use the operating system at all, witness XP. M$ is actively automating the OS through the Internet. I still get a chill every time Windows Media Player decides it's time to look for an upgrade and my proxy server dials out unbidden.
The point is, Windows machines are turning into dumb terminals. The burden of processing still rests with the terminal instead of the server, which simply enables the software to run. It's an interesting hybrid, and one which fits in with the business model this guy is talking about. If you can't actively control the Internet via the infrastructure, you can always take the control away from the end nodes by crippling their usability without some kind of automated registration and upgrade technique. .Net sounds worse to the nth power.
It exploits the dependence of users and businesses on the Internet itself - this kind of control wouldn't have been possible pre-'95. And now they want to re-vamp the whole thing to bring it all together on the business side.
That's what I'm really worried about.
Tatsujin
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.
It may not die, but there's no reason to believe it will be anywhere near as nice as it is now, especially as far as connecting to it.
Sooner or later some suit is going to figure out that it would be cheaper to build Son of Internet (MechaInternet, whatever) than to try to "fix" the existing one. It will have everything the suits want, none of what they don't want, and will be built explicitly to make money. As this comes about, more and more people will want access to this gleaming new monstrousity than to the Internet that we all know and love. Why go to the old one when the store/bank/tv channel you want to go to is only on Internet 2?
And what happens when more people want access to this new network than the old one? It will be more profitable to sell access to the new one than the old one. The ISPs we've come to expect as a commodity will all but vanish during this mass migration, because here isn't where the money is.
So maybe the internet will still be around and it will be wild and free and feeling the grass between its toes blah blah blah, just like it was ten years ago. But we'll also have to connect just like we did ten years ago: by dialling into some small BBS that just can't afford all the bells and whistles we've come to take for granted with current ISPs. Luxuries like bandwidth and phone lines and connection time.
Sure, you'll still have the Internet, but you'll only be allowed to connect for about ten minutes a day at 33.6 kbps.
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?
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 agree with your sentiment. In 1994, did people flock to the web (remember that old IBM commercial that had the nun saying she was dying to "surf the web"?) because of advertising and slick corporate marketing materials? Hell NO! The web took off because it was full of crap, truth, lies, gibberish and FAQs that other regular folks put together. CEOs and other pointy-haired morons often forget this reality. The web succeeded because, not in spite of, it's hostility towards business.
This is more than just an opinion by some crank. An AT&T researcher named Andrew Odlyzko has written about this many times. His Content is not king article is the most accessible. Odlyzko has looked at the history of pricing of communications channels, too. More recently, the "Internet Enabled" cell phones have failed, while SMS text messaging phones have taken off, probably because the "Internet Enabled" phone depended on people wanting to view slick corporate marketing collateral, while SMS text messaging is popular because everyone can use it for their own purposes.
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.