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

My Theory

[ziggy_zero]

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.

The Guerilla Net

[Nihilanth]

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..

The Internet as a social system

[Grokopen]

What I am disappointed by is that many people ... both in the business world and outside that world ... can't see the Internet as a social system. What do I mean by a *social system*? Towns are a social system. So are cities, regions, and nations. Families, schools, workplaces, etc., are social systems as well.

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.

This article is written for PHB's

[Stiletto]

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.

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

[gmhowell]

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.

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

[GMFTatsujin]

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

Tele mortification.

[twitter]

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.

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!

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

[Guppy06]

"Because the real Internet won't die."

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.

On turning the internet into a telephony network..

[Inspector]

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.

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..