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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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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..
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
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.