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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.
I think actually what they want is profitable COMPANIES. Strange that they are blaming the Internet for their inability to make a profit.
What, me worry?
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.
Got Rhinos?
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.
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.
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
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
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
It is much easier for an 'internet business' to be profitable if they ACTUALLY SELL SOMETHING!! People are finally figuring out that nobody clicks on banner ads, and so advertising revenue is down.
Think about it, advertising on the net is unique in that it is integrated within the content. the closest thing would be magazines where the ads are mixed with the content, but most magazine ads are on their own page.
In radio, you listen to a song, hear a commercial, then another song. They don't stop in the middle of the song to tell you about McDonald's and then play the rest of the song - but that same principle is what internet advertisers are wanting to do.
Bottom line is advertising on the net just does not work very well, especially pop up ads.
Has anyone seen the pop up ads that appear just a bit too far to the right, out of the screen area, so that the maximize button is on the edge of the screen. If out of habit, you click the top right of the pop up window, you will maximize it rather than close it. Sneaky, sneaky.
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
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..
Uhhh...shouldn't that be dumber users (hopefully with shiny new visa cards)?
You're using her as bait, Master!
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.
Why? After all, the "free market" is what people crave. (Actually, people are only -told- they crave it. The "free market", as invented by the French, has had almost no long-term effect. The old trading Empires have simply been replaced with new trading Empires. Standing still isn't progress.)
The problem with the Internet, however, is that the Corporate Sector never paid for it. Nor did they design it. Nor (for the most part) do they run it. Nor could they, as it stands. It requires far too much cooperation, openness and integrity.
What the Corporate Sector wants is a free lunch. Or, at least, a free launch. A new way to sell their junk and tripe, without any of that R&D nonsense, and without any bills to pay.
If this happens, what -WILL- happen IMHO is that serious "Internet" users will find ways to migrate onto Internet 2, or some comparable tripe-free network.
And, what will happen then is that all the Domestic Users at Home (DUH) will decide that the Internet has lost all the good stuff, and they will switch over to some (inevitable) ISPs that serve this new, high-speed network.
Once that happens, of course, the prawn-merchants and the advertisers will drop the old Internet, and switch to this new, exciting service, where they will get to plague humanity all over again.
Of course, when they do that, the high-power users will complain that their new ultra-expensive networks are too slow, and they'll go and build an even faster one. At THEIR expense.
And, so, the entire cycle will repeat. Endlessly and stupidly.
The high-power users don't -really- need a faster network. They need to have all the advertisers and prawnographers deported to the Andromeda Galaxy. That'll improve network capacity by more than enough.
Advertisers and Web Crawlers are the ones -really- killing the Internet. I've seen guesstimates which place the total bandwidth eaten by banner ads plus web search engines at around 65% of the Internet's capacity.
Sending those BSE-rejects into deep space may well be the only hope humanity has of survival. I only hope it's not too late.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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.
I don't think it's a safe assumption that the Internet is not a money-maker and that it fundamentally wants to be free. Certainly we would all like to stick with our traditional Internet values, and enjoy a free and giving 'net.
Everything that the free Internet does and facilitates is in direct contradiction with our economic ideologies (at least in the US). The rapid rate of technological innovation has our traditional capitalism busting at the seams. The only thing that holds it together is the massive power of corporations working with legislators to promote huge amounts of new legislation that protect companies' rights to make money for anything.
While this country's ideologies were based on personal freedom, and the separation of church and state, I think that those values are not enough in today's society.
I think a new world leader is likely to emerge in the centuries ahead with ideologies based on the separation of state and business. Think about it, the free market is a wonderful ECONOMIC tool. It provides unequaled productivity and efficiency. However, it does NOTHING for GOVERNMENT. The government should be there to set down the ground rules, things like environmental protections, and anti-trust laws.
Corporations as citizens is an alarming concept. It promotes the idea that business has the RIGHT to make as much money as possible. That is utter BS... the free market should dictate how much money can be made, and the government should dictate how far companies can go to sell their products.
The Internet is a reflection of people's needs to be free and have a realm of expression outside the control of big business. Let companies do what they will to squeeze every cent of profitability out of the Internet. I think the end of American greed-based capitalism is on the wane.
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.
What the net needs are smarter users. It's not the amount of information that traverses it that is important, it's the ability to sift through it with an educated, objective mind. Joe Sixpack needs to be elevated and then you'll really start seeing some happenin things being done with the net (not on it). The way I see it, our kids are gonna lead the revolution that changes the way /.'ers see the net, not us.
BOSTON SUCKS!
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'
The danger is in the regulation of the internet. What the business/government alliance will attempt is to regulate the internet via the FCC probably as if it were a broadcast technology. At that point it could be made illegal to have an independent presence on the internet except in little for-the-public preserved zoos of the public access cable variety.
How will they do this? With the economic threats of piracy and hacking (viruses, worms, site hacking), and with the social threat of terrorism and dangers to "the children." Think the argument that it hasn't destroyed society yet will stave this rhetoric off? Marijuana has been illegal for 70 years in the USA despite a 5000 year history of civilized pharmacological use with no sign of significant negative social impact. Why do we maintain a costly, inneffective and pointless prohibition? Why, it's for "the children."
Keep a close eye on the government, kids, because they're going to try to steal the internet and give it away same as they stole the digital television spectrum and sold it for chump change in campaign donations from the teevee giants. And we'll all grumble on slashdot (as plug-pullin' day fast approaches) that our beloved dumb-pipe internet ISN'T a broadcast technology, it's a private one-one communication network and all communications over it should be protected just like a telephone conversation. Well it won't make a damn bit of difference any more than the DMCA being a crappy piece of unconstitutional legislation could keep Sklyarov from getting arrested.
All I can say is when the time comes we better be prepared to do a hell of a lot better job than we did when faced with the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
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?
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"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.
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.
Ah - you almost brought tears to my eyes bringing up OLGA. What a sad travesty that was - and indeed, it was the first salvo. I remember thinking at the time how absolutely ludicrous EMI's accusations were. Now, well... That's par for the course.
However, OLGA does live on - and they are seeking support in order to stave off future legal bullying. In any case, I'm glad I don't have to pull out all the archives I 'backed up' before they went down...
Culture is more than commerce
All these pursuits are a concept separate from "the Internet", they are things people do with the Internet. The Internet is a medium which enables certain kinds of expression.
The Internet is infrastructure, just like roads, as has been mentioned already. The reason society funds roads is because they're multi-purpose and elevate the pursuits of everyone involved. Roads are platform-agnostic (as long as you follow a few simple physical rules, you are ready to rock) as well as purpose-agnostic. It is these two things that make highways so damned useful.
What's funny about the "Information Superhighway" metaphor is that most people used it (and cracked on it) without really understanding it, but it had the core of the Internet's promise contained in it. To say that the Internet's value was only contained in silly dot-com only businesses is to say that the entire point of the interstate highway system was to create motels and Cracker Barrels. But that isn't true- the value of the highways is realized when you want to go visit your friend in Philadelphia, but you live in Baltimore. It's realized when you have to truck a shipment of goods to another city. You could take ten million tiny little toll roads through a million little municipalities, but that would take forever and be a pain in the ass. No one benefits from that, just like no one benefits from a fragmented, incompatible, gate(s?)-infested Internet. These folks don't want an Internet, they want 65 different Fidonet-alikes. Well, that's not infrastructure.
The true value of the Internet is when it makes us all more capable, universally. If all goes well, it will become so universal we forget it's even there. That is the promise that TCP/IP has been thus far fulfilling. But if it doesn't go well, it will be as bad a loss as if the interstate highway system had been junked.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
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?
So, if Microsoft's vision becomes reality, will we see, by the side of the Information Superhighway, blue screens with corporate logos? ;)
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Someone mentioned the L0pht/@Stake "In Case Of Fascism, Break Glass" plans for a wireless roving network of packet-switched fun.
Suppose we update it with present tech. Imagine a few hundred geeks in any given city, using hax0r3d 802.11 gear hooked up to laptops with 80G hard drives, featuring end-to-end-encrypted store-and-forward UUCP-style transmission and replication of data. Something like a cross between Freenet and USENET, but with UUCP as opposed to NNTP as the transmission mechanism. Sure, it may take a few hours for a requested file to "hop" from one end of the country to another. Who cares, as long as you can get the data -- you send a request and later that night, the file appears.
The world can have AOL at 53K dialup speed. Hell, they can have AOL at 500K cable modem speed. (With a 1-kilobyte paragraph of text requiring 40K of Flash Banner Ad download and 10K of HTML and Javashit to put frames and popups around it, the throughput is about the same as dialup with image autoloading off ;-) The rest of us will go, not to the stars, but underground.
My theory about the new internet - the new internet will be as wildly popular as new Coke.
You might be closer than you realize - New Coke probably served it's purpose well (possibly to cover up a planned formula change from expensive sugar, to sweeter corn syrup in the origional product; or as a means of attracting massive amounts of media attention as Negativland suggested on one of the tracks of Dispepsi).
Announcing a NEW! SHINY!! network with lots of NEW! SHINY!! content would catch the eye of the overstimulated, media saturated, passive good little consumer we are all supposed to be. Get AOL or MSN on board, running your special protocal, with maybe a lone proxy allowing communication with the oldnet (Old BAD! see how slow it is? Ohhhh! Shiny Link!!!) Simplify it, and make it gradually as passive of an experience as you can.
That's how you kill off the old net...