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

[Midnight Thunder]

I think part of the issue is that of control. Companies like to know that they are in control in the end results, like a dictator. The internet is not like that and it scares them.

Other things which are worth noting is that, while I don't have any figures for this, the number of dot coms going bust is probably around the same for any number of real world business in the same geographic zone, ie world-wide. Another is banner ads and the complaint people don't click on them. Heck, nobody clicks on adverts in a paper magazine, so how an earth can they say that the final response rate is any less?

This goes back to the orginal point, a company will try to adapt the market to their own ends, if they can't then they will complain that the environment is not tailored to their needs. Life is chaos, and if you can't stand the chaos, you are better playing elsewhere, IMHO.

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.

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..

Re:This, Is Stupid.

[Johnny5000]

Ever read Fast Food Nation?

That's not as far from the truth as you might think.

The fast food chains have changed the face of ranching, farming, meat packing, travel, etc.

The moral of the story is, the businesses who stand to make money from a more business friendly internet have the resources to try to make that a reality.

On the other hand, who would want to use their new crappy internet? The money they're making has to come from somewhere- so New Crappy Internet (I think NCI should be the official name) will cost a fortune to anyone who uses it. Nice.

-J5K

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

[isdnip]

The author seems to buy in to Isenberg's "stupid network" hypothesis, which is a good one for Isenberg's rubber-chicken business but not terribly accurate when taken literally.

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.

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 :)

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.

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.

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?