Slashdot Mirror
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."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
I think actually what they want is profitable COMPANIES. Strange that they are blaming the Internet for their inability to make a profit.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!"