Life on The Net in 2004

NewtonsLaw writes "In recent years the Net has changed very quickly from a great place for geeks and nerds into a highly commercialized marketplace in which everyone is making a grab for your wallet. If it's not wave after wave of spam in your mailbox, it's excessively intrusive ad banners and popups, or demands by websites that you pay a subscription for access. The DMCA and other pending legislation could soon mean that companies such as Microsoft and the recording labels will cement their total ownership of your online rights -- leaving you with nothing but a hefty bill to pay whenever you want to use their software or services. Today's Aardvark Daily carries an interesting editorial that speculates on just what life could be like in the very near future. Sobering -- but perhaps not too far from reality?"

Comments

I see one of four things happening

[G-funk]

1) Exactly what this article states. Although I find this the least likely outcome.

2) The internet turns into tv + shopping. Lots of ads you can't get past

3) The internet gets so bad, that the geeks create decentralised, efficient, free-floating network partially on top of the existing network, partially outside of it, and it all begins again

4) It goes on exactly like it is now. the (x)AAs of the world keep trying to hold us down, the advertisers keep trying to make us look, MS keeps trying to make us pay (again), and we keep trying to stay one step ahead of them all. This is IMHO the most likely situation.

DRM exists now

[BrookHarty]

I just upgraded my DVD-rom just to find out that its RPC-2. They moved the Region code from the OS (RPC-1) to the firmware on the drive. You can only switch it 5 times, then it locks in firmware. No where on the box did it say it was RPC-2, nor is there any requirements for them to do so.

Maybe DRM is closer than you think.
-
chmod +a rwx /bin/freedom

This illustrates the "micropayment" fallacy nicely

[Nindalf]

People who support micropayments usually claim that they'll be so small that you won't notice them, much less care about them. Nice dream, but it doesn't take into account the motivations of the people involved.

When people set their mandatory micropayment prices, they'll do it to maximize profit. The prices will find and sit at the awareness threshold of users, so you'll look up and see you've spent $5 over the course of a few minutes without really noticing it. People will respond to this by thinking of internet use as an expensive activity, and keeping it to a minimum. The reduced demand will drive prices up higher.

That's a natural consequence of each entity setting the prices of what their selling. Information doesn't compete on price very well. I forget who said it... "Information wants to be free, because it's so easy to distribute, yet information wants to be expensive, because it's so useful." When the people owning the information set the price, they can make it expensive, because it takes a fairly high price before it's better than not having the information.

However, voluntary micropayments don't have this tendency, being set by the users. Ultimately, I think voluntary payments will win out in any area with a sufficiently clued-in audience to make it work. The competitive advantages of free information are obviously huge, so wherever they can make enough profit to develop a comparable product to the restricted information, they'll win. Also, voluntary micropayments are much simpler and cheaper to implement.

I've written a bit on the kind of systems that would be needed (and can fairly easily be developed) to replace intellectual property restrictions, and I've done some work developing parts of them (see my sig).

This Isn't Fantasy - It's Reality

[Grail]

The reality for Internet users in Australia is that traffic costs a minimum of $0.13/Mb.

The ACCC is fighting to make Region Encoding of DVDs illegal in Australia - claiming that it's an anti-competitive trade practice.

I browse with images off as often as possible, because images cost ten times as much as the article they're obscuring. Spam costs me money. Running "apt-get upgrade" on my Debian box will cost me about $3-$10, depending on how much "woody" has changed in the last fortnight.

Opening Internet Explorer costs me money because it insists on redirecting me to the Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 home page and claiming that I really, really should download this new version of IE.

Thanks to spam, "postcards", NTP, scheduled IMAP checks and other non-interactive traffic, I can easily spend $1/hour when I'm sleeping. I don't even have to check my mail in the morning to start racking up the bills.

You people in the USA are living in a market-share-broadening dreamland, where providers are tripping over each other in an attempt to get you signed up to their networks. They all realise that once you've been using their service for 6 months "for free", they can start charging for traffic, and you'll just roll over and accept it like the good consumer-sheep you are.

In any Capitalist economy, you have to keep repeating this holy mantra - "The money has to come from somewhere. There is no such thing as a free lunch."