Web Thinkers Warn of Culture Clash

Passacaglia writes "The Washington Post is carrying an article describing some stimulating discussion from the Internet Society meeting this week, including comments from Vinton Cerf, Eric Schmidt, about the clash between freedom and commercial interests."

Comments

Duh

[pope nihil]

The reason that the internet has become so accessible to the common man is because of big business. What does big business want in return? They want you look at their popups and they want to track you and they want you (in the end) to buy their products or services.

Re:Duh

[shepd]

That's strange, considering the first company I ever bought internet from was a co-operative.

Seems to me the big-business internet was either developed on the backs of smaller companies, or was developed as smaller companies grew up.

Re:Duh

[00_NOP]

Lots of things contributed to public access to the internet - it's not simply a question of business versus state.

But there is a wider question here So what if business built the internet. We - the people - are sovereign, not the CEOs. If we decide we want the internet to change or we wnat to restrict business activities in favour of community activities then that is our right.

"Business" is not sacred - why else do the mafia refer to their work as "business" after all?

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope popups and cookie abuse and all that crap is coming to an end, but I don't think that spells the end of doing business on the internet, which I am not opposed to. Think of this, over at kuro5shin Rusty puts out a call for some emergency funds--and it works! Meanwhile portal sites like Yahoo are getting uglier and more useless by the week, "content providers" like Salon and nytimes.com just don't seem to ever learn. Sooner or later I think the sites that don't get on the cluetrain will go under. Even the giants, because they cannot sustain a losing business model forever. It will take time, but for those that can stick it out, there will be financial rewards for those outfits who understand the internet and work with it. Well, that's my hope.

Status Quo

[houston_pt]

"But many participants said government agencies and businesses can't afford to wait on issues such as privacy, junk e-mail and copyright controls."

So, it's spam first and check the legislation later as usual...

There's no clash

[Anonymous Coward]

You want freedom, we want to sell it to you.

Culture of openness

[Anonymous Coward]

The medium which we affectionately refer to as "the internet" never had a culture of openness. It is a technocracy. Those who operate the communication lines say what goes over them. It has always been that way and those who have differing views of what the network should be used for have experienced how far from open that situation can be. The problem is not so much that "freedom of the press belongs to those who own the press", it is that very few own a press, metaphorically speaking.

Re:Culture of openness

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll match your cynicism, ac, and raise you a postmodern loss of identity. In fact you don't need tech literacy in order to express your views on the web, or usenet, or in listserves. And in many places, you don't even need to own a computer to get online and post your opinions. On the internet talk is cheap. Now, Vint Cerf, as reported in the Post article, argues that asymetric bandwidth is a threat to free expression and the ideal of open communication. In the present this is a real concern, but if recent history is any guide, then in the end I imagine video and audio will be as cheap and easy as talk. The real threat to liberty in that case will be the fracturing of dissent and the inability to form any organized opposition to power and its abuses. Power will hide itself in spectacle and the bogosity of the event even more effectively than it does through the mass media of Western democracies. As voices on cnn become indistinguishable from goatcx trolls, equally obnoxious and anonymous, communcition loses its emancipatory and critical functions. It ceases to mean. And what greater social disenfranchisement is there than to speak in a voice that has ceased to mean? This is the role the media giants, in cahoots with a self-appointed [and usurptatious] technocratic elite, have written for themselves: Their project is to engineer the sound of the free marketplace of ideas so that no individual voice can be heard. For evidence of this, look to the proposed collaboration of Verizon and MSN, or, more metaphorically (and therefore, some would say, more truly) listen to Britney Spears and N-Sync. Download an mp3 and really listen. Indeed speech on the internet has been less than egalitarian up till now, but in the near future these early years will seem to have been utopian.

Bandwidth is the key

[The Cat]

Companies are inhibiting innovation, Cerf said, by letting users receive information faster than they can send it.

This is the most important statement in the article. Bandwidth is the main component of every Internet policy discussion. Upstream is probably at least as important as downstream. To seperate the two significantly is an attempt to confine people to the role of consumer: i.e. "stay on the couch."

Upstream bandwidth allows people to become *producers* too, which is a good thing(tm).

Re:Bandwidth is the key

[Karora]

However the commercial reality is that the available bandwidth in a connection is the total upstream + downstream, and that's what drivers the provisioning costs. The pattern of usage for most consumers is that they pull down more than they push. Fact.

P2P applications change that a lot, as does hosting, but individuals don't usually want to host stuff at home.

Sure, it's an interesting thing to say, and it challenges us to think about it, but rather than assume some vast conspiracy to defraud the consumer, consider what happens when the consumer gets what they ask for.

People can be producers without aving upstream bandwidth. Hell, many companies don't host their own websites, for a bunch of really good reasons. Likewise many ISP accounts I see allow for hosting along with your e-mail, so they can still be producers. It ain't hard.

Re:Bandwidth is the key

[JaredOfEuropa]

Companies are indeed inhibiting innovation y limiting upstream bandwidth, but I think this is just an unintentional result of certain technical decisions they made when setting up their network. When bandwidth is limited, downstream has always (remember 1200/75 modems?) been favoured over upstream, and rightly so, as the majority of people pull in more than they send out.

What I see as far more detrimental to consumers becoming producers, is all the limitations ISP's place on their services. Again, all in the name of bandwidth preservation, but in this case they are far less subtle. Things like not giving fixed IP addresses, port blocking, not allowing people to run services, not allowing people to hook up multiple computers. All these are examples of ISPs meddling with how you use the bandwidth they sell, and prevent you from becoming a publisher as well as a comsumer.

I'm glad my ISP is one that provides me with bandwith, and nothing else. Barring a few provisions about not using my account for spam or resell the bandwidth, and a (generous) monthly data allowance, I am free to do whatever the hell I want with my connection.

Re:Bandwidth is the key

[JaredOfEuropa]

People can be producers without aving upstream bandwidth. Hell, many companies don't host their own websites, for a bunch of really good reasons. Likewise many ISP accounts I see allow for hosting along with your e-mail, so they can still be producers. It ain't hard.

Many ISP's and even webhosting services have rules about what you can host on their sites. The most common rule is: no pr0n. The point is not just being able to publish, but also the ability to publish whatever you want to publish. Put up a page on your AOL webspace about how badly AOL sucks, and see how long it stays up.

Re:Bandwidth is the key

[Gryffin]

"Companies are inhibiting innovation, Cerf said, by letting users receive information faster than they can send it."

There's an old saying: "Freedom of the press only applies to those who own one." Besides the issue of bandwith limits, most broadband ISPs block ports 21 and 80, and specifically prohibit running any sort of server, i.e., publishing on the web.

George Orwell's "1984" got one thing wrong: it's industry, not the government, that's now playing the role of Big Brother. In the US at least, this makes sense; the government is bound (well, to some degree) by the Constitution; corporations have no such limits on their behavior.

With fewer and fewer corporations controlling more and more of our lives, and with huge profits to apply towards influencing government policy, is it any wonder we're heading towards Dystopis, Inc.?

Re:Bandwidth is the key

[Cplus]

*WE*, as consumers, should be the ones who limit the powers of the corporations. All it takes is putting a little more thought into your purchasing.

Do you honestly believe that line about the "kindness of corporate strangers"? John Galt would have slapped you.

Re:Bandwidth is the key

[Karora]

Just because you have bandwidth to your house doesn't change the fact that you have an ISP who is providing that bandwidth to you and you have to abide by their rules.

Hosting elsewhere provides broader choice, allowing me to host anywhere in the world, and to pick a hosting ISP who doesn't restrict me.

Hosting elsewhere also provides much greater possibilities for anonymity.

Organized Crime, and Interesting Links

[peatbakke]

The article doesn't go into much detail about the discussions, and leaves a lot of questionable assertions dangling. For example, the claim that "Going too far one way would restrict freedom of choice, while the opposite could foster organized crime." The more you restrict freedom of choice, the more actions become criminal. And doesn't organize crime really take a foothold when undue restrictions are imposed upon the masses? The Prohibition in the United States is/was a pretty stark example.

That aside, check out the conference website for a full list of the subjects they're covering. You might also be interested in reading an interesting report from the US National Research Council and Eric Schmidt (the CEO of Google) about how the Internet is growing up, so to speak.

The representative from NOIE.

[Dogcow]

It's worth noting that the only reason the Australian guy (from NOIE) wants there to be better privacy and authentication standards/implementation is so people can trust "e-commerce".

NOIE never "got it" during the Internet boom days of 1999 and 2000, and it's clear they still don't "get it" now.

To them, it's all about money. Screw privacy so people can actually keep their personal information private. Screw authentication so your friend knows it's actually you're they're talking to. When you've got a religious zealot like Senator Richard Alston running a liberal, freewheeling, abstract, technical and artistic portfolio like Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, you're doomed to failure. At every turn, with regards to policy and proposed legislation is the shadowy hand of religious zealotry and fear - "close it down, lock it up, throw away the key, because only the heathens do it" sort of mentality.

Online gambling is the obvious example, with "content regulation" (aka censorship) being the other.

It should be no surprise that the NOIE representative is there pushing the out of touch, out of place, out of money approach.

Thank goodness NOIE got a swift kick in the pants at the last Federal Budget.

When they finally die, they will not be missed.

::sigh::

[DarkZero]

He pointed to the current "balkanization" of instant messaging, where a lack of standards prevents America Online users from communicating with people on rival services.

The people in this article made a very good point when they mentioned the problems that arise from upload speeds that differ wildly from the download speeds on the same service. However, the above point was just absolute stupidity. AIM and ICQ are COMPLETELY different services that function very differently from one another. They have differing levels of privacy, different ways of conveying information, and even very different ways of sending and receiving messages (AIM only receives messages when the user is online, while ICQ effectively acts as a short message equivalent to an e-mail account). A forced standard in this situation would do nothing but annoy those who have chosen AIM or ICQ specifically because they prefer the very different functions of whichever one they chose.

They're both referred to as "instant messaging services" (or some such), but that's where the similarities between AIM and ICQ end. Trying to force AIM and ICQ to conform to a standard is like trying to force ham radio companies and phone companies to conform to a standard. On the surface, they're very similar, as they're both forms of solely verbal communication between individuals or small groups. But the similarities stop there and the two services should be kept completely independant of one another for that reason.

Re:::sigh::

[transiit]

Trying to force AIM and ICQ to conform to a standard is like trying to force ham radio companies and phone companies to conform to a standard.

You do understand that AIM and ICQ are both products of AOL, right?
I think it's become apparent through the efforts of Jabber, Trillian, etc. that the technological side of getting interoperability between the networks isn't impossible. The problem is companies such as AOL changing their protocol whenever they feel threatened.
-transiit

Re:::sigh::

[transiit]

You do understand that AIM and ICQ are both products of AOL, right?

I don't see how that matters, other than to drive home my point that they are two (almost) completely different things.

I think I'm still going to have to disagree with you on this point. ICQ was developed, as my memory serves, by a company called Mirabillis. AOL bought them, and for whatever reason, never merged ICQ in with their product, AIM. Some features have shown up that didn't used to be there, like multiple users in the same chat session, etc., but the only thing that's keeping them apart at this point is the whims of AOL. (although some could say they're dealing with the problem by making ICQ increasingly more crapulent, but I've not used it in years. Couldn't say.)

Oh, of course the technological side isn't impossible. But I was talking about the usability side, and so far all of the "universal instant messenger" services that connect with anything that they can find display the same sort of problems that you would find in a Swiss Army Knife, i.e. they do everything "okay" or "pretty well", but overall don't do the job as well as a service or tool that is tailored to one specific job.

If your argument is to hold true, the whole situation is self-defeating. Either the gateway services are to cater to the lowest common denominator, or they aren't going to work. If they don't work, they fail. If they don't support every stupid addition to every possible client/protocol, they fail.

I'd also like to point out that analogies still suck. I've had a swiss army knife for years. Works great. Does what I need it to. (mainly, it cuts stuff, has a screwdriver, and keeps me from having to open cans with my teeth).

This differs greatly from programs that deal with the differing standards and manage to lump them all into one program. Accepting differing standards and packaging them together allows you to keep most of the purity of each standard by keeping them mostly seperate from one another. Forcing the services themselves to conform to a standard, however, would force the groups behind AIM and ICQ to decide whether or not they, for instance, wanted messages for a user that is offline to be stored and then sent when the user logs on. They wouldn't be allowed to make seperate decisions about how they wanted their services to work, so there would be a lot less choice and competition among instant messaging users.

Wait a second....you're against standards because they mean less choice for the user? Are you on crack? The idea of having a standard is all about choice: it means that you aren't forced into using one tool just because it's the only one that supports feature X. Say we've got a standard, like "For every instant message, the format is a 32-byte 'From' field, a datestamp, and the rest is message until you reach a null terminator". Now as a user, this doesn't mean a whole lot, except that you know that any client that follows this standard will work with the rest of the instant messaging user community, at which point you start picking the client based on whether or not they think you should see ads on your contact list, or how well they manage those contacts, or if they're prone to crashing every ten minutes, or if the servers they talk to are prone to being unreachable every ten minutes, etc. All the other bells and whistles get embedded between the datestamp and the terminator. Want HTML formatting, include it. Think XML is the one true instant message format? use it. But just like email clients, you would do yourself a service by being less noisy, but HTML mail continues to annoy email users worldwide, and most of the people sending it are too clueless to get it, so it continues....

And that just doesn't serve any purpose, or at least much less of a purpose than creating a standard in upload and download speeds over cable and DSL lines that aren't federally regulated.

Whoa. Where the hell did that come from, and for that matter, what the hell does it have to do with anything? Where is it written that if we try to create an instant messaging standard, we'll never get a standard in cable/dsl rates? In fact, why should we have a standard in transfer rates on those media above what already exists? (What, you think they got this shit working out of sheer dumb luck? Everybody reinvents the wheel for every cable provider or dsl-providing-telco? There's plenty of standarization on that stuff.)

The problem in this market is a lack of competition. How are we supposed to show our disgust with artificial bandwidth caps if we don't have any other choice in the market?

-transiit

Re:::sigh::

[infiniti99]

so far all of the "universal instant messenger" services that connect with anything that they can find display the same sort of problems that you would find in a Swiss Army Knife, i.e. they do everything "okay" or "pretty well", but overall don't do the job as well as a service or tool that is tailored to one specific job.

Maybe the users of these multi-IM programs are not interested in the extra service-specific features you speak of, otherwise these types of programs wouldn't be so popular. It is abundantly clear that the general public does _not_ like the segregated world of IM we live in.

Communications standards would not preclude an AIM-lover from using the official AIM client if they want the bonus features. Consider AOL internet services, which gives you all sorts of other things in addition to a TCP/IP connection. Consider AOL email, which uses a proprietary protocol internally, but talks SMTP to the rest of the world.

What we need is for AOL (and others) to agree on an IM standard, if only for the basics, so that we can tear this wall down exactly like what happened with email 10 years ago.

The Jabber protocol has achieved RFC status, and will likely be accepted by the IETF. There's our standard. Unfortunately, there are powerful market forces at work, so I won't place any bets on AOL running a Jabber server anytime soon. Too bad, really..

Upstream and Downstream

[Beautyon]

I am not overly concerned about the upstream downstream issue. We have already seen tools that combine small amounts of bandwidth from many different users to make an "on demand fat upstream pipe", as long as all the upstreaming users have identical files on thier system.

People collaborating to share their upstream bandwidth with the inevitable second genration swarming tools that will follow the like of Open Cola and its brethren will completely solve this "problem".

I say inevitable, because whenever a situation like this is artificially created, wether it be censorship (Freenet) or email privacy (PGP), the small group of creative software writers that fix these problems always come up with a tool to redress the balance, and sometimes, change everyones thinking permanently (gnutella).

If I consulted for these media companies, I would advise them to let everyone have the bandwidth that they want, because trafic shaping, contention and other evils will force the creation and evolution of tools that will make it easier to share content, which is precisely what they are trying to restrict.

Re:Upstream and Downstream

[Alsee]

combine small amounts of bandwidth from many different users to make an "on demand fat upstream pipe"

In some cases this "solves the problem", but in other cases the benfit can vanish to zero. You have a one virtual fat upstream pipe divided by many users. The number of data requests tends to increase at the same rate as the number of users. The system remails upstream-throttled.

-

Re:The Role of the Common Consumer

[PinkSchizoid]

I agree with the merits of your statement completely. However, I wonder how many "Joe Shmuck's" surfing the net at home really care about upstream bandwidth? I have to assume that the number of people who simply turn on their pc, check their email, and see what the Weather Channel(tm) website has to say about their local forecast is the largest percentage of typical users of the internet. A good chunk of the rest are mindlessly wandering around AOL (no further comment).
This would imply that the minority consists of we who read sites like Slashdot and care about upstream bandwidth. I have to stress the word minority here because if you:
A) care about bandwidth
B) want to be a producer or host
C) even know what the word "bandwidth" means
then you are definitely in the minority. Something I think we are all too quick to assume is that there is some type of universal intelligence on the part of web user's when there defintely is not. Again, (IMHO) I think most user's want to be a couch potato because they don't know or don't want to know anything more that would further complicate their lives.
Someone's previous observation that P2P software has changed this is assuming that all recipients of data equally want to be sources of data. I don't know about you, but uploaders really cramp my style on KaZaA. My downstream bandwidth gets killed because I have a 56K ISP uplink and a satellite dish downlink. I don't want to share data in this case as I can't get those cd's fast enough.
I've presented a case for the merchandiser/consumer model here. As long as the majority of user's stay stupid then marketers will increasingly seek alliances with service providers to affect the largest number of users possible. This is not only confined to the web - it reaches much further. Does Microsoft's recently announced partnership with Verizon bother anybody? It bother's me. As a Verizon customer (which I am), do I now have to face another outlet for "Windows" to be in my face on my phone? To hell with the contract cancellation penalties. I'll use two tin cans and a string the day I see ANY ad, service, etc... from MS on my cell phone.
Back to the web and the original article in general: perhaps the most troubling part of the reality to me is the admonishment of government influence/control. Perhaps I'll be labelled as a "terroristic threat"(tm GWB) for saying so, but with the level of paranoia up within an already visibly bipolar Bush adminstration I think we can expect certain government affects on our freedoms on the web (will the "right" to cruise the web soon become a revokable "privalege"?). But, for the majority, it's not a problem because they can still get their email and they can still check the weather channel as long as they behave themselves. HELLO !!!! Does anyone have a problem here or is it just me being paranoid again?

Re:Organized Crime?

[big.ears]

Imagine a world where 'organized' crime was occuring on-line. For instance, casinos would be on-line, skimming off the top, not paying off what they claim to be, and bilking senior citizen's out of their children's inheritance. Or, large billion-dollar corporations would extort protection money by requiring 'licensing' of internet middleware on all your computers, even those that don't use their software. And, to make sure you are honest, they would install a artificially-intelligent mole on your computer that would snitch on you if you didn't pay up. Or imagine a multi-national syndicate that artificially creates a scarcity of urls, and then makes people pay through the nose for the privilege to own such scarce property?

Re:The Role of the Common Consumer

[civilizedINTENSITY]

"Companies are inhibiting innovation, Cerf said, by letting users receive information faster than they can send it. "

..."an attempt to confine people to the role of consumer: i.e. "stay on the couch."

"how many "Joe Shmuck's" surfing the net at home

Yeah, and how many Joe Shmuck's ever do anything innovative? Its not that there aren't plenty of Joe Shmuck I-want-to-be-a-couch-potato-forever(s) running around out there. The point is that the small percentage of innovative gifted talent out there should be exploring the possibilites and extending the potential, which won't happen while we're stuck in consumer mode. Controling access is to content allows content to be priced. When everyone has the ability to be a producer, then the 2% or 3% who can, will, and that will disturb the current access control models. Those models should be distrubed.

Make an Open Net

[Monoman]

"We are actually at a point where we can make some very wrong decisions, and the Net will just kind of become like any other industry"

I think it is already too late for that. Once something is used by the common people it is an industry... an industry is mostly customers and people trying to make a buck off of customers. There are a few exceptions but I think we seeing the "almighty dollar" ruining the Internet in some ways(spam and pop-ups come to mind).

I think a new network based on openess is the way to go. Maybe Internet2(I don't know much about it) could be that network. Only allow organisations that adhere to a few mandates:

1. Apps and protocols that use Open standards.
2. Open source applications/protocols so they may evolve into open standards.

Question?

[dh003i]

I'm not familiar with the intimate details of ISP-services, but here's a question.

Why can't ISP's just offer users the option of how much upload/download bandwidth they want. On my cable modem, I get about 100-300 KB/s download bandwidth, and about 40 KB/s upload bandwidth. That amounts to about 140-340 KB/s bandwidth total. Lets say that its 240 KB/s.

So why can't my ISP just offer me any combination of upload/download bandwidth totalling up to that?

Or any percentage combination?

Or why can't they set up a dynamic system where the amount of upload and download bandwidth automatically shifts depending on what I'm doing?

Re:Question?

[dh003i]

But my question was this:

Is there anything physically preventing them from offering a dynamic upload/download pipe, where it adjusts to what the users are doing automatically?

Or is it just that they choose not to do that?

Re:Question?

[Kamel Jockey]

They rushed their services to market without building an infrastructure to support it if it got popular

But how much are you willing to pay for broadband? Most people won't shell out $100 a month for it. If the cable companies turned every broadband connection into the equivalent of a T1 or T3, you'd certainly be paying a lot more than $40-$50 a month for it. Would you be willing to pay that kind of money for a "real" internet connection?

Re:Question?

[Kamel Jockey]

the providers are the ones marketing broadband as T1 speeds for the home

I dunno about that one. The ads I've seen for DSL and cable modems here in Philadelphia advertise it as being "X times faster than dialup", "really fast" and "always on" without really getting into specifics. While it is true that all these services are capped at sub-T1 speeds, I don't think its fair to say they are marketing a "poor man's T1" to the masses.

My only response is

[extrasolar]

"Duh"

Why Joe Schmuck Cares - and When

[billstewart]

Hi! I'm Joe Schmuck, and I'm a Couch Potato. I don't create cool applications and services myself, I just run stuff other people create and leech off them, but I'm still the most important person out there that the cable company knows about, because I'm paying them $50/month to run Cool Stuff, and if there weren't Cool Stuff for us Couch Potatoes to use, I wouldn't bother. Here are some times I care - or don't - about upstream bandwidth.

• I don't care when I'm running Napster - most people spend more time listening or ignoring it than downloading, so the asymmetry averages out.
• I don't care about upstream bandwidth for my web server - it's mostly my vacation pictures and pictures of my kids, and it's much easier to use DigiCamWebSharer to have the pictures on my 20GB hard disk than to upload them to the wimpy 5MB that the cable company's website lets me store. It's mainly my relatives who look at it, plus a bunch of spiders.
• I don't care when I'm running Quake, because it runs ok on modems and I can really kick ass on the cable modem.
• I do care about upstream when I'm running VideoPhone, because my 128kbps upstream is good enough for talking heads and showing the kids when they sit still, but if they start running around, Grandma complains that they get all blocky, especially if I forget to turn off Napster.
• I also care when I'm running VaporBlaster, since that needs 512kbps upstream. Unfortunately, not enough Couch Potatoes have better than 128k upstream or a few have 384k, so the VaporBlaster folks never finished writing the home version of the arcade game that would have gotten 30 million more Couch Potatoes to buy cable modem service, so I can only play it at the mall,and my cable bill keeps having inserts about how they're not filling up their OC48 backbone and could we download some more movies from their PayPerView site so they don't have to cut the monthly bandwidth limits again.
• I also care when I'm running NeighborhoodWatchWebCam, because there've been a couple of car breakins this month and most of the neighbors are running theirs in slow-speed mode so we couldn't recognize the kids who did it.

Technical Issues prevent that

[billstewart]

The technology doesn't work that way - some things are inherently symmetric, and some are inherently asymmetric, but they're not just allocating bandwidth on a shared simplex channel like an Ethernet or radio space. There are three common standards out there for broadband to the home:

• Symmetric DSL versions - they're symmetric, and bandwidth is limited by the electrical characteristics of the wires. They usually need dedicated wires.
• Asymmetric DSL versions - they play different electrical tricks to fit the signal onto the wire, and can line-share with analog phones, so they're becoming the most common home DSL. Typical speeds are 384/128, 608/128, and 1544/384.
• Cable Modems - Cable TV depends on lots of Funky Analog Electrical Tricks just to work at all, and cable modems do even funkier tricks, and it's easier to do these tricks downstream, where you've got one signal source, than upstream, where you've got lots of sources at different points on the same wire which all want to bounce around and echo and interfere with each other unless you tune the thing right. It's much worse than the old ThickWire Ethernet. So it's easier for them to add as much downstream bandwidth as they want to pay for, but upstream's much harder. However, they're not giving you as much upstream bandwidth as they could, for a couple of reasons.
  • One is that they developed a bad performance reputation early on because of some bad equipment in the beta-test city, leading to high packet loss and all those Web Hog TV commercials by competitors, so they'd rather not push the limits of the network, because Bad Perception by the public is a killer.
  • Another is that the upstream is a shared medium, with total performance depending on the number of people sending right now and how fast they're sending, and if they let you have a lot more upstream, which they easily could, some users really would hog their neighborhood upstream, especially if they're running popular Pr0n Web Servers (see Bad Perception, above.)
  • They could manage the bandwidth of excessive users by using packet shapers like Packeteer, but those didn't really exist when they started, and still cost money today.
  • They either have to set all users to a lowest-common-denominator speed that will work everywhere, or they'd have to keep track of each individual user's setting and do much more complex engineering for each set of cable, and that's way too much work for a low-price service.
  
  Most of the cable modem technology out there limits you to 128kbps upstream, but it could do more if they wanted to set it for that. Some of the cable modem companies offer business-class service with 256kbps upstream and much better repair time guarantees, but the economics of the consumer-priced services are based on the idea that it's really just television and if it goes out for a day or two you can read a book or go to the movies.
  
• Digital Cable - This is the Mos Eisley of kitchen sink bandwidth allocation protocols, doing a huge variety of ugly things with different parts of the bitstream under different conditions. You really don't want to go there; it makes those ISDN Q.93x protocols designed by French Telecom Bureaucrats look positively clean and simple.
  

Meanwhile...

[Rogerborg]

While Vint and his chums write insightful pieces on why there might be a possible problem with conflicts of interest, the commercial interests just carry on buying up the laws and precedents to do whatever they damn well want with the root servers and TLD's.

The problem with reasonable, balanced, polite objections is that the other side is utterly convinced that might makes right. They see Vint and his kind as irrelevant dinosaurs, and they see us not as contributing netizens, but as consumers.

Vint, Vint, stop being so nice. Start asserting the bald fact: the net is for individuals, not for companies. Don't make the mistake of justifying that or explaining why it should be so, because the commercial interests damn well don't. Just assert it, and keep on asserting it more confidently every day. There's a war on for control of the internet, and wars aren't won through appeasment and debate, they're won through a single minded belief that there can be only one possible outcome, and that's that we will win this.

BTW, AIM and ICQ use the same protocol and servers

[smcv]

I'm currently running Gaim (a Linux/X/Gtk client originally developed for AIM compatibility) which uses a plugin system to connect to several competing IM servers (ICQ, AIM, MSN, Napster etc.) - as far as I can see, Trillian is its Windows equivalent (I don't know which came first).

The Gaim developers have stopped working on their ICQ plugin, because the same protocol ("Oscar") and server (login.oscar.aol.com port 5190) will work for both services, and their AIM plugin has expanded to have full ICQ functionality - you just fill in an ICQ number and password rather than an AIM screenname and password.

AIM and ICQ still don't seem to interoperate - I'm not sure whether this is a Gaim-ism or an AOL problem, but sending a message from my ICQ account to my AIM account (or vice versa) fails.

Re:We need only worry of the infrastructure...

[JimPooley]

Yeah! Let's go down to plain text delivered over 300 baud modems! The way it was in the good old days, right?
Sounds like a good way to drive the net into a geeks-only private club.

Re:We need only worry of the infrastructure...

[telbij]

Yes it does, it means browsers are going against my will on my system. There should be checkboxes for sound and the ability to spawn new windows (the ability to spawn them under anything flat out shouldn't exist). There should be site by site control of cookies so I could allow sites very narrow usage if sites I want require them.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Mozilla does a pretty good job of this. It's hypocritical to complain about what commercial vendors do with their products, because you yourself want complete freedom to do what you want with software you write.

It's easy to disagree with capitalist excess and pervasive commercialization of everything, but that is the cost of freedom. Saying what features browser makers should be mandated to add is like media conglomerates lobbying to get DRM hardware installed in every electronic device. Those guys think their side has the moral high ground too.

Re:We need only worry of the infrastructure...

[Ziviyr]

Hey, no need to burn the newer modems to the ground. Just close and make sutiably optional all features that pose significant privacy/security/annoyance risk.

It would really rock to be able to pull down whole books in a few seconds though. Might challenge people to new speedreading records. :-)

Re:We need only worry of the infrastructure...

[Ziviyr]

Except that half of what I said involved user controllable buttons allowing their preferences to be respected and I have no world-power governmental military force behind me to back it up (just a handful of slashdotters whose opinions I might have slightly changed).

Note alot of this fancy web tech came along because most web users are using one or two different browsers, many of which had the ability to nag the average user into submission (again, no "shut the f" -- " up" button available).

Bringing DRM into the conversation is like comparing the evils of sugar in Kool Aid with the evils of grinding Hitler's corpse into a new flavor of Kool Aid.