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

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.

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

[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

[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.?

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.

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:::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: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.

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..

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?

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.