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Competing (Commercial) Visions For The Internet Future
Stirland writes: "This
article in today's NYTimes says that AOL's new
plan focussed on creating content for broadband could
have cable companies over a barrel.
It tries to compare programming on cable to 'programming' on the Internet.
It's an important article to read because it gives us an idea of what cable companies' potential plans are for the broadband Internet. Given that they're not regulated like DSL, and they're the fastest growing providers of broadband Internet access, this has profound implications for the next generation of the Internet.
This article omits the fact that Excite@Home tried this 'programming' approach on broadband. It failed.
Another reason this article is important: Contrast AOL's approach described here with Amazon.com and Microsoft's .Net strategy. These are two polar opposite visions of the way the Internet will develop. The media vision vs. computing vision. The interesting story here is that it isn't that one is 'open' and the other 'closed.' They're just open and closed in different places -- places, obviously, that suit the companies' strategies. Why should you care, and what's in it for you? These competing visions are currently duking it out at the FCC under open-access proceedings. So the future of the Internet is hanging in the balance."
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Why care? Because IMHO it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what the net is all about, and if AOL tries this, they're fux0r3d even harder than they were after the AOL/TW merger.
What's in it for you? If you agree, and you put your money where your mouth is by selling AOL stock short, you make good money riding it down to zero. (Conversely, you can lose a bundle if you're wrong and don't realize it in time, but with great risk can come great reward :-)
And there we had them, Hooked :)
...and I already have such a feature that comes with DCable... you can fetch the local movie showtimes, get the local weather instantly, etc. AOL just wants to take over the world. The way I see it, this would become merged with a DigiCable feature on Time Warner cable systems (of which I am not I subscriber, so I wouldn't know).
For those of us not under the control of the FCC, we may beg to differ that this will decide the whole internet - there may be something that can be added to the internet by the rest of the world, perhaps ?
I suggest you go out and buy a few copies of Windows, Office, Exchange, and SQL Server right now...! ;-)
Surely the internet can develop in all directions. If one company wants to make it commercial, and another doesn't, so be it. /., with completely different content, which run parallel, and have no need to (and so don't) interact.
For example, there are AOL groups like
Just because the internet is literally linked, doesn't mean it is in practice. It's the people who make it what it is, not just the technology.
"You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that."
I'll sign up for the programming if it interests me. To translate for marketing executives: I want to see anything by JMS, specifically, I want to see "Crusade" finished. I want to see Star Trek Voyager, no, not the one that already exists --- I mean a GOOD version of Voyager. I want to see more episodes of Burke's "Connections". CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?
If these companies can't give me what I want, then they won't get my money. Lately, I've been bitten by a camera collecting bug. I want to get information on really cool old cameras that cost less than 20 bucks. Can they "program" for that? I doubt it.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
The internet is not meant to be a broadcast medium, nor is it very good as one. Ask online radio stations that not only must now pay high license fees, but also must buy lost of servers and bandwidth to stream audio to a few listeners, nothing like traditional broacast mediums (radio, tv, even broadcast cable and satelite) which scale much better.
Truely the internet is meant for and best at 2-way, end-to-end communications. These schemes to make the internet a playground for a few big content providers can cause nothing but trouble.
I dislike companies that try blur the line between Internet access providers and Internet Content providers. All I want from ATT or Verizon is fast internet access. They and AOL can take their content and shove it. If they can't make enough money providing me with basic internet access, without charging extra for what I click on, then I'm sure some other company will be content to take my money providing me with just the service that I want.
Has anyone seen the new nullsoft streaming video format? Opinions can be non-objective but in my opinion it rocks anything MS, Apple, or real have to offer.
So how does this tie into the whole AOL story? Well, some of you may or may not know nullsoft was bought out by time warner AOL some time ago. Now in addition to the MP3 technology nullsoft has a streaming format ready to go. Nullsoft has sort of become a PARC for AOL.
Just a interesting side note I wanted to point out.
Here's a mirror of the text of this website. Login/password haters of the world unite!
http://members.cox.net/infornography/nyt.txt
Are they thinking that somehow they will be able to "port" over the popular "must have" shows?.....I don't even watch HBO on television, still nothing for me...
The only way I could see this as positive is if somehow AOL and Comcast block Microsoft's attempt to own the content delivery. If AOL were to switch to some form of Linux too, that would keep delivery platform neutral....that's about the only good I could see from this.
"For a long time, we kept asking cable operators to let us import our traditional business model into the broadband arena," said Lisa Hook, who oversees America Online's high-speed, or broadband, business for AOL Time Warner. "We kept saying, `Sell us wholesale access to your network and we will have the direct relationship with the customer,' " Ms. Hook recalled in an interview last week. "It became clear that that was really unknown in the cable industry, and we've realized that moving more toward an HBO model for carriage makes a lot of sense."
I currently use a Comcast cable modem connection, and used to have a lot of problems with it (though lately it's been fine). I didn't enjoy calling tech support, because the level 1 guys are flunkies reading off a clipboard, but once you get to level 2 you can get some actual help. And when you have a serious problem that it takes a computer geek just like yourself to understand, Comcast actually has one somewhere up the line.
That's because they kind of care. While AT&T, Comcast, and others like them are large corporations, they still manage to deal with their users reasonably well. I'm sure more localized providers like Cox and Optimum Online do a great job with customer relations.
That said, I'm much happier that America Online has chosen this route. I'd have to have AOL, the most faceless company on the face of the Earth, be helping me with my tech support questions and installations. When I have a question that it needs an expert to answer, I don't want to speak to one of a hundred thousand AOL flunkies.
Better to have those with "the direct relationship with the customer" be those who actually know what state the customer lives in.
- Jeff
Can you see it?
CmdrTaco@aol.com
BWAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAA!
One where they are not just consumers and pirates and are not obliged to to spend every waking minute sucking up marketing and shelling over greenbacks. A vision where some shade of freedom, human rights, and free speech still exists. . . . one where pissing off a corporation is not necessarily illegal. . . . one where the world is included and the universe does not revolve around the corporations and government that make up the US powerhouse. ...and of course, lots of pr0n. ;p
Its too bad this worldwide forum is quickly just becoming just another mechanism for controlling the masses.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
The cable modem content-creation efforts failed, partly because the ideas that can be generated by one group of Central Planners are usually much lamer than the ideas created by a large number of different groups (even if they're not well-funded) - the anti-server policies adopted for performance reasons discouraged development of real applications, though some content applications developed by other people in the market succeeded at getting people to want to buy cable modem service (some of the games, and of course Napster). Another big reason, of course, was that there were only so many viable market niches for search engines, and the Excite business model depended on banner advertiser funding at a time that the market was going through rapid discovery of what that was worth (much much less for late arrivals in a crowded market than for the early adopters when web users were also mostly well-paid early adopters in an uncrowded market.) And Blue Mountain Greeting Cards didn't appear to have much business model at all - your mother could send out cutsie MommySpam(tm), but nobody got paid anything
AOL is another example of this - it's content that wanted more bandwidth, but that had become successful without it, though unlike some approaches, it's a combination of user-developed and service-provided content on the service's computers rather than the users'.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The future is going to have aspects of both strategies. The problem that AOL is going to face is that being a provider of broadband content isn't going to be that valuable. On the otherhand, being an distributor and moderator (for lack of a better word) of broadband content is the place to be.
Think about it, already we see on television that there is no shortage of crap to watch. The problem is figuring out what crap is worth watching, and when it is on. The solution, of course, is Tivo and ReplayTV. This solution has the side effect of choking off money (through ad revenue) to the providers of content. This does, however, illustrate the struggle that content providing services are already getting burned by.
Basically if you want to be a content provider, plan to provide a service that people will be willing to pay for. Be like HBO or any number of pr0n sites. Otherwise you will get drowned in the sea of noise that is thousands of small-time producers who are willing to do their work for free because they enjoy it or to gain noteriety enough to go work for HBO or any number of pr0n sites.
Smart money is on the people who can filter through the noise and consolidate the content in a useful way for various audiences.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
AOL retains it's customer base by convincing the customer that it IS the internet. The average AOL user hears internet and thinks AOL. They are a content provider and in order to keep their customers they need to keep convincing those customers that they need AOL for a reason. I see lots of people who are completly shocked that they can get the same content via any other internet service without AOL. I think they have a hard battle ahead of themselves. MSN Explorer is really cutting into AOL hard by offering a easy to use interface while not requiring the fees involved.
There is room for independent sites on the web and they will continue to exist while they can find an audience that will sustain them.
Well, I think some people have kept with AOL because they got accutomed to some of the custom content there, or the specific communities.
Hard to grow that though, with so much competing free stuff out there.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
-Hope this means faster pr0n...
-The more pr0n the better!
-Imagine what this will do to pr0n?
-I love porn.
-You've got pr0n!
It seems that the main location for experimentation is college campuses, which often have high-speed LANs in the dorms and may not be too aggressive about firewalls to the outside world, though there are also some US ISPs and DSL providers that allow servers on their DSL connections.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
" What's in it for you? If you agree, and you put your money where your mouth is by selling AOL stock short, you make good money riding it down to zero"
If only we had such sane markets. It matters not if AOL is a junk company or not, only if joe stockbuyer thinks it is. AOL has looked like a bad investment for years and years. You look at their various moronic business plans that they never really deliver on, etc. But as long as old Jod keeps buying it, it goes up - not down. Knowing they are wrong is easy, predicting the moment the bubble will burst in another thing entirely.
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
It strikes me that this kind of hanging-in-the-balance thinking is rooted in our big-media cultural mindset, like saying that the future of music hangs on the results of the next Grammy awards. It doesn't, considering how few musicians are actually involved in the Grammys. The vast majority continue to play the same gigs for the same audiences as before.
The only thing that concerns me is how it might affect your and my ability to post and surf each others websites. As long as those stay online, I don't care whether AOL or MSN has more members. The corporate interests all want to control whatever they think might threaten their profit streams, and in that sense I don't think really matters which of them wins these wars. There aren no good guys among them. What affects us is how much they are allowed to restrict on our access, and the only way we peasants will win that war is if Congress decides to bite the hand that feeds it and do a Bell breakup on these guys, prohibiting any of them from owning a controlling interest in a significant facet of the Internet.
Or, alternately, monkeys could fly out of my butt.
is a merger of your tv, and your internet. Everything at once, at your finger tips.
The idea is simple... TV on demand, watch what you want, when you want... We would all like that. Especially if there were few to no commercials.
Second, the internet, what you're using right at this moment.
Example: you're watching the movie you decided to see, for no apparent reason.. All you Aspen Extreme people know who you are... and all of a sudden something pops in your brain because of a scene on the TV. The press of a button, and you're on google! You do a search, surf, now satisfied, you go back to your Movie.
Now even better... you're watching TV and see a commercial. Press *55 now to go to our web page!
See what I mean. Everything, in one box. No, not for us Gamers, or serious programmers, but for the everyday I-just-check-my-e-mail user. This is the projected future of the internet, and people like AOL are betting their business on it.
But with 9 years of surfing (using gopher for me) can I drop my computer and go solely TV??? That's the obsticle they need to jump....
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
Quoth the poster:
.NET, I don't know. And Palladium. Ergh.
So the future of the Internet is hanging in the balance.
It seems a little hysterical to me to say such a thing. While we should be concerned and involved in the process, companies like AOL/MS/etc.. have to bring products to market that poeple will buy. They are not the best products, but they are saleable. Products with extreme DRM or forced commercials won't sell, I don't think. There will always be a gray market for non-DRM content, commercial-stripped content etc.. Until they make it easy and cheap to pay for the content, people will continue to "steal" it.
As for
Yes, it's a blog. Sorry if that offends you.
But you have no idea how many think they had to... or maybe you do, probably somewhere around 95% sound right? I received those packages in the mail and was quite suspicious. So, I setup a Win98 test box on my network in order to load up the software and see what it does. Well, that was a dead end because I ran into so many problems with hardware requirements. But keep in mind, this was a rather old machine, some 133 MHz or so setup that I picked up around 95 (still, it should be quite capable of connecting to the Comcast network without any bloat, and was able to in the past). I called in tech support a couple times to see if I could find solutions for some of the problems and basically ended up finding out that it didn't change any hardware settings or whatnot (I thought they might have be trying to push everyone through proxies with the switch-over). Now, that was just me, but at least I had suspicions. I also setup my grandma's box with Comcast cable, and when the software came in the mail she must have called me and/or mentioned something about the software several times, along the lines of "Will it still work after the date listed, because the package said it is absolutely critical to install the software before the network switches over.". I explained a few ideas about the network each time and she seemed to finally agree with me and everything turned out alright. But for the million of other Comcast subscribers that don't have a nerd to turn to, how can they be sure? And, more importantly, will they just end up taking the "safe road" and installing the software anyhow?
True. But given that the stock has been in a three-year decline from around $90 in late 2000 to today's $12 and change, I'd say that had you gone short at any time in the past three years (outside of the past two weeks :), the market would have rewarded you quite well for your prescience and patience.
Anyone who thinks "It matters not if XYZ is a junk company or not" has only to look at the stock charts for said companies over the past few years.
(And anyone who wants to talk about Enron, Tyco, Worldcon and Martha Stewart would do well to look at a one-year chart before they spoke. The market is a far harsher judge of business impropriety than Congress can ever be.)
First of all, as another poster pointed out, the FCC's mandates cannot possibly silence the rest of the world's own input into the future of the internet. And lets not forget the emerging 802.11a-b networks and the growing potential for these ad-hoc networks to coalesce into larger and large independent, anonymous, and unregulated networks - until it becomes an internet in its own right.
www.enthea.org
Boy, adapting your business model to the likings of the cable companies really sounds like a recapie for disaster! The only reason cable companies are successful is because they can extort their clients; competition for the last mile really destroys this advantage.
I was thinking more about watching this stoopid company through the '90s. It never looked like a fundamentally good company. But people kept buying it and buying it. Eventually the bubble was big enough to buy a real (if evil) company with real assets (Time/Warner) with the stock of their basically valueless company. for me they jumped the shark about the time they came out with their first PC client - which is long before most people knew they existed. Anyone else remember when they were Macintosh only?
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
The author spends much time building up an example of the broadcast TV and cable industry, and how the cable companies are forced to carry certain content to keep customers. But the problem is that this line of reasoning fails utterly when applied to the internet.
In the TV industry, you have a limited number of content providers and a limited number of content carriers. It takes a few barrels of money to become either a provider or carrier. Not so with the internet, at least not entirely. While you could make the case that there are a limited number of carriers, there are too many providers to count. Anyone with rudimentary knowledge of computers can set himself up to be a provider.
So AOL would be just another provider, only the content would be sent over the cable pipe only if you subscribe to it. Unless they propose coming up with their own protocol for this, I don't see how this would differ from just another site on the internet, except serviced exclusively through the cable connection. I don't see how this model is very different from having a site on the regular internet and requiring people to pay subscription fees to get into it. And the moment that they did come up with some "killer app", someone else somewhere will duplicate it on a site that is more widely available, and people will then say "why am I paying AOL through the nose for this when I can get is more cheaply on my own"? You can't do this in the traditional broadcast model because of the cost factor involved in setting up your own content. But on the internet, this cost prohibition is either not there are greatly reduced.
In other words, AOL is too late. The internet has been so widely established as not simply an American phenomenon, but a global one. I can't think of very many other technologies that a single protocol (i.e. TCP/IP) is so widely and tacitly accepted as the de facto standard. Not so with broadcast content (try playing a European PAL DVD in your American NTSC player and you'll see what I mean, and I'm not talking about region codes).
Yes, some people will subscribe to this because they don't know any better. But I don't see it becoming the resounded success that they want it to be without reverting to the days of BBSs and isolated networks. And I don't see anything warranting the somewhat alarmist cry of the person that posted the story.
Nothing more to see here. Move along.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
Gee, I guess those "Funding for this program has been provided by BigChemicalCo" announcements aren't commercials. My mistake! :^)
It would be interesting to measure their effectiveness against the blitz of ads on regular TV. Of course, the demographics are completely different.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
What really matters as these large companies battle over who "owns" the Internet is not the content and programming provided, nor the method of how this content is provided to customers. What really matters is what restrictions are placed on customers (our) ability to be our own content provider and publish information back to other users. Most of the cable providers place restrictions (either technically or by policy) on hosting any services. By doing this, the providers are trying to change the Internet from being a network (two way) into being a content delivery system (one way.) This is the real danger.
> I personally would rather give my money to a
> reliable hige company than one that could fold
> any minute.
A big reliable company that couldn't fold any minute? Such as Enron or Worldcom, perhaps?
When you rely on a small company and it folds you can find another just like it down the street. When you rely on a big company and it folds...
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I think that it hasn't arrived yet, that this will be 'something' else. Something that will superset everything else.
Ultimately I think it will be an AI Star Trek type thingy with voice commands, able to do almost anything. I say this because I can recall a old couple many many years ago who came into the computer retail store I worked in, who wanted to see the first mac with a built in microphone and built in speech capability. Telling them that it was not star trek yet was exactly like taking a lollipop from a child. They were heart broken.
Point being, there is a major pent up demand in the culture for that kind of tool. It has been sold in the culture through multple shows and movies for decades now. This is what computers are supposed to be.
The first company that can legitimately say say "This IS Star Trek" will make a mint. I think everything else is sort of grasping baby steps towards this sort of thing.
heck, If you have ever seen the film of the introduction of the very first Mac will note what a visceral reaction was achieved with such a jump in technology, even if alot still had to be fulfilled and developed over the coming year. Just the idea that it could be achieved ...
Heck If Steve Jobs comes out with something that is a legit star trek level type system in the next few years, he can blow peoples mind all over again. But I digress. (And I do not own a Mac)
Of course, this is insanely difficult. but ....
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
AOL retains it's customer base by convincing the customer that it IS the internet. The average AOL user hears internet and thinks AOL.
... esoteric. But then, so are the tastes of 99% of the people in the world, in one subject or another.
... that is the only thing the media whores running AOL-Time-Warner these days can see within their small minds.
Only to some degree. I know a number of people who use AOL, and most of the "internet" they spend their time on (the World Wide Web) isn't on AOL. Of course, their tastes are
AOL is suffering from the fact that the Time-Warner portion of the company has ousted most of the leadership of the AOL side of the company. In other words, the old Media Moghuls have taken over the AOL side of the company, and it shows in both their thinking and their behavior. It shouldn't be any surprise, in that light, that AOL is persuing the 'dream' of becoming a big cable company
It should also be no surprise that such a strategy will prove disasterous, should the internet survive. Unfortunately, the very same people are in Washington lobbying and purchasing legislation that will eliminate the internet as we know it, and replace it with something that represents the Home Shopping Network and Interactive TV more than it will the internet as we know it today. Should they succeed, this strategy will no longer be inane, it will be inspired. Inspired by the destruction of the last vestige of free thought and freedom of expresson in America, whose demise they will have orchestrated and profited from handsomely.
Gives new meaning to the song "Burn Hollywood Burn" doesn't it?
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
IIRC, they never were. I have an AOHell client disk for the Apple II at home...never used it because I didn't like the idea of being locked into using whatever crummy software they provided. (I used ProTERM 3.0 to dial into GEnie, the CS department's terminal server (for Internet access), and local BBSes instead.) I think they introduced DOS and/or Win16 clients around the same time they dropped Apple II support.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Seems to me that there should be some sort of "keep your fucking hands off" rule, nobody fucks with anything and everything is left just as it is! (though minus the pop-up ads would be nice)
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Bankroll the NYT and you'll get any news you desire.
Oh, you don't want to pay?
Therein lies the whole problem.
Internet users want shit for free, because they paid for their computer and their dialup, dammit! they expect to have all this free video and news and shit!
Hey Taco! Looks like you're using the "infinite monkeys and typewriters" scheme to generate Ask Slashdots again...
And fucked over again in its own right, ... O well, hooray for
and then
"This, too, shall pass"
Considered harmful.
I woudl have liked that song better without the vocals but true.
:-D
If they take the internet away, we'll just have to start our own.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
These socialist paradises are becoming very unfriendly towards immigrants. It's nearly impossible, for example, for a non-ethnic-German immigrant to get German citizenship within their lifetime. It's becoming increasingly difficult to even get into any EU countries at all.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Mozilla is my favorite AOL product. Sure, it's free software and has quite a few contributors, but the majority of the core programming team are AOL employees, so AOL is primarily to thank for its continued active development.
And whenever I'm in Windows I use Winamp, another fine AOL product.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Remember though, in the end it is about the consumer. If you don't ilke it, stick with it. There are still a (few) gopher sites around, even though I havn't seen one since 1995. There are a couple BBSs in my area, though I haven't called one since I got on the internet.
I used to be into irc, one guy at work found out, and decided to check it out. In half an hour he found 10 warze sites, and concluded that it was irc was about. I used it for hours at a time, over several years, and never once encountered warze (or porn, which is appearently the other big thing on irc). Porn is a major force in web-commernce according to slashdot posts, but I rarely encounter them.
If the consumer doesn't like it, they won't find it. If the consumer finds it useful they will. Now you might find that you are a minority consumer, but just because you don't want what everyone else does, doesn't mean that you can't get your fix.
I don't care if AOL wins, and 95% of the net population subscribes to their service, which can only be accessed with their client in windows. Knowing AOL/TW, I don't expect to have any interest in the content I cannot access. My TV is only used for nostalga trips with my Atari, I have no interest in any of the programs I could get. Maybe there is something of interest, but I haven't seen it. YMMV.
As long as the clueless Luser is still shelling out for M$ and getting an unsafe IIS by default I care what they spend their $$'s on. The idiots out there impact me just by being the natural self. As for the financial part I can't help but agree absolutely. My aunt and uncle actually PAY for AOL, and LIKE IT, no accounting for taste.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
After all people can type 100 words per minute, but how many people can speak that fast?
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Big media is global.
Neither Vivendi nor Rupert Murdoch's News Corp is American. Don't you think they are doing exactly the same calculating that ATT and AOL are doing? John Malone, the American cable magnate, has been trying real hard to crack the European cable market. EuroDisney. Do you feel safe from them where you live?
Europe will of course be safer than the developing world where the big guys are going in before there is a mature market to crack. Many countries might never get to experience a 'net with a frontier, it will be like the walled garden Compuserve of the mid/late 80's. Murdoch is especially agressive in this area, having a lock on global satellite distribution outside of the US. Most media markets are protected in some way from foreign ownership,, these protections are under attack, being on the WTO's agenda for the next round of negotiations. Brazil recently amended its constitution to allow for foreign ownership.
So, if you live outside of the US, you should watch what goes on here closely and make sure it doesn't happen where you live.
Most of the cable companies supported by AT&T Broadband doesn't let you run a server on *your* machine - you can't take that nice In reality, while the cable modem upstream bandwidth is limited, it's not THAT limited. Most of the equipment can limit you to 128kbps upstream, which is a surprisingly large amount of data transfer for any activities other than distributing lots of CDs or movies. You wouldn't want to run a high-volume commercial site on it, not only because it's too slow, but because the cable tv Service Level Agreements say Look, it's just television, if it goes down for a day or two in bad weather, go read a book or help your kids build snowmen and the cable modems get the same quality of repair service. 2.5Mbps upstream is more than a T1 - a surprising number of medium-sized business offices don't need that much for downstream (though it's always nice) for the number of people you're sharing your cable feed with. And most of the newer cable modem systems are running on Hybrid Fiber-Coax - if they run out of bandwidth, it's pretty easy to split the segment, but more importantly, the cost of Packet Shapers has been coming way down - they can stick a box in the upstream that starts throttling individual connections if the total gets too high.
The real reason they banned servers was that the beta-test cities had some equipment problems causing high packet loss (perceived as low throughput due to TCP retransmits) which led to all those bogus but effective Don't Be A Web Hog smear ads from competing telco DSL services - and the equipment they were using couldn't limit individual users below the raw transmit level of 768kbps, so they were worried that they might have worse public relations problems (i.e. even lower sales) if they started having neighborhoods with bad performance because of somebody's p0rn server. By the time Napster came along, they had performance under control, so they had official policies about "Napster is Bad Evil Bandwidth-Eating Copyright Theft" even though half the employees thought "well *duhh*, it's about *time* people had a compelling reason to get broadband besides gamez for their kids" :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I want to see more episodes of Burke's "Connections".
Hell yeah. I'd never even heard of Connections until I got cable and saw it on Discover Science. Awesome stuff, history filled to the brim with fascinating trivia. You'll never hear about this stuff in your history classes.
Burke was rumored to have done some speaking here in Portland recently, but I missed it. Want to see him speak, along with Spalding Gray.
Oppression here is the same as anywhere, the penalty just differs. For every thing you can't do or own legally, there is something here that is similar. For every illegal opinion, there is one here too. Hell, you saw what they did to the Branch Davidians in Waco, TX, right? Their beliefs and practices where supposed to be legal, and they probably were. They just weren't popular and some closet-communist (Janet Reno) decided to burn 'em out. I'm betting you'd at least get a trial in Germany for disbelieving in the holocaust.
They may have existed before then, but even I never noticed them until they took over applelink in.... what... maybe '88?
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan