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Cable Industry Taking Control of the Net
Tompaine.com has a piece warning of measures that cable internet providers are taking to control their users' experiences online. We've touched on this before, but this issue needs a lot of attention and it has gotten very little from the mainstream press.
I am sorry Dave, I can not allow you to visit this non-TimeWarnerAOL site... The Media was not endorsed by the RIAA or MPAA
Sigs? We don't need no stinking sigs!
But the big media companies offering Internet service; Comcast, ATT, AOL -- would like to change that, and already have in a few test locations.
Would you mind telling us where these "test locations" are? This is the same rhetoric we've seen over and over again. There's nothing new in this article and no supporting evidence for ANYTHING that's stated. What a waste.
Is your browser retarded?
If you want to have tiered pricing, you better damn well ensure I get what I pay for. I would give up an extra 10-20 a month for BETTER service, not the SAME service. (I have AT&T broadband right now, and it serves my needs, I game and play around on KaZaA alot, and FTP stuff around between friends). But if I get the same service I get now, thats a Damn Rip Off (tm).
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
I guess its time to switch to DSL, so you can wait for the telecom industry to screw you.
I'm starting to miss the small ISPs that couldn't screw you as bad because there were many more alternatives.
Oh well... long live monopolies!
People may just decide that an Internet Broadband Co-op is a good idea, form one, and snub their nose at the likes of ATT, Comcast, Rogers, Cox, and Mchsi. Policing users is not the job if the ISP, rather assisting law-enforcement once illegalities are done is. That is not a fine line but a really big one, and hard to miss.
It seems we have someone predicting the "Imminent Death of the 'Net" again. While this is concerning, unless we can have certificable proof (like the test locations for example), then we really ought to take these things with a bit of a grain of salt. Just IMNSHO.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
Hmm.
Actually, ISPs DO control the internet...
Without the core layer routers, root domain system, and communications backbone that the major corporations own and control the internet doesn't operate.
People often forget that the internet is more than just a bunch of computers connected together. It depends on hundreds of millions of dollars worth of equipment that SOMEBODY has to buy and maintain.
because the "Mainstream press is the cable companies
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
This article is long on rhetoric and short on evidence. I don't deny that its logic makes sense, but it hasn't provided any reason to make me believe it.
I'll express an unpopular opinion here: ultimately, bandwidth will have to be metered. Bandwidth is a commodity (I think it was the commoditization of bandwidth that is the part of the reason for the telecom collapse) like water or electricity: cheap, but not infinite. The problem, of course, is that if bandwidth is allowed to be monopolized like electricity and telephone service are, prices will be increased far above their levels in a competitive environment. I would like to think the FCC and other government agencies would follow such a policy, but I have no real confidence in it.
The classic net.geek blunder is at work here in this article, as it assumes that we're the majority, instead of the minority.
/. reader. AT&T uses port scanners to make sure you don't run services on their pipes. The neighborhood scheme is flawed, leading to saturated bandwidth, and frankly, it sucks for what I want. A side effect of this is that users like me are unhappy, but their continued efforts to work around restrictions placed on them by the ISP has made cablemodem suck for mom & pop web surfer, too.
Cablemodem has sucked for a while now if you're a user like the typical
There's a lot more mom & pops than there are net.geeks. Cable ISP's that survive on volume see more money in providing service to mom & pop websurfer, so they're taking steps to make the network suck more for people like me, and less for mom & pop.
Eventually, the very-lucrative-for-AT&T-Broadband mom & pop will be all that's left on their networks, and that's fine by me.
There's other providers waiting to pick up the slack that cable ISP's leave behind. I've already given my business to a DSL provider who lets me do whatever I want with my line, including hosting web/game/email/dns servers from it.
This looks like a win-win for everyone.
Cable ISP's get the market they want (e-mail & websurfers), I get the service I want from another provider (gaming, running http / ftp servers, etc.), the other providor carves a profitable niche serving me & those like me, and everyone's happy.
So what's the big deal?
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
As long as you are on the internet, and can connect to IPv4 or IPv6, you cannot be stopped. The technology inherently allows you to move around blockages or outage points.
Unless you have a tunnel established, I'd say blocking port n at your cable modem pretty well controls your access to services that run on port n, wouldn't you?
Sure, we could cram everything into port 80-- technologies like SOAP are built around that basic premise already. But that's not exactly the greatest idea ever.
This sort of thing is a pendulum. Consider pop-up ads. Earthlink is running television commercials advertising their pop-up ad blocking software. Somebody at Earthlink thinks they can get subscribers to sign up by offering a hassle-free Internet experience, and they're probably right. If the pendulum swings too far-- cable modem providers arbitrarily limiting service in ways that customers don't like-- then somebody will see a business opportunity to offer unmetered, unshaped service and the pendulum will start to swing the other way again.
I write in my journal
Yes, Free Market Competition would be a very nice thing to have. It would eliminate the problems this article describes very nicely.
The problem is there is little competition and soon there will be less. The vast majority of broadband suppliers have an effective monopoly in their area of service. And the consolidation is continuing.
Sure would be nice if we actually had a competitive free market rather than a few giant companies buying monopolies for themselves.
The real question is what the volume pricing should look like. A 5GB limit is too low--if they charge that, they will likely lose lots of customers. Something that would make more sense to me would be:
A classic conflict has arisen over streaming media, especially of radio. In a recent letter to globetechnology.com, Andrew Cole, manager of media relations for Bell Sympatico, defended the 5GB bit cap, saying that "In my experience, Internet radio stations usually transmit at approximately 20 Kbps. This equates to 1.2MB per minute, or 72MB per hour. At this rate, a HSE customer could enjoy 70 hours of Internet Radio per month and remain within the bandwidth usage plan."
20 Kbps * 60 s * 1 B/8b = 150 kB/min
that means 568 hours worth..
I assume he was talking about kilobits, because the next paragraph talks about most good net stations being 56k...either that or the people writing the article messed it up.
What they don't realize is that as soon as metered bandwidth becomes a reality, ad-blocking software will become a big market.
This is funny, because AOL/TW sell (and place) a LOT of ads.
I don't think *you* get it. They don't have to block you. When they give you a 5GB/month quota and charge $8/GB for anything over that, you have no choice. Unless you're made of money.
This has been talked about and talked about and talked about to death. The mainstream media will never cover this, because there's nothing for them to cover. Anyone who cares about this kind of stuff already knows about this. They keep up on the technology, and likely come by here every so often.
The sky isn't falling. This won't kill the Internet, it will just make it more responsible, for once. Bandwidth isn't an unlimited resource. DEAL WITH IT. If you don't like it, start your own ISP and try to give everyone 2Mbit unrestricted connections, reliably, for $40/month. You won't be able to do it. Get all the venture capital funding you ask for and you still won't be able to do it. Look what happened to Excite@Home. If stuff like this ever happens, it'll be a blessing to networks everywhere. Maybe people will actually take some responsibility and secure their machines when their bandwidth is all used up 'cause someone zombified their machines and used them in a DDoS attack, or the next Internet worm uses it all up. That would make the neighborhood a whole lot safer, let me tell you.
People claim that restricting bandwidth in this manner will kill off the Internet economy. Bah, I say. It will save the internet economy. It will make people realize that this stuff costs something. It will make them at least be aware of how they use it. If they want to use it alot, they're going to have to pay for the privilidge. If they don't want to use it alot, they're going to be able to pay less, to only use it when they need to.
I'm all for it. Of course this is all hot air until the cable companies really crack down on it, so I guess let the good times roll as long as they can. That will only make the hangover longer I suppose. I did fine at 56K, I can do it again. No big.
That's utter BS. Most of the cable news networks and the three major broadcast stations here in the US get their stories from the New York Times, or the major news wires (AP, Reuters, etc). Television is only a fraction of the news outlets out there. You have the internet, newspapers, magazines, journals, etc. To say that they are supressing this is utter conspiracy at best.
Secondly, they aren't taking control of the internet. There will always be several ways to get internet access. You have telephone lines, satellite connections, other companies that own the last mile fiber, and more. Ten years ago, it looked like the telephone companies would 'own' the internet. But looking back, it turned out to be nothing. The same thing holds true right now. Just because cable companies are doing a good job providing high speed access doesn't mean that it will stay that way ten years down the road.
I've got a Comcast (formerly @Home) cable modem, and I would happily pay more for DSL from somebody like speakeasy, but it's not available in my area.
The techs laughed at my circuit-- it was the dirtiest they had seen in some time, especially in a major city. Bridge taps, unterminated pairs (one nearly a mile long), some sort of coil, and so on. He said every problem on their list was present more than once, on top of the distance being 50% outside their max window for IDSL (which would have been a whopping 144kbps anyway).
Satellite is out because of the ridiculous ping. Okay for web access, crap for games.
Don't forget that there are plenty of people who still live inside a geographically-enforced cable internet monopoly.
If you'd (wait for it!...) read the article you would have seen the example given in Canada; Sympatico, run by Bell, has recently done this very thing. 5 GB cap. Go over the limit.. and they dock ya.
I personally know a few people who were incensed enough about this to flee to the only other broadband provider in Canada, Rogers... which also has a tiered plan in effect. The difference is that Rogers will pinch the connection after a certain data-rate has been sustained for an unspecified period of time (basically warez kiddies snarking something off LimeWire). But it's not capped. Thus, the lesser of two evils.
But yeah, it's real today.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
It's pretty evident that you don't have the slightest idea what "monopoly" means here. If there's a cable company, a DSL provider, a dial-up provider, a satellite provider, and a cellular dial-up provider, then there's not exactly a monopoly, is there?
I write in my journal
Exactamundo.
In the Texas Panhandle, it's flat. Really, really flat. It's so flat, that on a clear day, you can look off at the horizon and see all 360 degress of it... faded blue depending on the humidity, but there nonetheless.
Now, what do you need for a good wireless connection? A flat, unobstructed line-of-sight to an antenna or a repeater.
Heh... by sticking atennas and repeaters on top of granaries, water towers, and high buildings, wireless ISPs in Amarillo and the surrounds are getting *amazing* distances with their wireless shots. You can drive 30-40 miles away and still get a good clean connection via a pingle-can antenna. Thusly, Wireless is taking off in a big way here. A good number of the people I work with are already using wireless as their main form of bandwidth and out and out refuse to go back to cable. Most everyone else is actively considering switching. Those who are considering other forms of broadband bandwidth are going to DSL and not cable.
Cable companies and media conglomerates are screaming and making a big fucking deal out of a non-existant problem in the name of gelaning control. What it boils down to is that the technology is changing too rapidly for them to effectively impliment any kind of contols. Sure, they can nail some of the areas in the U.S. where it's impossible to get DSL or wireless, but they can't go everywhere. If my understanding is correct, DSL is getting cheaper and cheaper, and wireless is getting better and better. Cable is a flash in the pan. A bright flash, but a flash in the pan nonetheless.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
I don't mind paying for what I use. If I use a ton of bandwidth then I should have to pay for it; it's how most companies pay their upstream ISP. It's how I pay for phone or for power.
Having said that, if I'm paying my $5 per GB, I'd damn well be able to use that bandwidth for whatever I deem necessary. The part of the article that makes me nervous is the talk of redirecting requests and the like. Not good...
For starters, I think this guy needs a lesson in bits versus bytes in his net radio rant. Of course, that fact that nobody follows a 'b' = bits and 'B' = bytes convention doesn't help, either. 20kBps is 1.2MB per minute. And 20kBps net radio is damn good if you ask me.
I guess this guy's never priced a real connection to the internet. Bandwidth is just expensive. Now, I have no idea why it's that way - seems like it shouldn't be - but it is. Our business DSL line costs us $220/mo for 768kbps symetric. That fact that that same line costs me $70/mo at home is because my ISP knows that our business line is going to do more throughput that my home line. It's factored into the price that the expected behaviours are different.
Now, when people with consumer DSL/cable/etc. connections start behaving like business customers in their usage patterns, telcos start to put the brakes on and say "You need to be paying business-grade prices of you're doing business-grade traffic." What's so wrong about this that it gets every geek up in arms?
If you're going to be keeping the line at capacity >10% of the time, you deserve to pay for it. Any real connection you pay 95th percentile bandwidth charges (that means you pay for your actual metered usage, minus the top 5% of the measurements). And if you're pulling ISOs and MP3s and warez and porn over that, you're gonna get a bill that you may not like.
But...if I've got a 768kbps line that I use for web surfing and email and SSH sessions into work when something breaks, I don't really feel like paying the same amount as you. I say "Bring on the metered lines!" It won't raise my bill - I'm actually using the line the way the telco expects. I've got a line that's 12 times the speed of my old modem for about 4 times the cost. And I certainly do more than 4 times the transfers that I used to. But not 50 times or more.
So, to end my rant, I just wanna know why people think they shouldn't have to pay the actual costs of their transfers. Prices for high-speed connections via cable/DSL are SO low compared to what business-grade connections (T1, etc.) cost. Just be grateful you can afford 5GB/mo in the first place. Try pulling that over your modem.
I know this because I recently had to pry some straight answers out of Time-Warner/Roadrunner on behalf of my boss's boss's boss (He and I are both RR customers). It seems the Dean (yes, I work at an edu) wanted to work from home, including mounting the Windows shares on our NT domain. Time-Warner swore up and down that they did not have the netbios ports blocked until I identified myself as a customer and demanded to speak to security because I could prove that the Level I tech was lying to me. I had port-scanned my box at home and it showed 137, 138 and 139 in state 'filtered' (this is a Linux box without Samba installed, so blocking by RR is the ONLY way I could have gotten that result).
They finally told me that, yes, the netbios ports are blocked (which I consider to be a Good Thing (TM)) and will STAY that way, and that the only way the Dean could get them unblocked is to buy a commercial account and a static IP (for which RR charges $130.00/month) (which the Dean considers a Really Bad Thing(TM)).
I told them I would keep that in mind the next time a faculty member asked for my recommendation of an ISP and whether they should get cable internet or DSL.
utter rubbish
eat away at your limit? Just think of how much you would hate spam then...
The main issue is the ability of the end user to get access to the backbones of the Net.
When the ability to hook up is a monopoly (like cable, where no 3rd party company is permitted to provide access over the cable company's coax), there is no competition incentive. All these "problematic" uses for the Net get banned, and there's no where else to go.
The situation is not much better with DSL, since the 3rd party providers are at the mercy of the Bells, and are pretty limited to what they can provide because of it.
The air, however, isn't owned by anyone (regulated, yes, but not property). If technology can allow for fast, reliable, two-way Net access through airspace, this removes the telco & cable companies' ability to ignore these undesirable Net services. If they start to lose too many subscribers to over-the-air providers, they will have to back off on the restrictions.
Note that the tone of the article was not an issue of cost: it was an issue of what you are *allowed* to do on the Net *regardless* of cost. If the telcos and cable providers are allowed to continue, they simply will stop permitting P2P usage on their lines, with no option to turn it on (they would rather kill high-bandwidth usage than bother to administer its usage).
End result: if we have other high-speed options, Net access will cost more (as it likely should), but at least we will still have the freedom to do as we wish. But if we do not get other options (through restrictive regulations, likely at the request of the copyright industries), then the article is bang-on.
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
I don't think there's as much to worry about as this article indicates. In a free market, tiered plans that are overpriced and overly restricted will ultimately fail to competition. People in small markets might be hurt for a little while until competition moves in, but it is only a matter of time.
There are actually two providers here in Columbus now that have tiered plans but they're both based on throughput, not total monthly bandwidth used. In fact, it's actually pretty sweet. One of the companies offers 150kbs down and 75kbs up for $4.95 per month. Their "power user" package is 1.5mbit down and 300k up for $15.95. One of my friends is going to try it out for a month or two and compare it to roadrunner. I guarantee if it's as good as it sounds, half my office will be switching within a month.
It's actually tempting to grab the lower tiered service and adjust to the slower speed just for the price savings. $4.95 is stupid cheap for broadband internet acess.
No, the word is oligopoly.
Or do you maintain that it's a coincidence that cable, dsl, and satellite access each cost $44.95/month here?
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On one hand, I can understand that the up-front capital expenditure for all the cable infrastructure has yet to pay for itself, and that while bandwidth is currently a somewhat scarce resource, it does need to be divvied up more fairly.
But a real menace lurks within all this: the prospect of cable companies charging different fees according to types and providers of content.
What this could mean is that there could be a list of news sites, music stations etc which can be accessed freely, even gigs per month. But accessing any site which isn't in the cable companies' "good books" (read: payola), runs up the traffic charges.
This to me is the bigger threat.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
I've seen satelite; it's expensive and rare, and the latencies are outrageous. Most of the time, only downstream is broadband, and upstream is over a modem. Most importantly, however, is that it doesn't scale. Modem doesn't count, and neither does cellular (except perhaps for some mythical 3G solution I haven't heard anything about yet in Japan or Korea, let alone in this country). We're talking about broadband - one of the many ways you've confused the issue.
The TA96 mandated that phone companies could drop a bunch of regulations, but had to share hardware with competitors. The result was a spate of competition in both local, long-distance, and internet services firms, and a dramatic price drop. The RBOCs saw their end and successfully bribed the government to change course. Cable had never really been deregulated in that sense, and have successfully kept it at bay; their approach is more akin to blackmail.
For an agency that found its niche after the Bell breakup, the FCC has authorized some inexplicably massive telecom mergers lately. The notoriously corrupt Michael Powell made his position eminently clear on competition at the outset, with zero enforcement against the RBOCs' many egregious behaviors toward their "client-competitors." Then, he decreed that Cable providers wouldn't need to share their hardware (as phone companies were "theoretically" required to do by law), and he's since gone on record as being opposed to the CLECs as well... in short - he's sold out any notion of competition, and his figleaf is basically your sham argument, that because we have a choice between Time Warner and Verizon, there's no monopoly.
Which is completely absurd.
It doesn't take a genius to fix prices and rig restrictions in a market with two suppliers in any given region, and less than a dozen nationwide. Prices are already on the steady rise, but TomPaine hits it on the head: the money is unimportant to them compared to control - and they may get it, since this hijacking of the internet is in the interests of the same companies that control the major media outlets, including almost all of the TV news... Putting the internet, ironically, at the center of one of the largest media conspiracies of our time.
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As is the case in these sorts of situations, ISPs are in the difficult position of either leaving it largely alone and arguing that content on USENET is decentralized and nearly impossible to monitor and censor; or attempting to do so and thus implicitly concede their own liability for that content and their responsibility for failing to censor it when it's illegal.
Most ISPs do one of three things with USENET: they either carry all groups and don't censor (although I believe--but could be wrong--that most everyone uses filters to fight spam); or they don't carry the binary groups (which they are probably doing mostly to radically reduce bandwidth and disk usage, but it also gets rid of the illegal porn, too); or they carry the binary groups but monitor group names for egregiously illegal content. For example, they don't carry "alt.binaries.pictures.erotics.pre-teen" or "alt.binaries.warez".
One reason that you may still see these sorts of groups even if your ISP is attempting to block illegal content is because people are creating new groups to get around the block.
And while it may sound simple to monitor for the child porn that you are objecting to, in reality it's nearly impossible. They can block groups that are named obviously enough. But that doesn't stop anyone from posting child porn on other groups. An ISP that's taken responsibility for censoring child porn is arguably just as responsible for it when it appears in "alt.binaries.erotica" as when it appears in an obvious child porn group. And there's no way that anyone could actually monitor the content directly, since in the erotica groups alone there are probably more than 100,000 individual images posted every day.
Putting aside the issue of dedicating resources to all the binary traffic, were the decision ever to be mine, I'd chose to leave it alone and argue that I'm no more responsible for the content on my news server than I am the content on my http caching server. (That's a precarious argument, but only because technologically ignorant courts have made unreasonable rulings involving this sort of thing. These issues are still being fought over, obviously in the case of P2P.)
Finally, I previously used Time Warner's Road Runner cable ISP, and they seemed to be pretty "hands-off", although (since I do look at the a.b.p.e.* groups every now and then) I think I noticed that flagrantly child-porn groups would eventually disappear. The teen groups they seemed to keep. Now I use SBC DSL, since I got annoyed with TW, and they block quite a few groups. I'm actually more weirded out by the child molestation and adult-child incest stories in the alt.sex.stories groups than I am upset by the photo groups. I guess because I think that there's not really that much real child-porn out there (children and pre-teens), but there sure are a lot of people posting and reading stories about daddy having sex with his daughter. Or nice Mr. Smith seducing the neighborhood children. Maybe it's an outlet. But I've scanned over some of these stories (out of the same sort of curiosity one looks at a traffic accident or murder scene) and I've thought "this guy has actually done this. I'm sure of it by how he is describing his 'strategies'". It really, really disturbed me. But then, my ex-wife is an incest survivor, and my ex-father-in-law (the abuser) was the creepiest most evil person I've ever met. I don't like these people. Many or most are not just turned on by children the way the rest of us are turned on by adults--no, a lot of them are honest-to-God predators who primarily enjoy "catching" their pitifully weak "prey". It is absolutely horrifying. But sorry about that rant.
(The coolest thing about news via cable modem was since their news server was local, and in those days there wasn't as much neighorhood traffic, and there weren't caps, the DL speeds from the server to my computer were enormous.)
DISCLAIMER: I am not, nor have I ever been, a news admin. I may be mistaken about a few things in this post. This being Slashdot, I don't have to request that more knowledgable people correct my errors. They will. But please do.
Since then, there's been some loose talk about the "tragedy of the commons" from people who know a little economics but not much network design. These people usually seem to have a bias in favor of markets as a solution to a wide range of problems. Their arguments are not compelling.
Sometimes a market isn't the solution. The feedback loops implicit in a pricing model are usually far too slow to regulate a datagram network without introducing instability. Realize that markets are control systems, and are subject to the stability problems of control systems. Most economists don't get this. Classical economics assumes that if there's an equilibrium point, the system will stabilize at or near it. That's not true; all you're really guaranteed is that if it oscillates, the oscillations will pass through the equilibrium point now and then.
In addition, a pricing system itself imposes costs. In telephony, billing now costs more than transmission. Billing, setup, and support typically cost an ISP more than their backbone bandwidth. There's so much underutilized fibre installed now that backbone bandwidth just isn't a problem.
Most of this talk is an attempt to justify a price increase by an incumbent monopoly.