Slashdot Mirror
ISPs Race to Create Two-Tiered Internet
An anonymous reader writes "The ISP race toward a two-tiered Internet is picking up speed. This
article from Michael Geist
points to a wide range of examples involving packet preferencing,
content blocking, traffic shaping, and public musings about premium
charges for faster content downloads. ISPs are now reducing
access to peer-to-peer applications, blocking Skype, and, scariest of
all, lobbying Congress to let them do it."
De. Regulate.
... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press ...
Real deregulation has nothing to do with Congress making laws, changing laws or getting rid of a few old regulations that actually don't affect communications. True deregulation means getting rid of ALL laws that affect communication, including ones that were set up over a hundred years ago that we still have to follow.
In my opinion, the interstate commerce "clause" in the Constitution was not intended to control communications, set up an FCC, or regulate costs or services. It was intended to prevent taxation and tariffs (exactly the problem we have today!) I'll grudgingly accept the argument for the regulation up to maybe 1995, but after that, we saw an unregulated quantity of computers magically connect without major subsidies (I'll grant you that ARPA was originally tax paid, but how big did it get during the government years?). The fact that so many people got online without excessive regulations aimed at driving the Internet leads me to believe that the best form of our beloved Internet IS anarchy (not chaos).
Congress shall make no law
My speech is free to go where I sent it. For Congress to say that 2 or 5 or 10 big companies know better than thousands of little ones is typical nannyism. Who knows best? The People. We choose ISps that meet our needs. The system works. Some ISPs go under. Some combine into one ISP. Some fall apart into seperate smaller ISPs. This is how the free market works. We're going to see more free WiFi ISPs (my small town has 3!). We're going to see faster cell phone bandwidth (my EDGE network gets 150kbps downloads). We're going to see less reliance on the phone companies and the cable companies. This isn't happening because of regulation.
As to the two-tiered Internet, I'm all in support of the system if it isn't regulated. Without regulations, the ISPs must compete with one another. This means that the two-tier system could actually be of benefit to the end users. I have customers with offices all over the country who have to maintain expensive T1 lines. With a two-tier system that gives customers on the same network preferential treatment, I think we'll see lowered costs for corporate WANs, meaning lower prices for consumers of those corporations' products. Every dollar saved is some money passed on to the consumer.
Yet these two tiered systems can, overnight, become a mess if Congress decides to set rules and restrictions and requirements. Instead of promoting more bandwidth between same-network customers, regulations will push less bandwidth for different-network customers. If the little guy is pushed out (as regulations tend to do), the big guys won't have any reason to stay competitive. It isn't AOL versus MSN versus Comcast versus SBC that lowers prices and raises bandwidth. It is the thousands of smaller ISPs that are like mosquitos, constantly biting the big elephants and causing them to make changes to their service. For years I used Speakeasy and converted dozens of my customers. I still prefer Speakeasy, but they've been cut off in my market -- by SBC and Comcast that lobbied my local government and state government. REGULATION killed off Speakeasy in my area -- deregulation gave me years of amazing performance and price.
Don't believe the hype -- anarchy in communications has led us to a smaller world and a brighter future. Regulations have led us to 90 years of excise taxes on our phone bills that won't go away, even if the reason for the taxes is antiquated or ancient. Yes, we're still paying taxes on our phone bill that were set up in 1898 and for World War I costs. And you continue to support those leeches by voting for them?
If there was ever a time for slashdots to be active politically it is now, this is a wake up call that the Internet as we know it is in jeopardy. What this new ISP movement really is all about is to remold the Internet into what Gore invisioned originally, that is a wholly owned and controlled network primary based on cable technology.
Favoring content delivery over customer participation, the original concept for the "information super highway" was basically a one way street from the providers to the customers with the consumers having very little control. The Internet is not what he and the corps envisioned and they are pissed that they can't generate decent income streams from it (at least the majority of corps the innovators like google are able to but being an innovator is to hard for most corps).
As for liability the isps had better think about this real hard before they leap into content control, I'm sure the lawyers are licking their chops as the possibility for massive waves of lawsuits dance in their heads. From the article
"The network neutrality principle has served ISPs, Internet companies, and Internet users well. It has enabled ISPs to plausibly argue that they function much like common carriers and that they should therefore be exempt from liability for the content that passes through their systems. "
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
If your ISP does this, find a better ISP, cancel your subscription with the former.
When ISPs get enough of it, they'll come around
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
It seems that they copy everything else the US does, usually with prettier language to make the shafting we are about to recieve that much more acceptable...
regards, the_leander
The ISPs are going to submit it to Congress as the "Keep the Children Safe from Porn and Stop Content Theives."
that other customers, like myself, will opt to move over to ISPs who refuse to act in such an evil manner. Sure, it will make them money putting a pricing system like that in place, but if its at the cost of all your customers, then they will be likely to shift backwards. All it takes is a few ISPs who want to keep their customers happy to kill an idea like this.
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
Film at 11.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Can't see the article, though from the summary, I have this to say:
If the ISPs think they can just limit our usage however they want, they're sorely mistaken. People will continually bitch, piss, and moan over it. And if that doesn't do anything, they'll always have a fallback: circumvent their evil systems.
"It is the stillest words which bring the storm. Thoughts that come with doves' footsteps guide the world."
seems like an american idea ... so before you are all gone could we europeans have slashdot ?
haha our data traffic doesn't get blocked they are just watching it...
*an infinite number of monkeys wrote this sig
...something's blocking access to the story. (Millions of other slashdotters most likely.)
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
Seems like network neutrality is simply going a different direction in favor of greedy money grubbers. Although I remember suggesting this idea to a comcast executive a while back of increasing the speed of transfer inside the comcast network.
if they're not going to follow protocol, why let them on the net?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
So, with filtering of unwanted content, will this fabled second tier be more able to withstand a landslide of slashdotter HTTP requests?
http://www.networkmirror.com/AQGdtdGeemUeo3VD/www. michaelgeist.ca/index.php%3Foption%3Dcom_content%2 6task%3Dview%26id%3D1040.html
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
This idea of having two tiers for the information superhighway makes about as much sense as having two tiers of regular highways. Could you imagine what would happen if we had two "tiers" of highways, one for everyone to use, and another where you had to pay money in exchange for limited access and faster travel? I mean, come on. This whole argument that faster, more efficient systems will get built years earlier than if they were funded solely through tax dollars is just a load of BS. Everyone knows that "highways want to be free".
ISPs may well want to sell crippled service, but there's no reason for non-idiots to buy same. They will soon discover that their investments have been a complete waste.
sulli
RTFJ.
At least change the title when posting something from digg. We gotta keep up our Digg vs. Dot score.
"In the game of life, someone always has to lose. To me, if life were fair, that someone would always be Oklahoma." -DKR
How do the ISP's block or attenuate traffic speeds for certain services? Do they actually look at the contents of packets or is it simply by port? If by port, can't many applications like p2p's be set to use non-standard ports? For a few years now on Time Warner Cable/Road Runner, I've noticed that sometimes default settings for P2P's yield very slow results and sometimes no connection to the tracker/server and connections to very few peers. I've simply changed those port settings. I guess some applications can't be changed either because of lack of customization in the program or a required standard port.
If customers don't opt for the "new and improved" service, ISPs will drop it fatster than a hot potato.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I guess Micheal Geist didn't pay his protection fees to Comcast/SBC?
Yay! They're trying to gain more of our business by limiting what we can do no the intenet and making things suck.
As a "consumer" that exactly what I look for. I wouldn't want the greedy telcos to have to actually price stuff based on a competitive market.
I look forward to a few years from now when Japan and other countries in Asia will have cheap, and abundant bandwith (at least 100Mb/s, probably wireless to boot) and I'll still have a 1.5Mb/s DSL line and be paying MORE for it. Yeah, that'll be great.
If the telco's succeed in this we (US internet users) will be relegated to a second class status on the net.
And that doesn't even take into account the chokehold they'll have on innovation in the IT sector. Then we'll get passed there too.
Don't get me wrong its not a US and them internet, the net is a global endeavor. It just that in the future being from the US I'd like to participate in it and not get blown past because increasing our bandwidth has take a back seat to Telco profits.
"Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at www.michaelgeist.ca."
See, they're blocking me already!!!!
-Nick
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
The sad truth about something like this is that is will go larely unnoticed by the tech-saavy-less public. It will be advertised as a "more reliable, more secure, more parental-control friendly" internet connection, and will succeed. Most people only want the internet for email and web surfing and so if that is still possible, people will go for it.
Tunnel exactly everything through HTTP. What will the ISP's then regulate, control or block?
E-gads it's really simple. As long as they provide a medium we can use it. Blockade, veto and blacklist their tactics by subterfuge, really.
Unfortunately, most people have either one or two choices for broadband internet service - the cable company and if thy're lucky also the phone company. It's hard to vote with your wallet when there's only one candidate running for office.
Just in a way. I'm all for freedom of speech.
I think this plan will backfire on ISP's. They presently do not filter content, so they are held excempt from liability of the content. Plenty of court cases have backed that.
However if they are filtering content, controlling what an end user can and cannot access, then won't the courts hold them accountable for this behaviour?
This will be a splippery slope, one where a few ISPs will get burned from it.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Of course access to your mailbox is faster if its your ISP. But if MSN starts slowing down Gmail, Google limits it Wireless (and more to come) *SP routes to Hotmail customers will ask, "do you limit my bandwith".
Customers rule to a creatin level and hey.....
We speak about America.
They researched the internet but it is not a reason to think some stupid bill will change the world. Just go to an canadian ISP (or server farm) than. Or Mexico. There are countrys with no cable internet at all.
Not to be cynical - but we're essentially screwed here.
Nobody else will give a damn. AOL are the most popular ISP in the world, and we all know they suck - doesn't matter. Vote with your wallet, fine. Nobody else will. They'll believe the hype - the megacorps will win, they will be convinced that this means they get a safer, faster internet. They'll be pleased.
Even then, it won't matter - your escape options will vanish, because every major ISP will do exactly the same thing.
We're losing the internet to the Bad Guys, the battle is half over already, and on balance, they're winning it. I have no idea what the solution is - we're under attack from the politicians on both national and international levels, the corporations on a global scale... I don't see us winning this fight. Best we can hope for is a draw.
fortune -o
Sounds to me like they want our virtual lives to reflect our real lives: rich vs. poor.
And who said we have a classless system?
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Just like any other great thing that comes along in history, bureaucracy is getting its hands on it and making it a mess.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
I don't understand how they can block Skype.
Imagine if AOL decided to block all porn. People would be outraged. The ACLU would sue.
I wonder if more than 2 ISP's blocked the same website, if the people could sue claiming the ISP's are violating anti-trust by working together to kill a third party?
Whats next? slashdot?
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
If someone sells me access to "the Internet" and blocks ports defined in RFCs then it isn't "the Internet" it is something else.
Back when AOL and Compuserve were BBSs (networks unto themselves with minimal/no connection to other services) their customers demanded access to Internet E-mail and got it; eventually bundled in as opposed to for extra charge.
The ISPs will have to realize that there are ways to circumvent their blockages and all it takes is one person to come up with it and the whole world knows.
How about "port knocking" as a data transport? I hesitate to list some of the other methods our group of gurus has discussed over the past few years, but you can be assured that there are lots, and the black hats have been using them for some time now.
How about someone providing a service that tunnels other traffic via an unblocked port? Unencrypted there would be not much extra overhead - encrypted it would be proof against almost any blocking since the tunnel service provider can use any port they want and the ISP can't block them all or what's the use of calling it a network. Port 80 sounds like a good choice.
And if the ISP blocks the service's address block, how about something that does a shared-bandwidth service such as bittorrent does now?
Pretty soon the ISPs will get it through their thick skulls that blocking ports isn't the way - providing lower latency for similar service (to that provided by someone farther away by net) or making partnerships (franchises, etc.) with the data/service/application providers is really the only way to differentiate.
Using the routers is easy - but it will not prevail.
Been there, done that, paid for the T-shirt
and didn't get it
The Search for Net Neutrality
Appeared in the Toronto Star on December 19, 2005 as Dangers in ISPs' Bid For New Tolls
The Search, a popular new book by John Battelle about Google and the search engine industry, provides a revealing look at how in its early years Google's founders were unsure of how to channel their enviable position as intermediaries between Internet users and the search for Internet content into a viable business model. The answer ultimately emerged as advertisers' willingness to pay for visibility in search results became the basis for the multi-billion dollar paid search market.
Analysis of the Internet service provider business suggests that it has engaged in a similar decade-long search. Although providing Internet connectivity is certainly a profitable enterprise, ISPs have understandably sought to identify how they can leverage their role as intermediaries to generate additional revenues.
In the 1990s, many ISPs focused on providing both connectivity and content. Large ISPs such as America Online developed a wide range of exclusive content, though they ultimately failed to match the breadth of what developed freely online.
Meanwhile, companies such as BCE pursued convergence strategies, buying up television networks (CTV) and publishers (the Globe and Mail) with the view of combining connectivity and content. More recently, the industry has relied on bundling, de-emphasizing the content and connectivity combination for the opportunity to cross-sell Internet services with cable or satellite television as well as with conventional phone and wireless services.
While some consumers resent the bundling approach, there is the far more troubling strategy unfolding that involves the creation of a two-tiered Internet. This strategy, threatens to upend the longstanding principle of network neutrality under which ISPs treat all data equally, would enable ISPs to prioritize their own network traffic over that of their competitors.
The network neutrality principle has served ISPs, Internet companies, and Internet users well. It has enabled ISPs to plausibly argue that they function much like common carriers and that they should therefore be exempt from liability for the content that passes through their systems.
Websites, e-commerce companies, and other innovators have also relied on network neutrality, secure in the knowledge that the network treats all companies, whether big or small, equally. That approach enables those with the best products and services, not the deepest pockets, to emerge as the market winners.
Internet users have similarly benefited from the network neutrality principle. They enjoy access to greater choice in goods, services, and content regardless of which ISP they use. While ISPs may compete based on price, service, or speed, they have not significantly differentiated their services based on availability of Internet content or applications, which remains the same for all.
In short, network neutrality has enabled ISPs to invest heavily in new infrastructure, fostered greater competition and innovation, and provided all Canadians with equal access to a dizzying array of content.
Notwithstanding its benefits, in recent months ISPs have begun to chip away at the principle.
Internet telephony (often referred to as Voice-over-IP or VoIP) provides a classic illustration of this trend. As each major ISP races to offer their own Internet telephony services, some have begun to use their network position to unfairly disadvantage the competition.
For example, Canadian cable provider Shaw now offers a premium VoIP service that promises to prioritize Internet telephony traffic for a monthly fee. The potential implications of such a service are obvious - the use of competing services will require a supplemental fee, while Shaw will be free to waive the charge for its own service.
Other ISPs have gone even further. Quebec-based Videotron has expressed great hostility toward third party Internet
http://www.michaelgeist.ca.nyud.net:8090/index.php ?option=com_content&task=view&id=1040
/. editors ALWAYS DO THIS?)
(why, oh why, don't
You're missing the piece about barriers to entry.
Where the entry cost is low, competition works well (joe's computer shop, asmet's sweatshirt shop, even beverages). Where barriers to entry are very high (telecom, drugs, automobiles) regulation is needed to prevent monopoly powers.
Although I live in Canada, where broadband coverage is pretty high and I get a 7mb/s connection for about CAD$56 per month, I would be suprememly P.O'd if my ISP suddenly decided that they liked MSN.ca but not Yahoo.ca, and I got crippled connectivity to a second class site. I would think that even here in the land of complacency consumers would be outraged with this stupidity to the point of saying something out loud or possibly writing a letter. I hope that American consumers stand up for themselves and squash this trend ASAP, because if the U.S.A. approves it, every country in the world is going to follow suit. Besides,you would think that the ISP's would be more concerned with increasing broadband penetration, rather than devising new ways to cripple customers' connections.
NeverEndingBillboard.com
It's a free market right? If providers start limiting things, consumers will be heard as they scramble for a provider that has the features that they want. If anything, the lobbying should be from the consumers in the form of a desire to have full disclosure of what services are being limited by the provider. It's hard to do a feature comparison between vendors if they're not up front about their practices and are allowed to change them on the fly.
If I sign up for a service because it advertises that it allows anything I want to do, and the next day I find them blocking or choking services that I use, I'm going to be pissed -- and not want to be tied to a service contract.
That's really the only danger I see.
This is why i can't wait for internet over power lines because, if it works, it'll be faster, and probably unencombered cuz the utilities are less regulated than the telcos, and will be so new to the game they'll be more concerned with making their network function than in filtering it
It is interesting to note that this is the top ad that appears on the comments page:
T1 Lines as Low as $240 for 1st 3 Months
Get a Covad T1 line for as low as $240 per month for the first 3 months.
Free installation. Keep your business a step ahead.
Check availability now. (for it may be regulated later)
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I think that it is time to start returning the favour to the ISPs that engage in these unsavoury practices.
I would propose making normally free web services (services similar to Slashdot, Reddit, Digg, etc) unavailable to customers who connect to the Internet through these ISPs (SBC / Comcast, etc), or available only as a payed-for subscription service.
This may cause customers who value these services to switch to more reasonable internet providers, thus ensuring a steady supply of business for them.
Given the size of the organisations who intend to balkanise the Internet, fighting them head on would be difficult. Perhaps the best way to handle in this situation is to ensure that our side has a say in how this is done.
- Brittix
Although it seems difficult for the slashdot editors to know the content of their site by reading it, reading their email, or searching it, if there were a way for us paying subscribers to make suggestions, at least I would appreciate it. Maybe others as well.
This is a borderline dupe or trupe, or maybe a logical continuation of a topic.
Other media that I have read, watched, or listened to call these things a "series", and they preface the stories as such. Is it our job to make almost 100% of the content, suggest the stories, and correct them too with our comments?
I knew this was going to going happen eventually. The internet will be split into three tiers eventually:
* Standard/Free Class: Which is what most people, only with P2P port blocked. Think CB/Ham Radio in features
* Premium Class: Everything will be wide open. Almost every service under the sun will be open to you, including VOIP and special content wrapped into a nice GUI ala AOL. Think G3 Cell Phone in features
* Business Class: Premium Class with larger pipes and you don't have to use a GUI system, but the GUI system will be strongly encouraged. Think Satellite phones in features
A lot of people will move to the Premium Class because of the speed while a hard core group will make lean protocols that will run well on the 'Standard Class' pipes. This in the long run this will be a good thing because it will force someone to come up with a new 'killer app' which will either use the basic internet much better or create a whole new system outside the current internet.
Personally I see either a mesh network or a new cell phone base network as the next big thing in data communications. Completely bypass the current land line networks that we have now.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Does anyone else wonder why the timing of this is coinciding the with .NET initiatives and other "subscription-based" solutions?? Once non-techs get "convinced" that "wow, isn't it great to have MS Office running on a server somewhere", the ISPs will effectively control the distribution method of this type of software, and will be able to "extort" (for lack of a better term) end-users with preferential packet-priorities and the such.
These multinationals are constantly looking for ways to suck more dollars from us, and in most cases our "best-government-money-can-buy" leaders just follow along.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
I never used AOL so can't judge how bad it really seems pretty clear that the majority of customers do not want them.
Now they want to lobby congress to make the AOL model the only way (No can't RTFA the server is gone)?
Oh well if congres is corrupt enough and the american voter stupid enough (and later the EU parlement and european voter (just as corrupt and stupid just a bit behind the times) then this could happen. For now the movement seems actually to be in the opposite direction (at least in europe) with more and more ISP's offering bare bones service. Just the internet and no portals and content crap. Funny thing? Seems you can make profit just selling only access.
The struggle lies in ISP's trying to sell content. Usually because it is A crap B expensive C hidden on sites that are a pain to navigate and finally D totally out of touch with customers tastes. So what is your an ISP offering the latest news. Who cares? I can get that from a hundred sites. Faster and without the ads. Oh well, big companies trying to keep alive a dying business model. It must be contagious
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Stop using commercial ISP's and switch to a public WiFi mesh infrastracture. We don't have to buy their shitty services. We're very capable of running our own network. Invest that money up front in buying the hardware needed to join your local mesh network and avoid paying ISP fees and playing by their stupid rules.
Of course then you have the problem that the bastards are trying to outlaw that too.. time to fight the man! I'm going to firebomb the fuckers if they try to mess with my Internet access. Show them the wrath of geeks.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Man, I don't usually chime in to get the moderators attention, but this is possibly the most salient point made. There really is very little choice here. It's like telling somebody that if they don't like their cable TV service, choose a different cable provider. Oos - there are no others, unless you're willing to move to a different house that's served by a different company. In an era of consolidation by companies with large, varied interests, the "choice" is quickly leaving the table as a possibility. It's going to become opt in or opt out. And opting out is just cutting off your nose if you have any need for those services. The internet has become almost as necessary as a phone to most people, and for good reason.
In a way, I hope it does go to hell in a handbasket. Then maybe something will happen.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
t's a free market right? If providers start limiting things, consumers will be heard as they scramble for a provider that has the features that they want.
:P
Exactly! I agree totally, I mean you wouldn't keep using an OS if it suddenly was made to watch everything you do, block content, and work only with things the company that owns it wants it to work with would you?
I don't see how this is any different from that, well, they definitly shouldn't block slashdot.
#!/bin/bash
login root
chmod 775 universe://
You - are - deluded.
Regulation is precisely what keeps these companies from doing what they are suggesting. That is, they are operating as "common carriers," meaning they have to play well with others. They are trying to become proprietary carriers. Deregulation is what gave us, basically, two or three options. However, it is also what allowed us to give those two or three options the screws. So, we went from Bell to baby-bells in one round and in the second round, instead of going from a handful of baby bells to 400 micro-bells, we went to, basically, Bell and an evil twin (ATT & Verizon). So, that sucked, but at least they had to sell their lines to thousands of leeches like Earthlink and even garage-shops that were reselling service, so when they got difficult we could just say "screw you, I'm removing 60% of the profit from this relationship." You still had to do business with them at some point because they owned the copper/fiber. But, the REGULATIONS forced them to give up their profits when they pissed you off and chose to send your checks to someone else. Your service still sucked and came from the same company, but at least you could pretend and keep a few pennies out of their pockets.
They are trying to regulate themselves out of that little problem. Complete de-regulation, instead of explicitly permitting them to make life difficult for you would simply make it unnecessary to ask permission before screwing you blue. I choose having regulation on my side, rather than just letting an already conglomerated market run around willy nilly where I can "vote with my dollars" between one company and nothing. Yeah, rots a ruck.
Hey Mr. ISP - no problem, you want to start regulating which sites we get good service at, and which sites we get bad service at? No problem, i'll certainly be happy to pay more for a faster service -- but make no mistake, once you start to regulate you jeapordize that all-so-important "Hey we're only a venue" ruling ..
.. give P2P applications more traffic, and then watch who the RIAA+MPAA turns on!!!!! Oh, how i'd love to see the Smackdown between the RIAA+MPAA vs. The Bells -- bring it on!
Go head
btw> I suggested to our Colo provider a few months ago that they introduce a new two tier, high speed, reduced latency service for AJAX applications (which are highly sensitive to latency)
Yep. Its a free market.
What would happen if the ISP silently blocked P2P, server, VoIP, and gaming ports of their entire user base?
A few people would cancel their accounts. No more than 10%. Really no one else would know that something is up. Its a free market, and people are voting with their money. But they don't even know they're voting and dutifully write their checks each month. More importantly, ISPs see this as compliance. Which opens the way for more restrictive rules..
Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if the US made like the Aussies and had draconian bandwidth restrictions. With..I dunno..say $300 per gigabyte over 2GB down per month? It'd sure make them a lot of money in saved bandwidth..think of how many more subscribers they could jam into the saved bandwidth..after all, its not about the customers or providing a good service. Its about extorting money out of people, through laws, regulations, shady service, passing the buck, whatever it takes.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Just wait until they block SSH on port 22 and make you pay a premium for being able to securely access your servers from home..
-Myke
Why don't the greedy b*st*rds get that they will only create animosity over stuff like this?
HEY! YOU! ISP!
The RIAA and MPAA have already proved that this is a fatally flawed business model. Wake up!
Oh, and you *will* *not* tell me what bits I can put on that wire!
RHCE; are you certified? Karma: ambiguous.
This is what happens when all you care about is the cheapest price. Go to smaller independants and this kind of thing wouldn't be happening. More often than not the service is better from independant ISPs as well as they don't practice this kind of B.S. For that matter, you'd be surprised, prices may very well be the same or even lower. But really, if you're ISP is blocking something you need/want, is a mear $3 a month more really that much more to pay?
America is getting what it deserves in so many ways right now it's not even funny. When you reward behavior like this, you get MORE behavior like this. We are responsible for it because we allow it to happen.
My suggestion would be....get away from the telco ISP and be happy with real quality of service.
Parent may be a troll, but I was laughing five minutes on his post...
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Encrypt!!!
If you encrypt all your traffic, they cant shape or block it. I guess every app will have to move to encrypt traffic, not only for security reasons, but for performance, specially p2p. If this applications set up encrypted connections looking like VPNs or https with their peers, they will not be blocked, because the ISPs won't risk blocking corporate traffic.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
There are only two ways to get broadband: telephone wires or cable. Those suggesting that we can simply switch to an ISP that isn't being evil are missing this point. If the cable companies and the phone companies both decide to start doing this, there will be nowhere left to go. A friend of mine who works at hoosier net says the big phone companies just won a decision which is basically going to put them out of business. I don't think the telephone companies have to let other ISP's use their wires any longer. So his company will no longer be able to sell t1 lines to small business's. This will make companies like earthlink go away eventually.
No, he'll care about a free internet. Rather than admit to the public he wants his porn, he'll start spouting Slashdot/ACLU rhetoric about freedom of speech and so forth. He'll care about a "free internet" precisely because he can't say he cares about "my porn".
As if blocking skype actually accomplishes anything useful. What is the true intention here? To charge for those calls being made for free? Port scrambling on Open Source software already beats this.
And if the counterterrorism arguement is used, well all you need is two people playing, say, Battlefield 2, where one hosts a server and password's it, and their buddy joins in, already knowing the password, and then they join the same squad and BAM, press the B key and chat all you like.
Idiots...
Now we know what the impetus to switch to internet 2 will be.
I do security
Rogers High Speed Internet (http://www.rogers.com/ is already doing the following:
. As a side effect, it's affected iTunes (http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,14747626) and XBox Live (http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,15038493) usage.
8 8371) although they do so selectively.
- Throttling back Bittorrent speed to the point that it as well as some other P2P services are unusable (http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,15033490)
- Killing off their Newsgroup servers as of the 15th of this month (http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,14769820)
- Creating and enforcing bandwidth limits(http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,144
And all of this without letting their users know up front. Lovely. This is what you Americans have to look forward to.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Sadly, this idea in conjunction with another story posted a couple of days ago about how anonymity on the Internet is viewed as a bad thing go together.
/.ers have cable? Somewhere along the way, they figure out how to "prefer" their packets over others.
The cable companies got it right. They have a box in your home with big-time controls and identification features. It's critical they know who you are to make paying for content easy. They've made that model work and work extremely well. How many
No one with any power to substantially influence government values your anonymity. I don't know about the rest of the world, but in America, we tend to abhor a kind of neutral freedom where all participants have similar access. It smells too much like "Socialism" which we've been trained to believe fails.
The people that value a free internet will be sequestered to their own little freedom-loving ghetto while the rest pay. (and pay and pay some more) It was fun while it lasted. In the future, I'll be one of those in the freedom-loving ghetto.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Dada for Congress!
I've read many of the comments here discussing deregulation, monopoly-abuse, and the need of regulation. I think most of my fellow slashdotters are mistaking the point where monopoly-regulation is good and where it is bad. Monopolies for infrastructure are good, for anything else they tend to be bad. It's ridiculous to think that we need competitive markets for power delivery to your house. One power line is sufficient any more is foolish, the same for any cable or pipe that a business or home needs. One road monopoly; one water; one sewer.
However, there should be strict protection of the right for competition for the providers who supply the materials for those monopolies or the services transported over them.
One Phone line provider is good, one phone service provider is not, and One ISP is not. Anytime you prevent competition among content providers of any medium you limit innovation, inflate cost, and allow abuses of power.
A Ma-Bell providing lines to everyone and maintaining them isn't a bad thing if they have only the providers as clients. Having Bellsouth, or MCI, or who ever hire the ma-bell line men to work on your lines and make sure they work can, and does work. There is a comparable example in some of the natural gas deregulation markets. However, the SNL bit about the phone company is true only if you must use them for service.
Anyway, that's my $2.00's (regulated inflation of my usual $0.02)
"Secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy
Is that some ISPs just won't do it, and they'll make all the money. I gaurentee that it'll become a big advertising point for ISPs that don't do this, and they'll be many. In fact I predict if the DSL provider starts doing it, the cable company choses not to and hammers them for it in ads.
So maybe you wonder about larger lines, just do it on the OC lines that the ISPs hook up to. Nope, all that's under contract. When you get a large line it's not like getting a DSL connection, there's two way negoation and a binding contract. They'll provide the service, as specified, or face a lawsuit. Again, if they refuse to provide unrestricted service in the future, there will be someone who will. When we last redid out net contract on campus we had about 10 people bidding on the contract. Even if half of them go down the "we'll filter you route" that's plenty that won't.
My bet is this whole thing is pretty short lived. As the ISPs that filter start to take it in the shorts from those that don't, the'll quickly figure it out, that or simply die form lack of subscribers.
"There really is very little choice here. It's like telling somebody that if they don't like their cable TV service, choose a different cable provider. Oos - there are no others, unless you're willing to move to a different house that's served by a different company."
You have three choices.
1-No cable TV period. As much as you all complain about the quality of TV. This should be a no-brainer.
2-Cable TV. Take your lumps and make your voice heard. For a group that mouths off a lot on this forum. You all are rather quiet when it comes to talking to your cable company.
3-Buy a dish (DirecTV or "C") and go to town with FREEDOM!.
To me I picked number one (twice). No cable TV (I'm not addicted like some), and no broadband so all this two-tier this and that is irrelevent, and if it comes to dial-up? I can pick several different ISPs.
"And opting out is just cutting off your nose if you have any need for those services. The internet has become almost as necessary as a phone to most people, and for good reason."
No, what geeks really mean with this is "we're addicted to broadband, and will not consider dial-up as an alternative". You have that "oh so essential internet". It's just not at "movie or music download speeds".
Choice is no longer defined as "what's available", but a self-selected list. It's like some saying there's no choice of OS out their, unless it's a windows OS (not appearing on that self-selected list is Linux, ReactOS, solaris, and many others).
I can't believe no one brought this up. As soon as they show an ability to shape and control all types of traffic and actually make it their business to do so, they lose common carrier status and can be sued for anything and everything. I can't even imagine what damage this would do. The carriers are either insane or greedy. I vote the for the latter.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
I keed! I keed!! Long Live Linux!!!
Once upon a time, I was the member of an ISP called Vroom Wireless. This ISP blocked all P2P traffic except between the hours of midnight and 6am. This was not listed anywhere in their TOS. The upside to that (which was pointless) was that our upstream was basically unlimited (2mbit each way) ... ... and ALSO, every single bloody incoming port was blocked except NTP.
Aside from that, we basically got no signal between 4pm and 10pm anyway, so we canned that stupid idea and went with SBC, which only offers their lowest tier of service where we live.
Cute little independent podunk ISPs are probably doing the types of things mentioned in TFA, and will continue to do them... because they don't appear to be regulated.
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There are enough people here pissed off about this, if everyone on slashdot would write these comments to their representatives instead of just preaching to the choir here then maybe this could really be stopped. I've already done as much myself.
perl -e '$_="\007/4`\cp%2,".chr(127);s/./"\"\\c$&\""/gees
They call it a Layer-7 filter. Not sure how it works, precisely, but it IDs traffic off of more than just port. We use them on campus and they seem to work well. Everything identified as P2P traffic is given a lower priority than other traffic. So P2P is free to use as much of our bandwidth as it likes, but if we are maxed, it's throttled in favour of other stuff.
Not saying a method to evade such a thing couldn't be developed, but at the present time it works well.
1) areas that are experimenting with broadband over powerlines and 2) wireless broadband... so I guess there are more than 2.
I can see that happening. Won't be long before ebay is saying things like "You block skype we make ebay block you and suggest other ISPS' if people try and access ebay via your network" . As always it will be the little people who suffer.
Alan
Price fixing!
Once upon a time, the government recognized the value of unfettered communication to our democracy. So it held at bay those who wanted to privatize it, meter it , and restrict access. No longer it seems. This is not really a new phenomenon in a capitalist economic system, many of our forms of communication have drifted away from the commons. The internet was granted a brief reprieve because it had its roots in the non-profit government and academic worlds. But it has grown big enough and widepsread enough, that the capitalists want to own it now. They leer at its freedom and scope and lust to control it. What they miss is that it grew exactly because it wasn't owned privately by people whose only vision is profit. I don't think there is any stopping it unless the goverment declares it a utility and a commons--and that is very unlikely to happen under this administration. It was at one time a popular notion which is why the air waves have been generally a commons--though that distinction has been chipped away. And today's media moguls will be damned if they let new forms of communication follow that 'free', as in unbiquitous and uncontrolled, route. The Telcos and video broadcasters just want what the RIAA and MPAA want: to meter their services, IP, and content to the greatest extent the market will bear and maximize profits. The Telcos, unlike the RIAA and MPAA, suffered a setback with the breakup of 'Mother Bell' and that despoiled their fertile field for profit, telephone service, and ruined it for a long time to come. They moved rapidly into cellular mobile phones and that rewarded them for a while until the price wars broke out and bandwidth cheapened to the point it is difficult ot get a great return on infrastructure (it doesn't help that the merger mania the execs engaged in caused them to over pay which significantly lengthened payback periods). So as they search for ways to bring their profits back, the internet provides a great and vast infrastructure for content, services, and IP delivery that they want to control. In order to squeeze every last bit of profit out of it the telcos and broadcasters will need to wrest control from the public and concentrate it in their hands. This means the usual: eliminate competition from free content, supress service competitors like Skype , create a premium tier they can use for content delivery and charge, charge, charge for every scrap of value and access. If free speech and communication for everyone is trod upon and obliterated, they'll shed not a tear--they don't care about anything but profit. That's the nature of the beast and part of the tragedy of the commons. And that's why not all things should be 'free' as in 'free markets'. There are some things too precious to give to those who worship profit above all else and the handful of brilliant men that founded this nation tried to anticipate the rapaciousness of the capitalist and preserve those things in their founding documents. Too bad no one in the White House, the legislative, or judicial branches reads the writings of those men or those doucments much any more--too little time left after reading the checks from the lobbyists, popular polls, and their bank statements. The hundreds of billions in Iraq could have funded a free internet for our children as a commons--but that ship has sailed. they are building oen in the EU and Aisia--we'll be left behind.
You can moderate the truth (-1, Flamebait) or (-1, Troll) all you want, but it will still be the truth. I stand behind my words. Not all ideas are equally valid. Libertarianism is idealistic nonsense. It assumes that consumers are all informed, make sensible decisions, and care about quality (or even price, to a point). It assumes that companies won't collude together to fix prices; it assumes competition is perfect and "by the books". It conveniently disregards such concepts as pre-existing mindshare (who'd buy phone service from Joe-Bob's Discount Long Distance if AT&T or Sprint already serves the area, and then some?), FUD, and barrier to entry. It's a pure form of idealistic free-market religionism, cut from the same cloth as the Pollyannas who constantly chirp about how America is "the land of opportunity" and anyone who really works hard and has a can-do attitude can make it rich here.
Just because libertarianism/Libertarianism is currently in vogue on SlashDot doesn't make it a good idea, and just because I'm pointing out similarities between a religious belief in obviously contradictory ideas and an economic belief in obviously contradictory ideas doesn't make me a troll. (Or wrong.)
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
You are comparing apples to oranges.
Power regulation is all about regulating the delivery of power.
Communications regulation is about regulating the delivery of, well, communications.
If a power company suddenly starts spewing broadband over power lines, they won't magically be able to skirt whatever regulation affects other ISP's just because they're a power company. They would then become an ISP just like the rest (albeit with a different mode of delivery than your local cable company) and would be subject to the rules affecting the service they are providing.
I wonder what content providers will be willing to pay to keep their content from being relegated to a lower tier of service, or from being filtered altogether. After all, I'm assuming at some point in time, some content providers will start noticing drops in traffic if something like this were to become prevalent enough.
What if every web site with the words "teenage" and "Bush" close enough together in context got filtered? How would GWB reach out to america's youth then? Would government web sites get automatic preferencial tier status for throughput and downloads? The IRS too? Would all ISP need to respect such governmental site status settings?
What a tangle web we weave...
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
"When people start taking advantage of that, how long will it be before the ISPs smarten-up?"
:== find some technology that'll solve the problem even if it's temporary.*
About the same length of time it takes geeks to lose their techno-faith.
Social problem
*Apparrently "arms race" doesn't exist in the geek vocabulary.
What?
... well, have fun doing whatever it is you do, in whatever world you live in. It must be a nice place, pity you can't get there from the Universe I apparently inhabit.
Honestly, that's ridiculous. If that's what you believe, than
Practically everything that's ever been done has been out of some sort of profit motive or another. I won't say 'everything,' because certainly there have been some things done from various altruistic motives, but they pale in comparison to things that were done for profit. And that's profit both on a personal and corporate/institutional/national level. In fact a lot of people who do "charitable" work are doing it for personal profit of some sort. You can argue whether that's their chief motivation or not, but it's undeniably quite strong.
Just because I'm aiming to make a profit off of you, doesn't mean that it's a bad thing. In fact the basis of a truly 'free' economy in the sense that free-marketers talk of it, is that every interaction is a win-win. That is, for you and me to do business together, BOTH of us have to be getting some sort of profit out of it. Does that always happen in our real world? Probably not; but it happens a lot more often than you'd realize.
The owner of the pizza parlor down the street from me is quite wealthy. He doesn't stay in the business he's in because he really enjoys enriching other people's lives by serving them pizza, he does it because he's good at it and makes more money running a pizza shop than he would in an alternative career at this point in his life, given his education. His business, on paper, is ripping off its customers. After all, it sells what is probably less than a dollar of raw ingredients (probably the cardboard box is the most expensive thing) and a few cents worth of gas for the oven, and a few dollars for overhead of the store and employee wages, for $10. And I happily pay it, because I'd rather pay him to do this, even if he's making money hand over fist, than do it myself. It's a win-win transaction.
Just because you're in the business of making money for yourself doesn't mean that you're harming anyone else. As long as the transaction is not coerced in any way, everyone ought to be able to go about their profit-motivated ways and be fine. It's not a perfect system, but it's a damn sight better than anything else I've heard offered up as an alternative.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The ISPs wants you to pay to get to Google? They want Google to pay to "use their pipes?" How about if Google & co. present an ultimatum to each ISP: "Free access or no access." ___It is easily within Google's power to not respond to HTTP requests originating from within a "hostile ISP."___ Let's watch the hostile ISP's customer base flee, en masse and overnight, to friendly ISPs. Let's kickstart the Muni-WLAN mesh. Who is _really_ in control?
yes it's truth. We copy the very best of you guys in US. Unfortunatly, some politics agenda forced us to accept the crapiest global and economical politics made by US like the genetically modified food and the steel incoming taxes not to mention other nasty stuff like US pressure to adopt the US patent system which would introduce software patents something which is still not usual to us, and thus companies like Microsoft had tried hard to buy some politics.
...
Unfortunatly, these kind of news don't show up in the CNN
Wireless looks to me like a good way to endrun this newest malfeasance.
Are they actually looking into ways of stopping community wireless efforts? Not the city-funded ones that is but large adhoc clouds?
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
Every dollar saved is some money passed on to the consumer.
This *might* work purely on a PR level, but we all know that the first beneficiary of any money-saving activity is the CEO. After he gets done stroking his ego with an extra perk or bonus, any savings left over from that then, may be passed on as savings to the customer.
The content industry probably realised that they are doomed, and so is now trying to save themselves by offering ISP's a cut to get them into the action. Good luck, they'll need it.
Traffic shaping, prioritising connections, filtering. All this will lead to:
The Free ISP.
You will not have to pay anymore, the service pays itself when it creeps advertising into your life. It will not filter but adapt every pattern you do in order to get the maximum number of advertising impressions on you. It seeks to completely control your life and your habits, and it's controlled by none other than the people who control your society.
But isn't this a good thing or was Internet the ultimate escapism until the medium that we were escaping from caught up with us?
... on the east coast of the US. They're called turnpikes (or toll roads, or throughways). No one's stopping you from going from NYC to Albany via the Taconic, or Miami to Orlando via I-95 to I-10. If you want to get there quicker, you use the NYS Throughway or Florida Turnpike.
And, what's more, you have EZ-Pass (which I believe costs $1/month + the actual tolls) so you can go faster through the toll booths.
Plus, nowadays, many state governments are considering/have implemented HOT lanes (basically single car HOV lanes with a toll for access).
Or were you being sarcastic?
...is that the ISPs want it both ways. By that I mean they want to be considered nothing but common carriers. So when someone wants to sue for defamation or copyright infringement, they can escape liability because all they do is transfer bits. But now they also want absolute control over those bits, in addition to the near absolute immunity.
They won't be able to have it both ways. Unless Congress gives them some sort of statutory immunity, which I doubt will happen, expect the lawsuits to start from the RIAA, the MPAA, anti-pornography nuts, etc.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Tried loading the networkmirror link 4 times now and it keeps timing out on some ad server (3.adbrite.com). It doesn't load any content, only a couple of google ads.
:(
Too bad.
Excuse the language, but this fucking sucks! :(
...Fire!
,inferior quality, PCs. When was the last time you heard of Ram's PC shop getting bigger and bringing the benefit to a world of customers? eMachines? Better talk to the boys at gateway about that one.
In the PC world, there is no regulations on the cost, quality or performance of PCs. We have hundreds of companies selling products -- big boys like Dell and HP, small guys like Ram's PC Shop. Guess what? Prices have fallen even against inflation.
And in that same PC world, intel x86 chips still dominate over the higher quality competition, microsoft still dominate desktops with an inferior OS and products, and EULA-isms ensure that from top to bottom, the entire computer industry is filled to bursting with cowboys, schisters, and dissatisfied customers. Dell is still the biggest seller of
In the automotive world, we have heavy regulations -- steel tariffs, union requirements and other government mandates. Car prices have risen, faster than inflation.
Yet strangely, in stark contrast to our previous example, the automotive industry is filled with lane after shimmering lane of satisfied customers. People who've paid over the price of inflation for their moving machines, yet are pleased with their purchaces. How can this be? Could it be that the meager regulations present prevent the absolute chicanery of the less accountable computer industry. Better yet regulation has helped prevent actual death thanks to safety standards. YMMV depending on juristiction.
In the soda world, we have almost no regulations (except for some USDA/FDA ones). Soda prices have fallen against inflation, and generic versions taste as good as the real ones in some occasions. I can buy a 2 liter of diet cola for US$0.49 versus US$0.99 a few years ago.
Good for you! Did you also realise that the same diet cola cost what, $0.05 to produce? Take a short look at the soft drinks industry. What do you see? That's right! Coca-Cola. One of the biggest companies in the world! Selling the same inflated product in ovre 200 countries. Ask yourself how a company selling sugared water is now the second or third largest on planet earth.
In the medicine world, we have excessive regulations, and prices have climbed beyond inflation.
Really? Because there are plenty of minor drugs companies that can make "generic" drugs at rock bottom prices. Turns out they can't though. Not because of market regulation as it turns out, but because of our old friend the USPTO. You may want to lump the USPTO under "financial regulators" but you'll find a lot of companies won't be quite so happy to see the regulators decommissioned if their old pal Patty is given a pink slip as well.
In the clothing world, we have few regulations (some tariffs on cotton and other materials). I can buy a nice, quality hoodie for US$10 at H&M. A few years back they were over US$50 at the mall.
Oh my god! Google Asian Sweatshop NOW! That hoodie is worth, like, $2. The free market has gone to China and brought back nothing but margins my friend.
Tell me again how regulations help and anarchy hurts?
Anarchy sucks. Just ask the people of New Orleans. Excessive Regulation also sucks. Just ask... ummm can't think of many really good examples. Maybe England? Pre Thatcher? But it would suck.
However letting private individuals do what they like would really, really suck. It has even been tried before. the results were less than stellar. See Barbarian Hordes, Feudalism, child labor, JD Rockerfeller, and in fact, most of the rest of the guide.
May the Maths Be with you!
A service business can expect to reap the benefits of a large retail neighbor such as Wal-Mart because Wal-Mart does not service or repair goods.
You also get the added benefit of the fact that Wal-Mart sells garbage. Have you noticed the rapid decline in the quality of goods? I have. I wanted to buy my niece a stereo system last year. I went to Wal-Mart and inspected what they have. The systems were inexpensive but also incredibly inferior in quality to what I had when I was her age.
Go to any Wal-Mart electronics section: put your finger on any knob on any stereo, and wiggle your finger. The knob wiggles too, doesn't it? That's because the garbage in Wal-Mart has had so much cost removed from it that they have also removed the quality! The crap they sell will fall apart from normal use in a few short months
Back before the rapid infection of Wal-Mart I could find a small electronics store in any city I was in. Those stores sold stereo equipment at a higher price than Wal-Mart, but it lasted for years!. And now they are gone.
Well, you argue, so what? Target and Best Buy have replaced those smaller stores.
I would have to agree with you. But we have still lost those smaller stores, and the stereo equipment in Best Buy and Circuit City is just as cheap and inferior as the crap in Wal-Mart.
End result: we the consumer lose.
As for Video rentals: I don't know where you live, but I have seen a steady decline in the number of independant video rental stores since the early 1990s. The smaller stores that survive are all part of smaller chains than Blockbuster, but they are still chains. In fact, the only independant in my city just closed a few weeks ago, leaving us with only Blockbuster.
We have always been at war with Eurasia!
So, if the telco goes for a 2 tier internet, then the other "ISPs" are pretty much f**ked. They either go along with it or go out of business. Either way, we get borked too. We do have the option (dependant on location) of using cable, but the situation is pretty much the same there, and there is no reason to believe that they wouldn't copy the landline telco.
Time to fire up the old ham radios I think. I have some packet radio software somewhere.
It might be expensive, but anyone, anywhere can get a satellite modem.
There are lots of farmers, etc who live out in the middle of nowhere who get tv & their internet service from the same satellite provider.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Don't get me wrong, I'm not an apologist for SBC - I think this is a horrible idea, because customers ALREADY pay for higher download speeds in the form of a higher bandwidth connectioin (and the same goes for content providers like Google, et. al, who pay a lot of money for bandwidth, one way or another). They basically want to double charge me - "Oh, you payed for a 768k DSL line? Well, if you actually want to DOWNLOAD data at 768k [which you already payed for], then the content provider you are downloading from has to pay us too".
But, as far as the common carrier argument goes - airlines, trainlines, and ship-lines are also, I believe considered common carriers, but they can have multi-tiered pricing schemes (1st class vs coach, state room vs steerage, etc) for levels of service. And the ISP's that want this will claim that is all this is - it doesn't *prevent* anyone from getting access to certain content (at least, not directly), but only affects the level of service based on price.
I'm no lawayer, but trust me, the argument that introducing pricing levels to content providers for higher priority traffic endangers their common carrier status, or require a special act of congress to allow, is pretty much nonsense. They can't do it currently, but I don't think it has anything to do with common carrier, and more to do with FCC regulations.
Slashdotters seem to want unlimited bandwidth for whatever purpose and, along with that, cheap - or free - pricing. You can't get both. No ISP can provide both. P2P users who leave their computers on line and available for file sharing cost the ISPs in either bandwidth or money. On many "broadband" networks a few dozen P2P users can dominate all the available bandwidth and leave little left over for the other few hundred users. What ISP would tolerate this? Why would any ISP tolerate this? The ISP managers I've spoken with would prefer all their P2P users move to another ISP; any other ISP... along with the hundreds of people all over the world sucking down that music and videos and costing them (the ISPs) money.
Around here an ISP pays the PUD $350 for every average mb of bandwidth per month. It's not unusual to see a small percentage of users each sending 5mb of P2P files out to the world 24 hours a day. One user averaging 1mb of file sharing over a month will cost the ISP $350. Mulitply this by as many P2P users on line. This on a connection charge of under $40 a month.
So yeah... vote with your feet folks. See if they care. Take your business to another provider. Bandwidth limiting isn't a choice most providers want to make; it's a choice they were forced to make.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
of the old Netzero commercials. You remember the ones that were set in some sort of McCarthy-esque trial where people were saying the internet should be free for everyone. As cheesy as these old commercials were, is it not really the case that the internet should be as free as broadcast TV? We have a new form of media that by and large exists quite similar to television. Consider each website as a television program, some of them have ads on the page just like product placement and some temporarily stop your navigation with an ad before the next page, just like a TV commercial.
The internet offers an opportunity for information exchange beyond what could have ever been conceived even 10 or 20 yrs ago. I can talk to friends a few states or even half the world away and the communication is nearly instantaneous. Not only that, but this new form of communication travels with me. A truly wireless world where each person with their laptop, pda or cell phone can instantly be online talking to their best friends. However, there are some people standing in the way of this great digital, free internet revolution.
Are the people standing in the way the US Government or our elected officials? No, they are just the pawns of bigger more interested individuals who are not ready for the new order of things. Large corporations sit on vast supplies of money and they are dependent on archaic communication methods to maintain their precious power. Who are these huge conglomerates? The telecos who already lose a great deal of money to VoiP, Instant Messaging and e-mail. They tried to offset this some with cell phones, but that only appears to take them so far. The huge cable companies. These people have built an industry out of nothing. There was a time (believe it or not) when you had three networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) and that was it. Now we have thousands of channels delivered by huges companies like Time-Warner and Comcast.
Of course these people have the most to lose, but so do large media groups. Some of these groups are the same people bringing you cable, but others exist as well. They all have a lot to lose.
This new technology threatens their livelyhood and the livelyhood of a great many people. I liken the matter to an idea I had once. Consider matter transportation like we see on Star Trek. How many people would oppose such a great new technology? Well, you have the entire transportation industry who would lose countless passengers on their airlines, trains and buses. What about car manufacturers? Would you really need a car anymore to get to point B if you could arrive in a few seconds? Shipping companies? You would be able to order from Amazon and have the item magically appear next to you a few moments later.
The problem is the power and the money lies with people who do not want change. They are the ones who currently have our money and who continue to get it, so why should they want to change anything. They use lies and "studies" to convince these gullable politicians they need new laws to protect the consumer, or some other BS argument that is meant to sounds friendly. In reality, they are only trying to protect their own pockets and sadly it seems the people we vote into office are stupid enough to listen. I had a history professor tell me once, "Most Americans are just stupid." I guess that explains why people elect the people they do (i.e. George W. Bush).
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
Deregulation is the only way to combat this.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
The point that everyone, including the big-name ISPs are missing, is what this will mean to everyone else.
Case in point.
Let's say that a Verizon broadband customer buys service for a new Verizon VOIP product.
Let's say that this same customer has a friend across the country, that is also a Verizon customer.
They both get the new product, and one decides to call the other.
In todays market, that call will go from one end of the country to the other, with no impediment to it's packets (at least none that isn't applied to all traffic going through a certain subnet).
In the proposed market, let's say that to get from point A to point B, this traffic has to cross subnets owned by Sprint and Qwest.
Both Sprint and Qwest will throttle back the data as it's originated at, and destined for a foreign network.
Even though both customers are on Verizon's network, they get CRAP service due to the way the internet works.
Now, even though both customers paid Verizon for high speed VOIP service, Verizon couldn't deliver the goods because the user didn't pay Sprint and Qwest for that same service. Verizon sure as hell isn't going to pay Qwest and Sprint to speed up these connections as that would minimize their profit margins, so the customer gets shittier service, for a higher cost.
All this idea is, is a way to allow ISPs to charge more, for less service.
My guess would be that they won't do anything but throw controls in that throttle foreign network traffic, or traffic that hasn't been paid for by the customer.
It will be the end of the Internet as we know it.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
yeah, keep watching Fox News and slurping down the Kool Aid.
If it weren't for the rocks in its bed, the stream would have no songs.
"So! In the end it will be We, ze french, who will 'áve zese 'igher ping times!
Ve shall share 'La Marseilles' endlessly on e-'âne' while you foo-els wallow in your stupide slow Bell-net!
Now I go to browse ze web with mon wireless ISP during my two hour coffee break. Adieu... mes amie!!
Á HÁWW HU HÁWW HU HÁWW HU HÁWW!! "
May the Maths Be with you!
Preface: SBC = Evil, Verizon = Evil I know you've read a lot crap about "deregulation" coming from the baby bells (SBC, Verizon) these days, and I can understand why the word would make you shudder. I shudder when I hear about thier brand of "deregulation". It's bullshit. It's really selective deregulation where they remove all the regulations that keep them from squashing and locking out the competition, while retaining the regulation that prevents competitors from building their own infrastructures.
Having said that, let's move on.
Please read this history of Ma Bell. It's long but it's a great eye opener.
http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cjv14n2-6.html
Essentially it reads: After the patents for the telephone had expired the market flooded open with all sorts of new competition. After 13 years of competition, telephone use rose from 270,000 to 6,000,000 with service available practically everywhere with competition servicing areas where Ma Bell thought it wasn't worth it.
It was between 1913-1921 when Theodore Vail approached the government to help him with his little problem of competition. After going through a series of phases of regulation, the telephone system was finally nationalized on Auguest 1, 1918 during WWI for national security reasons.
So no. An unregulated market did not create a natural monopoly in the case of AT&T. If anything, it goes to show how good big companies like AT&T are good at selling the public bullshit regulation.
Communism is like having one big phone company. -Lenny Bruce-Havnt the last 40 years been all about getting rid of segregation and trying to create equals. As far as I can see the internet will be for the wealthy and the poor will just have to suck it in. The more that corporations try and enforce things like that the more disjointed they will become. There is nothing wrong with having their own content delivery mechanisms in place, However when it becomes expensive and the poorest people loose out does that make more people want to pirate content ? Simply putting it out of reach financially makes people want it more.
*sigh* Money does indeed talk.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
I haven't read the article due to heavy slashdottage... I don't suppose there is a mirror somewhere?
I would like to read the article, but obviously that's not possible.... So can someone who happened to be luckey enough to have gotten in to read it, please tell me what these so called "tiers" are?
j
Sure, letting ISPs filter content sounds like a good thing, but it's a slippery slope. One day they're denying access to child pornography and terrorist communication, but the next thing you know you can't get any black gay amputee midget porn and there's not a damn thing you can do about it!
Fine, pass that $1 on to the CEO. Some other CEO will settle for $0.99, and give me $0.01. Then some other one will settle for $0.98...
"Once upon a time, the government recognized the value of unfettered communication to our democracy. So it held at bay those who wanted to privatize it, meter it , and restrict access."
I'm not sure, but it's my understanding that the reason communications was metered for so long is that the way telco's and cable television systems came about, there were necessary reasons that you would only have ONE phone company and cable television company in any geographic region. The nature of running cables to people's houses demanded that public property (right-of ways to place utility poles, or run underground cables) be utilized, and granted the local phone/cable company a monopoly. Since you can have no competition in an industry with guaranteed monopolies, government regulation (price controls, guarantees of service levels, etc) was absolutely necessary.
Basically, these industries were non-capitalistic business in a primarily capitalist country, and the people wouldn't allow them to go un-regulated.
"But it has grown big enough and widepsread enough, that the capitalists want to own it now."
Uhh, reality check. They already own/control the internet, at least to the extent that they own the portion of the internet that you use to access the internet. I think this two-tier pricing is going to bite them in the ass, however, when customers flock to other ISP's that don't do this extortion racket. Or, maybe customers won't care.
Probably, a lot of web-sites will start detecting customers from these two-tier ISPs, and constantly send them warnings that "Your Internet Service Provider, , provides lower quality of service to you when accessing this service. If you have problems with the site being slow, or a loss of quality in video,audio, or game streams, this is due to your ISP reducing download speeds and/or dropping packets from our servers. If you experience difficulty, we recommend choosing another ISP: ".
If enough web-sites started doing this, it would no doubt hurt the revenue of such ISP's to the point where they *have* to scrap this idea. If I ran a web site that got hit by this extortion racket, I'd do this in a heartbeat. And, if the ISP's dared to block my little warning message, I'd sue them to have their Common Carrier status stripped, at which point they'd be open to an avelanche of lawsuits from now till the end of the world (as we know it).
"What they miss is that it grew exactly because it wasn't owned privately by people whose only vision is profit."
Partly right. At least in the very early days. But since about 1995, the internet has largely been 'owned' (in the sense of the physical infrastructure) by private corporations who very much are driven by profit. But, the reason we haven't seen this nonsense before (and why I don't think it'll last), is because there is too much competition in the ISP business.
I realize the ISP game is consolidating down a lot, to become mostly telco or cable co as your options, but as long as all the ISP's don't conspire together to bring this about, then I suspect people will switch to whatever service gives them the best service. That's the power of open, competitive markets. If you have competition who is willing to take care of their customers better than you do, then you *must* give approximately the same service at about the same price, or else go out of business.
"There are some things too precious to give to those who worship profit above all else and the handful of brilliant men that founded this nation tried to anticipate the rapaciousness of the capitalist"
I think you meant the 'rapaciousness of the monopolist'. The scenarios you describe are what happens when you get monopolies or oligopolies (a very small number of competitors who all conspire to drive up prices, etc). Right now, there is quite a lot of competition in the ISP market, *but* it is, admittedly, reducing somewhat rapidly.
Capitalism, in the sense of open, vigorous competition, usually leads to bett
I'm just hoping wireless can save us. I'm currently dependant upon an infrastructure owned by a single entity and protected by polititions who just happen to be for sale. It's just a matter of time. If you have a choice between wireless and wired, choose wireless. If we keep pumping money to wireless providers, the technology will only get better; and wireless has much lower entry barriors, so we can count on competition. Adam Smith would be proud.
http://www.mises.org/story/1881 The Evaporation of the FCC by Tim Swanson
http://www.mises.org/fullstory.aspx?Id=1662 The Spectrum Should Be Private Property: The Economics, History, and Future of Wireless Technology by B.K. Marcus
To do a very short recap of my own experience, I was doing network engineering in 1993 when control of the "routing tables" were released by the NSF and thereby ISPs were first legally allowed to peer directly with each other, as well as having the legal restriction on commercial content on "the Internet" repealed.
De-regulation at its most fundamental, the Fed.Gov simply let go.
The result was that "the Internet" exploded in function, reach and availability. The cost of connecting dropped immediately and has been continuing to drop ever since. The "technical issues" that had been the basis for Al Gore's "Information Superhighway" evaporated as each ISP worked to solve the problems of routing and peering, and engineers like myself found efficiencies that would never have been utilized if the "Information Superhighway" had been mandated by law.
The DMCA and such have been trying to put the genie back in the bottle, to re-regulate the content and use of "the Internet". Evil or stupid? It's hard to tell the difference with politicians and bureaucrats.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
I've seen this too, and not even in a high-tech area. My dad runs a small retail establishment, formerly a hardware and building supplies store that has gradually evolved into a lighting showroom with a paint department. In the last 10 years or so, our city has seen Walmart, a giant Home Hardware, and other box stores come to town. Business for us is apparently better than ever - the big Home Hardware creates interest in things like home renovation projects simply by virtue of its visibility, but when people want a beautiful $500 stained-glass fixture for the dining room, guess where they go?
What makes me sad about this is that, while Europe and Asia have these insane high-speed connections that run over 10x faster than ours for barely half the price, our connections only seem to be getting slower and more expensive. We already pay too much each month if we have high-speed Internet – $50 a month is not cheap, and we aren't even getting enough bang for our buck. And now they want to raise that price by making the basic $50 plan run even more slowly on any site they don't like? Sad.
What's especially disappointing is that ISP's don't seem to like people like me who want to run their own Web sites from home. My own connection only has 384 kB/s upload, which makes it almost impossible to run stuff like my Linux distribution that requires a great deal more bandwidth, particularly for FTP downloads. Not only that, but apparently their AUP doesn't allow for that type of thing, so I'm hoping I'm not caught... but anyway, the only alternative would be to pay someone lots of money to run it full-time, which is just as bad because I'd have to deal with their server configuration, their bandwidth limitations, their limited disk space... and not to mention paying thousands of dollars a year that I don't even have.
Please, somebody listen to the people for a change...
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
I don't think the ISP's have indicated any intention to limit traffic based on content, but rather to provide different levels of service (QoS) for some providers, and for, e.g. P2P, relegate that traffic to the 'lower' tier of service. But all packets would still go through (although, as part of QoS, I wouldn't be suprised if you get significant packet loss for games and things - hard to say how they will treat packets for, e.g. Quake/Call of Duty/etc).
I think the ISPs can and will make the claim that they aren't actually doing content *filtering*, which would trigger loss of Common Carrier as you say. They will claim that they are providing different levels of service for different types of traffic from different origins, *regardless* of the content of those packets. That is, I think the argument can be made that, e.g. giving packets destined for the port used commonly for a particular P2P program a lower priority doesn't really take into account the *contents* of the packet, but rather just what port it is sent on.
I'm not saying it's right in the moral sense. I'm just saying that, from what I understand of the proposal which may be wrong, they are just creating multiple levels of service, someting common carriers have done for ages.
You used a Fedex example. Fedex has overnight delivery, 2 day, and 3-4 day 'regular' delivery. I expect the ISPs that are lobbying for this to argue that this is exactly the same situation.
It was de-regulation that caused every fruit company to combine into one.
This is one eason why FreeWan Cells and like types of local networks are needed. Information sharing will continue, and it will be done regardless of the wishes of the media, communications, or utility cartels. Hackers are working on wireless mesh type networks at this very moment. DVD's can hold plenty of data and have great bandidth capability - Especially when shipped acrossed the country in packages of a 100. The genie is out of the bottle and filtering the "pipe" will only cause people to use the river. The local college in my aread has a vibrant filesharing network where thousands of multimedia are traded each day. The network consists of about 4 wireless routers and about 200 computers. The network was put together by students and is run by students. It is separate from the Internet, cheaper, and faster. More of these will pop up and compete with local ISP's and telco's should this tiered Internet crap be imposed on people.
Although content providers can still throttle based on the end site, eventually packet shaping and content throttling will lead to a situation where network appication developers use SSL to wrap everything! If just about everything uses SSL and goes down ports 80 or 443 content throttling based on packet inspection will come to an abrupt end.
"ISPs are now reducing access to peer-to-peer applications, blocking Skype, and, scariest of all, lobbying Congress to let them do it."
They don't have to lobby congress - it's their network, they can offer whatever QoS they like.
People have been using different levels of QoS to consumer traffic than commercial traffic since consumers starting using the net - throttling P2P traffic isn't "news" and neither is port blocking. Plenty of ISP's block incoming ports, and not all providers route to all destinations, nor are they obliged to by any form of holy covenant (for example, MFN used to deliberately black hole traffic to ISP Manawatu Internet Services [insert long story here]). Blocking out going ports is likely to be slightly more contentious - and subject to regulatory interference - if they are trying to block outgoing common VoIP traffic and they are an incumbant fix-lined telco, but some ISP's already block specific outbound ports (specifically port 25 connections other than their mail servers as a Spam prevention measure).
Routing equipment, transit and fiber is not free to run and neither are the teams that have to design and manage them - as the network grows, costs increase, often dramatically (it's not just a case of "light another fiber" and it all scales magically). This is why providers arn't really keen on those guys who pay 19.99 UKP a month then do 400 GB worth of (mostly P2P) traffic every month - not only does your back bone capacity (fiber and switch equipment) need to be expanded when customers start using that much traffic, but your transit capacity and your connection to the POP/DSLAM - but all of that all twice over, for redandancy of course.
If you don't like the QoS a provider is offering - either pay for a better QoS (as private companies do - those that made large networks cost effective to run at all and without which the general public would still still be on dialup) or try and provide a non QoS'd service yourself and see what happens to your users ability to do simple things like surf the web or play online games when the leechers signup (after being kicked off the other networks). Oops! - the network is full of P2P crap, no bandwith left, packets dropping everywhere, hardware at capacity - customers all leaving, huge transit bill to pay - doh!
The truth is, the relatively small number of people who flood the network with crap P2P traffic - and it really is a small percentage - screw up the service for everyone else (driving up the contention on the line, driving up operating costs very noticeably and driving down other people's download speeds). To make things worse P2P clients (with things like Kazza, rather than Bit Torrent in mind) are typically horribly inefficent and consist largely of noise - not even geniune downloads of files or software people want. That people are doing this primarily as a way to get "OMG FREE WAREZ!1" because they can't be bothered to pay for software/media is reprehensible.
If people were primarily using more efficient clients like Bit Torrent in a resonsible way this would not be such a big issue, though users inclined to share a lot of files for extended periods of time would still be doing more traffic than their 9.99 UKP a month broadband account reasonably entitles them to. BT is a great way of preventing a site or transit connection to a specific provider from being overloaded by a sudden influx of traffic (such as the weekly patching of WoW) - and it does this in a way that benifits end users, the content providers and the ISP's (as it cuts traffic outside the network). However, as a sole transit mechanisim (e.g. for Warez) it's not as desirible or good for users or providers - if users want to start being able to serve files themselves (and so use as much bandwith as download providers use, and be able to offer similar speeds), they need to start paying the same rates companies like File Front / File Planet do for that privilage, because that's how much it costs the ISP to provide that sort
The future is already here..
NTT already sells 1gigabit/sec (thats not a typo!) fiber to the home
service in Japan. It is available all over Tokyo, and most other major cities in Japan as well I think..
It costs around $50/month, unlimited usage. You can even stream stereo video/tv on it from home servers to friends places and it works just beautifully.
No. We're losing the Internet to the Stupid, who are about to turn it over to the Greedy, the Shortsighted, and the Unimaginative, because they say they will make things better and keep the Internet away from the Bad Guys.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
I work for a small ISP in Ohio. We charge less than AOL for dialup, but more than some other local providers. I keep trying to tell people it's the *quality of service* that counts.
Our DSL offerings are only about $5 more than SBC, but the service is better.
We have a fixed wireless option that is $40/mth, but gives you 3mb downstream *and* up.
It's comparable in every way to RoadRunner, in some cases better since it's dedicated bandwidth (and you get a nice fast upstream speed), at roughly the same cost. The best part (IMHO) is that you don't have to give your money to a soul sucking corporation like AOL/TW.
Just like driving a car:
(D) to go forward
(R) to go backward
...my slow downloads, the Internet is just two tiered.
Virgin Mobile buys airtime in bulk from another carrier (Sprint) and resells it with a (sometimes) lower markup. If Sprint is able to sell more of their airtime, what do you think will happen to Virgin's quality of service? They're in exactly the same boat as the non-facilities based DSL providers.
Or they all keep the dollar.
You free market types are incredibly naive.
A blog about stuff.
Think of he children!
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
Of course, the next guy along the line might want $500/month for rights of way.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
If there was ever a time for slashdots to be active politically it is now
And waste effort fighting for an economically unviable demand. The reality is that consumers are driving the split because of their desire for high download capacities but refusal to pay the appropriate cost for unfiltered, SLA-protected broadband.
Consider for instance why I pay $2500 per month for a fiber fed 10 Mbps connection for my data center that operates an ASP? The local cable Internet provider is now advertising 10 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up for $60 a month. Why shouldn't I just switch to that? Why the hell am I being charged $2500 - just because I'm a business?
Having formerly worked as a carrier cost analyst and being responsible for the data center's capital budget, I can understand why the $60 product isn't usable. It's filtered, bandwidth capped, and eventually proxied and limited to only a few acceptable protocols. Already one can't L2TP over their network using a $60 resi connection (which I disagree with due to the need for my people to telework, but they explain encapsulates traffic that could end up providing for a server farm behind a resi connection).
The reality is that transcontinental IP costs real money. Fiber IRUs (purchasing strands in a bundle of fiber for instance) run for more than several thousand dollars a mile a year around here - need to get a fiber IRU from St. Louis to Chicago? Millions of dollars up front, plus an annual maintenance fee that is equally steep. And for what? Letting unlimited demands for network services at $40-$60 a month? A time-share network that increasingly becomes monopolized by low-paying customers doesn't work. Either you raise the costs (which a residential customer won't pay) or limit the capability.
And on the topic of content filtering (e.g. pay or play moves by incumbant carriers who expect Yahoo to pay them to access their eyeballs), let them try. Last time I checked, nobody wanted "Internet" that consisted of a dead-end router with no connectivity to other networks. Let any Bell go ahead and cut off Google and see how long their eyeballs value their linkless net...
http://www.ftc.gov/bc/compguide/
Ahhhh, I see how it will happen now... First they get the Brand X decision from the Supreme Court. Consolidation starts until the resulting monopoly makes price/quality of the internet unbearable. Politicians step in to "save" us from the big evil monopoly with municipal internet plans. Once ubiquitous, anti-terror rhetoric used to consolidate control of municipal ISPs at the federal level. Big brother, 1984 style, begins "for the children."
No, it's directly akin to deliberately downgrading the quality if you connect to a competing network. The bandwidth is there, they just seek to charge more for it.
Just because I'm aiming to make a profit off of you, doesn't mean that it's a bad thing. In fact the basis of a truly 'free' economy in the sense that free-marketers talk of it, is that every interaction is a win-win.
Unfortunatley, the problem isn't they are trying to make a profit... It is the fact they are using the law and power to prevent anyone else from competing with them. Regulation and free market can go both ways...
If a free market has a healthy competing group of companies and they aren't preventing entry level companies from joining... Then leave them the hell alone.
If a free market has a stagnant non-competing group of companies in a cartel that is activley preventing new entry level companies from joining the market, then the government has to step in to break that cartel up just like President Teddy did back with the train and oil barons.
Otherwise we as bad off as a planned economy in Soviet Russia.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Thanks to the Telecom monopoly almost all New Zealand ADSL has been limited to 128kbs upstream.
It is a complete myth that ISPs are "common carriers", and I have no idea why everyone keeps bringing it up on Slashdot.
The proof.
"Internet Service Providers generally wish to avoid being classified as a "common carrier" and, so far, have managed to do so. Before 1996, such classification could be helpful in defending a monopololistic position, but the main focus of policy has been on competition, so "common carrier" status has little value for ISPs, while carrying obligations they would rather avoid."
This is why it should *never* have been commercialized.
It took a few years, but it was just like signing its death warrant.
It was fun while it lasted.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
BTW? How do we start lobbing OUR people in congress to get this blocked. If this goes through (from what I understand) it could have the potential to destroy the internet. I like it the way it is now. Charging me extra for "extra services" that are standard on a regular connection.
COME ON PEOPLE! If you dont like this idea we need to get together to stop this. Get the EFF on this. Do something.
Procrastinating life a way at a rapid rate of speed.
Yeah, the thing is, in a free market system, it is impossible to offer LESS product for MORE money and seriously expect to stay in buisiness. Case in point: I am using Alltel basic DSL. Get ~1.2mbs (hey, far from switch as you can get, should be ~1.5). They also offer 3mbs, but that is not the point. They don't block ANY ports, or have anything else. Yeah, I could get Cable and it is faster (4 mb/s) BUT their shit goes down like once a fucking week AND they block mad ports (and lie about it when tech support was asked about it). You could tunnel, but this doesn't always work. I'm not sure about packet shaping, didn't stick around to find out. This is why I switched to DSL when I moved. Shit. If you really want to D'L, use the shit at school. Most of the kids there are tech illiterate, so there is alot of unused bw there - (average on the workstations is like 8-10mbs down, didn't test up).
Geez, all this doom and gloom! WiMax is around the corner, folks, and you can already buy WiMax cards on the market now. The infrastructure cost for my local cable provider to wire up my city was hundreds of millions of dollars. The cost to set up a handful of WiMax antenna's to do the same thing wirelessly would have to be less than 50K. To the banks, this is a *small* business loan. This could even be done by a non-profit organization such that the cost of administration is averaged per user. This would give a strong incentive to sign customers up as the cost/user would go down with increased users on the network. The more the merrier.
I'll tolerate anything except intolerance.
Nothing will happen technologically until Cisco or some other major router manufacturer puts the software in place in the network backbones to perform these functions. Until that happens these "media companies" can bitch and moan all they want. Someone is going to have to develop the capability, and it sure as shit won't be their IT departments.
It depends. Cable companies recently won a Supreme Court case to retain their classification as an "information service" which exempts them from some of the regulations of a common carrier (chiefly, that they would have to give access to their lines to competitors). This also means they can be held liable for what their users do legally. Can...depends on who's lawyer is doing the talking. It's also the reason why cable modem companies are a heck of a lot more strict than telco's.
That brings me to DSL companies. They ARE classified as a "telecommunication service" and ergo, a common carrier. This also goes for T1's, etc. and other telco provided services.
Now if the ISP does not handle the physical line provisioning, etc. then they are not a common carrier but may try this to keep their legal shield (common carriers are not legally liable for what their clients transport over it's service with a few caveats). If the ISP is involved with the telco end (and there are cases on record from way back dealing with modems that go both ways on this), then it could be considered a common carrier (but not in all instances).
The big deal here is competeing companies could use this law to show that cable companies are common carriers and try to force them to open up their lines (like CLEC's in the telco biz).
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Blocking p2p ports just forces people to adopt vpn solutions inorder to bypass any limitations set by their isp. Soon the RIAA will be complaining that they cant catch people because there using annonymous VPN gateways.
This was modded as interesting? Trolling, anyone? Hello?
The smaller telecom companies were selling you T1 lines, but when they broke the big company was ultimately the one to fix it. Meaning you called company B, who eventually called company A. Company A, being the big mean one that costs more, would take it's sweet time fixing problem for company B. Meanwhile company A's customers were fixed in a jiffy. Hell, i've even seen company A break things for company B, and then drag ass when it was time to fix it. Pathetic. And sadly, we cant afford to be down, so we have to go with Company A now (deregulation is forcing us anyhow).
That was Ernestine (Lily Tomlin) from Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In not from Saturday Night Pre-Recorded For Your Time Zone. Laugh-in was NBC's reply to the Smothers Brothers Variety Hour (on CBS) - you'll have to buy the DVD collection of the first year of the Muppet show for a reference to ABC's response.
BTW, there were some excellent jabs at TPC (The Phone Company) in the movie "The President's Analyst".
FWIW, most companies want some sort of regulation - telco's and cable companies don't want competitors muscling in on their turf - witness BellSouth's reaction to New Orleans bid to provide municipal wi-fi and the cableco's reaction to Verizon offering TV over VDSL and FIOS.
... is why I love the Canada Research Chair program, the Ontario postsecondary education system, and Michael Geist. His observations on the Internet are always legally informative, politically neutral, and rhetoric-free; at the same time they embody the sort of values, enshrined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, that Canada's laws are designed to protect.
His work is the exact antithesis of the partisan committee-authored 'think tank' reports that a lot of American lawmaking and lobbying seem to be based on, a direct effect of the mandate of the CRC. I find it very refreshing.
That sounds good, but most, who suggest it have not looked at all facts of history. One was mentioned on taxes. That littlw tax on our phone bill was to help pay for the Spanish American War. LAst time I checked I think it was over. Maybe I missed something. Those who are interested in looking at facts not often seen ought look at two books by Gabriel Kolko. I believe in regulation to some extent. If you look at when it began in the USA you will see Bush finger prints all over it. Some regulation is good, sort of like a ref in a hockey game or such. It is necessary to maintain order. With no regulation at all what do we think Bill Gates and al will do. Have a llok at John D. Rockefeller and his progeny and note what they did and still are doing. But on the flip side consider what they might or have done BY regulation. In two books Kolko argues that history may not be as we learned in school in all cases. He suggests that looking at the facts might show something different than we were taught. One book "Railroads and Regulation, 1877-1916" and the other " The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916" offer some interesting facts. When I went to school I was told the ICC was the result of farmers demands. Apparently searching U.S. governmnet records says otherwise, in fact they show that the railroads were the ones demanding regulation. But why? If you were a business and wanted to squash your competition, which would cost you more spending more on research, cutting your prices, buying him up...or buying some politicians, who then write regulations that give youy the advantage? GHW Bush was the big name behind NAFTA, as his son continues on. He's talking about selling the National Weather Service, FAA flight control at airports and more. I use to work for an electrical engineering consulting firm and we often talked about power deregulation. Save folks money? Yeh, if your GMC, Ford or the like. Gas? My gas costs me more now than it did, not only because of higher material cost, but I now pay shipping as well. I guarantee if the FCC regulates it will favor the M$s of the world, and isn't that one of the things the Halloween Docs talked about? If Gates can control web protocols he can kill linux, BSD or the like. Linux is a child of the web. There are some things I do not like about the web, but there are good things as well. At the bottom it's a great communications medium. I have more acces to facts I follow like outsourcing and illegal immigration as well as Linux et all, will I lose those and be stuck listening to the drivel the main stream media hands out? I hope not. Like I tell people, when I challenge open borders policies in the USA or job outsourcing, selling visas to multinational corps, if you don't call your reps and let them know what ou think you will surely get stuck with what the guys with money want. Calls will are no guarantee, but not calling is a guarantee. The more voices heard the louder the noise!