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Pay-to Play and the Tiered Internet
Crash24 writes "According to an article at The Nation, "industry planners are mulling new subscription plans that would further limit the online experience, establishing "platinum," "gold" and "silver" levels of Internet access that would set limits on the number of downloads, media streams or even e-mail messages that could be sent or received." " Tiered internet service may be inevitable folks. Brace yourself.
There are companies fighting this, trying to get policies put forth requiring network neutrality. According to the article, both Google and Amazon are against it, along with other special interest groups. I'm willing to bet that Microsoft would oppose it as well, since they're getting more and more into internet applications. Same goes for Apple.
Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T may be powerful, but they're going to have a hell of a fight if they're going up against Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Amazon.
Maybe it's time to create the Othernet where the rest of the world is networked.
I'm quite surprised that out of so many competitions, like GPS, satellite, Space program etc., which cost huge amount of money, no country is yet to create another internet.
On the other hand, if all service providers band together, we might finally see the feasibility of micropayment, so that a penny is charged to your broadband bill every time you access Slashdot.
Uncensored Google results requested and delivered by email
Is this possible proposed policy to establish equity? If so, I'm okay with that. I've often wondered that for the same $30/month as my neighbor I can download five of the latest linux distributions, sample 20 or 30 trial software packages (large).
What would bother me, and bother me greatly, would be if they established pricing baselines the cheapest of which match what people pay today. In other words, a money-grab.
People have long paid more money to make more long distance calls, that only makes sense. Why not for heavier internet usage? It makes sense that heavier users pay higher fees.
There also could be additional benefits (assuming this is a fair and balanced idea) -- that being a more moderated approach to internet usage. I don't doubt a significant slice of internet bandwidth is absorbed by indiscriminate downloading and uploading, and streaming. I know I don't think twice about downloading Photoshop Elements to trial for a couple days (~300MB) just because I can. I'm also just as likely to stream my music to whereever I am in the country from my server at my home, again, just because I can. How many others approach the internet in the same way? I'm guessing "many".
If users used the internet as a finite resource (which it is, by the way) the usability of the internet would improve almost immediately and expansion costs and needs would attenuate (my opinion). All of this would help keep costs and increased charges down (again, assuming businesses are here to charge us a fair price).
But, based on everything else I see in business, this may not pass the smell test. Sigh
The charged by the hour. Is this model going to come back?
www.oobersworld.com - For those that ride.
Fuck the industry planners.
it will only be inevitable if google does not enter the market.
-- lol pwned
I can see this being attempted, no doubt. However I simply cannot see it being accepted by the public. You can't take away something that was free from the public without causing a revolution. I don't think these people have as firm a grasp on the concept of the internet that they think.
It bothers me that the government is having such a field day with all these search engines, blasting them about censoring for China. Yet that same government wants to completely try to contain the internet for the capital gain and exploitation of certain telecom companies?
The internet is the biggest creation of our time, I really hope people won't lie down and let this happen. Use your voice people, do something, I know I will.
Fractured Element
The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment, and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!"
Fair enough.
And just as cable companies provide for local broadcasting under town square legislation--also under attack--so must Internet companies respect the venue for the exercise of free speech that the Internet has irreversibly become.
Did any of these CEO's pay attention in history class during the part about freedom of speech in the central square of corporate owned towns, do they just not care about a basic tenant of their own society, or are they laboring under some illusion that the system is sure to resolve any conflicts?
freeman
... wouldn't that entice the next generation of ISP competitors to offer a 1-tiered system? I'm thinking of Vonage of here and what its done for the LD market. If there's consumer harm there's an opportunity...
body massage!
Guess I'm over my slashdot article limit...
Seriously, we in Europe have finally gotten rid of the Pay Per Minute system with cable/adsl. You that have had it for so long, want to move to Pay Per View? You're not evolving, you're degenerating...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Way back in the day (think Compuserve), this is how things used to be. However, eventually competition forced providers to offer flat-rate service because that's what the market demanded. How is this any different? Any provider that abandons flat-rate pricing risks losing customers in droves.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
By demonstrating they are willing to control the delivery of content, they will lose their common carrier status and be subject to penalties for what they carry depending on violations of local laws.
This is a non-starter.
...and prepare yourself for finding ways to avoid the major providers. A few months back, I was messing around with finding ways to provide a wireless network within my community mostly for file sharing but also for finding ways to minimize our reliance on the pipes coming in (Comcast, SBC and 3 WiFi high speed providers) so we won't have to worry about it in the future.
Then it occurred to me that these minornets could very well be linked to one another -- microwave or other wireless connections. Sure, the latency goes up, but the reliance on the communications cartels (there is definitely a collusive conspiracy theory there!) is reduced greatly. You tie into the main Internet at a few points, set up your routing to get everyone into the main Internet in the fastest fashion, and you're set. It might be complicated initially but the software and hardware is out there to make it happen, IF NEEDED.
I really think that the whole idea of relying on the big boys' land lines might not be necessary. I was a endpoint on Fidonet, and got along just fine as technology progressed -- some people used X.25, some used landlines, some used ISDN lines, but we all got along. It was slow, but it worked, and it became better over time.
We have to thank the big providers for really being confused for so long as to how they can take advantage of the net. Now we have many ways to stay connected -- I connect to the web via my PDA (and my laptop) through my Samsung t809 with a Bluetooth connection. I'm using it right now, and I get 150kbps downloads -- more than enough. If I didn't have T-Mobile's great package, I know I have about 5 other wireless providers I could buy bandwidth from.
Give it time. Those who try to control you will not realize that there are those who know they can offer less control at a better price. Don't like the monopoly tiered service in your community? Go get a T1, and run a WiFi provider in your area. 3 of my neighbors pay me US$10 a month to get on my megapipe already. I could probably get another 20 of them if I really went out to try.
Tiered service MIGHT be what the average household wants, though. If the monopolies try it and no one comes in to offer a cheaper/less controlled service, the free market will have answered that question. I'd like to hear what the more authoritarian slashdotters here have to say about how the free market could fail the individual user in this case.
Just remember one thing -- if MegaCorp X is a monopoly provider of high speed bandwidth in your town, it isn't MegaCorp X's fault. Go blame the government who gave them the monopoly. If MegaCorp Y created their connections over previous monopoly status, don't ask MegaCorp Y to give you back what you gave them originally -- the right to be a monopoly. This is why I am against government licensing and regulations -- it creates these monopolies which come to affect us decades later.
It isn't the monopolies' fault that you let your local government give up your rights in exchange for bad service. In the old days, maybe it was OK -- it was either bad service or no service. Yet we see the slippery slope and how it affects us in the future, and we need to carefully think about the programs we're asking for today that might become bad monopoly services in the future.
from TFA:
Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
how will they regulate free access from munincipalities? once the libraries bill increases, and the local governments, this is gone. but it will never happen in the first place. again, look at the source...
Giving it more credibility just because it's in the news means you got 0wned by a public relations department.
If spam could be eliminated look at how much bandwidth would be saved. When my ISP (BellSouth) stops all the spam entering their network, then they can talk to me about how they need to prioritize my traffic because of limited capacity.
I hope this isn't the platinium quality service ...
When this hits a cresendo, I'll feel better knowing that this isn't simply a David vs Goliath, Internet users vs Telcos, but rather: David and an army of pit-bull technology lawyers vs Goliath.
Not to mention the fight from other coroporations, but I'll tell you one thing: I know many, many people including myself who would give these telecommunications companies absolute hell for going through with this. And note that these are mainly the "major" corporations. There are other telecommuncations companies offering services. And those who are immensely opposed to the idea would instantly switch over.
I honestly forsee shareholders not going for this idea either because it'll lose customers in the long run.
- Adam
The Computations of AdamR
http://www.adamreyher.com
Hasn't the general populace been victim to viruses, spyware, and such that hog up their bandwith? You'll see a huge outcry from people who state that they AREN'T using as much bandwith as the ISPs say they are. Give me a fool proof internet, and maybe we'll see some legitimate pay scales, but otherwise, this is total BS.
Unless the fcc steps in and screws this up, this is the perfect opportunity for companies like speakeasy to become more competative... simply by offering the same services they offer now. or for communities to pool their resources, get fiber, and set up a wifi mesh network to provide access to everyone.
Sitting Walrus Blog
Well, except for the fact that MSFT, Google, Apple, and Amazon need the telcos more than the telcos need them. By a wide margin -- and especially true for Google and Amazon (and eBay).
If this is successful, it will be the single largest "limiting" factor in the online world. What if this was the case 10 years ago? We wouldn't have the plethora of online stores we currently have, that's for sure. Or blogs. Or online games. Or P2P for that matter. Or VOIP. NONE of these "cool" technologies would have ever gotten out of the starting gate.
I could go on an on about how bad of an idea it is but I fear I am just wasting my breath. Until internet access is treated as a utility, this nonsense will continue to go on unchecked.
..US wasnt giving up the "internet-ownership"?
Ok, the industry goons look at the current model and say "we could make more money if we installed limits."
But wouldn't everyone have to do the same thing on the same day in order to make this work? If my cablemodem suddenly had these idiotic limits put on it I'd move to another service that very day.
How in the world could the industry get paying customers on a less capable model than what we already have? And how could they eliminate every single other alternative?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
My ISP has already done this. Fortunately, in the new tiered system I was at a bracket that already met my needs. So there was no 'net' disadvantage for me, and I can now get more that I would have ever been allowed under my existing agreement by electing to go to the higher tier.
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
It seems to me that there are plenty of contenders out there vying for the home broadband market, and with upcoming wireless standards more contenders will emerge. We're not going to be stuck choosing between cable and DSL. Unless the main providers can create an illegal cartel (and evade government prosecution for doing so), I can't see that tiered service will ever harm us.
I'm sure that there are light users out there who would love $8/month tiered service for the 8 megs of transfer they might use in a month. But for the rest of us, I bet we'll always be able to switch providers to an untiered service the moment our current provider offers an unattractive tiered plan. Bandwidth is only going to get cheaper and more of a commodity, even at the local level.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
My wife is in the Real Estate industry and I am in the Banking industry. Both have, in recent years, been the target of legal action for price fixing, which, as I understand it is fixing the price of a product or service in agreement with another individual or business, which is illegal. The general rule provides that a vendor may not in combination with another vendor agree to set a certain price thereby creating a fixed price within a certain market. The original article appears to be down, of course, but the summary sounds a lot like price fixing to me.
if i get a dial up modem, or a cable modem, or a t1, i have different levels of service
if you are saying they are going to offer me less bandwidth for the same $, then we have a problem, but i'm sure a competitor has something to say about that
but if you are saying if i pay them 2x$ what i am already paying for a significantly bigger pipe, i don't exactly see what the problem is.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So we'll be paying more, and getting less service?
.. then they should expect to give those up and open to competition.
.. and allow new players to build wired infrastructure .. and bypass these "providers".
.. why not let others? They'll pay up when they need real bandwidth .. and maybe then some will return the favor. Or is he view that everyone in society is bad? Not sure if it would save money part (you have to pay for he electricity of wifi and router equipment etc), but I'd sure like the idea of not worrying about a provider restricting my access to sites that didnt pay up, or forcing me not to use certain protocols like SSL.
If these companies got government/public aid that enables them to place wiring through cities/public places
And the FCC must allow people to build their own WiFi or other wireless network
We really need a wifi / wireless protocol that works on a reward for re-tranmit (like bittorrent) so that the self funding free wireless internet becomes a reality.
People need to open their wifi to the public, maybe use a program to limit it so that it doesnt affect their own download speeds when they're using it. But when not using
Curse you and your inevitable betrayal!
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If this happens, browser/box hijacking will definitely be a hotter commodity. AN you will certainly see a larger community of people writing better tools to unencrypt their neighbor's wifi key and let them pay for your Warez dl's.
Bury me in mashed potatoes.
The pipes belong to the public.
We the people made agreements as to what the terms were in which the cable and phone companies could lay and maintain those pipes. They cannot change the bargain now without coming back to congress and getting permission from the people to change the deal.
Call your reps!
That way google can charge those companies for making their connection USEFUL....
which would be hilarious, they both end up paying each other haha
Say we find these so-called "planners" and kick them in the nuts.
i will cancel my ISP account and use my PCs with only a LAN, (no WAN)
computers can still be usefrull without an internet connection to the outside world.
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
... that was when Internet connections were subject to the per-minute charges levied by the local phone loop owners.
Am I missing something, or does this just smack of wanting to roll back time?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
The cat is out of the bag and competition will keep it that way.
Saying that they will charge per e-mail or download is as unrealistic as the electric company charging you per piece of toast, or load of laundry that you wash. What they can charge you on is the bandwidth that you use. Similar to how the electric company can charge per kilowatt hour... Also... They could only ever charge you for what you downloaded. Can you imagine how pissed you would be to find out that all the responses to incoming zombie requests to you computer racked up a $400 "Internet" bill. Even then, people will not be happy with the idea that they have to pay $15.00 extra dollars this month because a Microsoft error led to a giant ass patch they HAD to download.
It will not happen, the die has been cast and you can't repurpose this airplane as a clown's scooter.
..welcome our metallurgical revisionist overlords.
industry planners are mulling new subscription plans that would further limit the online experience, establishing "platinum," "gold" and "silver" levels of Internet access
What happened to good old Bronze? Has this metal had its day? It used to be "Bronze, Silver, Gold" - you know, like the Olympics. Apparently there is no room for poor old bronze in this new scheme of things, of course implying that there are no poor people in this rich media experience which these benevolent, altruistic ISP's are planning for Joe Consumer.
They already realized the fighting the big guys won't work. So, they are now picking on the little guy.
But in reality some of the cable providers (or in the recent past) would terminate service for
using too much traffic.
Fight Spammers!
This business model is exactly what killed it, everyone split shortly after the changes were made. You can expect people to not happily go along with it this time either.
Just because you can, does not mean you should.
First Tier: You can connect. You might get advertised speeds, but you'll probably get a good 1/3rd of that. Speed will be almost zero during peak hours.
Second Tier: You can connect, and you don't get BAD speeds, but they're closer to bad than passable. You get one support call a month.
Third Tier: Current Standards
Final Tier: Higher than current standards at 3x the price.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
[i]"Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment, and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!"[/i]
Two thoughts here.
Why should L3 allow at&t's backbone to route traffic across their pipes or vice versa? Are they idiots or would they seriously rather have no interconnects and have the internet break down to multiple WAN's?
Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Google or Yahoo! or basically any other web site out there pay for their bandwidth and on top of this, the consumers pay for essentially the same thing on the other end. Basically they're double dipping and still complaining that they aren't making enough.
$sys$droids
Are you trying to tell us that there are no choices of ISP in the areas where these big telcos exist? I don't use any of the big ISPs here. I use small one that lets me do what I want. They have a 100GB bandwidth quota, but seeing as I use less than 10GB (sometimes 5GB) per month, I don't see it as a limitation.
Screw AT&T and all the other so-called bandwidth providers if they think I'm going to fork over any more money then I am currently paying.
Ya see, here in the Great White (as in snow) North Canada, I pay a premium price for unlimited downloads. Regular and basic plans have capped monthly limits.
I just can't see how the US government or more importantly the rest of the planet would allow these modern day robber barrons to create this tiered system. That would be like my cable company charging me $10 a month because I watched 100 more reruns last month.
And speaking of my cable company, how would local telcos charge for this "extra" bandwidth? Their pipe isn't going to get any bigger so its not a quantity issue or are they simply going to be tollgates for "priority traffic". Which is probably the case which means its NOT a bandwidth issue, its a money grab.
I think its rather timely that the $200 Billion Broadband Scandel is being released.
http://www.newnetworks.com/broadbandscandals.htm
$200 Billion Dollar Broadband Scandal, is a powerful critique that outlines a truly massive case of fraud. The Bell Companies (Verizon, SBC, Qwest, and BellSouth) used trickery and deceit to swindle the U.S. out of a promised 45mbps internet connection. They collected billions of dollars in regulatory fees, and now they are attempting to commoditize the Internet. Kushnick's book uses stunning detail to expose this treachery with accuracy and thoroughness.
You silly Murickans....
Most consumers of broadband already have a sliding pay scale that depends on the size of their pipe. For example, 1.5 to 6.0 Mbps DSL costs more per month than 384 Kbps to 1.5 Mbps.
e-mail messages that could be sent or received
If this comes to be, then there better be ways to find and destoy spammers. Because they'll be the cause of a lot of people getting reaching their "limits" and getting blocked.
As long as I have ftp access to linux distro mirrors, irc, bittorrent, and Slashdot, don't expect me to pony up any extra dough for "premium" internet content.
But how can it even be legal for Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T to agree to discontinue free service, or reduce output (where "output" is service to the customer, in this case)? Seriously, IANAL, how can this be legal?
The idea of competition is that, when Verizon does something stupid that punishes customers, I can go somewhere else. It's a real problem if all the gatekeepers can legally get together and decide to give us all the shaft. And not even to try to hide their cooperation against consumers?! Messed up.
If the internet becomes to expensive we techs should join with other Eduational Facilities and Buisnesses. Using Off the shelf gear and some wires we should wire these buisnesses together and rebuild an other internet without the telephone companies. And charge for builing the new infrastructure.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Well, gang, looks like it's time to go back to the dial-up BBS and email via Fidonet.
Party like it's 1989!
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
...until Google fires up the dark fiber
I'm probably going to get it for responding to "egg troll", but anyway...
Yeah, they own the pipes, but they are already charging people for the data being sent across it. If you make a long distance phone call, lets say, to your grandmother, would it be fair for the phone company to charge both you and grandma for the call? What about if they charge you for placing the call, and then charged grandma extra if she wants the sound of her voice at normal volume, instead of restricted to 10% volume?
Content providers pay a huge amount in connectivity already (I've worked for some, and have seen the bills) and my internet access at home isn't what I'd call cheap either (~$50/month). The backbone providers get their money from the connection providers that the content providers and users, like you and I, buy bandwidth from. So, they are already being paid for the traffic going across their pipes by the parties involved in the transfer.
I don't know about you, but I personally would prefer not to be double billed.
My karma is in a nose dive
Like Television? Seems to be logical next step.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
As spooky as "deep packet inspection" might sound, there's not much that can be done if all of the traffic is encrypted since there would be no way to differentiate between email, P2P, and normal web surfing. Yet another reason to start using Tor... aside from the whole wiretapping mess.
Fuck you Americans and your stupid ideas on how to charge the fuck out of people.
Tiered internet can suck my balls. If the internet goes like that, I'll fucking put up a free BBS again and to hell with you all.
This is just price differentiation at the retail level. Don't worry about it. Price differentiation is everywhere. When you go to the movies, you can go to see the cheap matinee, or more expensive evening show, and you can pay even more for the premium experience: a ticket plus a gallon of popcorn (or did you really think that 12 ounces of corn, popped and smeared with butter-flavored oil, is worth $5?)
This is completely different from asking service providers to pay for access to their customers.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Stop calling a content-biased-set-of-networked computers a tiered internet. It is by the definition of the IP protocol NOT the internet and should not be associated with it.
If your provider comes to you and says "we have new pricing. The rate you're currently paying gives you 10GB/month of data transfer." you say "fine"; and from that moment on, ensure you use exactly 10GB - 1byte every month. Write an application that takes care of this auditing for you; managing your usage so that you use right up to your threshold. Then give this application to everyone you know using the same provider. If they give you a 95th percentile throughput limit, then run traffic shaping software. If everyone starts to consume every last bit per second they're paying for, the providers will suddenly decide to back off.
I've seen some chatter on the NANOG list about this. The whole idea of tiered Internet service seems to be something cooked up by some insidious CEO, then other CEOs of big companies caught on, and before you know it, everyone's on the "competing for the extra buck" bandwagon.
Now, being a network admin myself, I have to wonder why the network admins, and other fighters-of-the-good-fight, aren't stepping up and saying, "No, this is a BAD IDEA(tm)."? I don't think it's just because they fear for the loss of their paychecks.
Every service that I can think of that started out pay-per-minute or pay-per-tier has gone by the wayside. Cell phones? You used to have to pay for every kilobyte of data transfer; now the offers are mostly unmetered. Dial-up? Same thing. You used to pay $XX for 20 hours, but not anymore. Seems to me that implementing an extortion-based plan like this is a huge backward step.
One thing I don't have any information on: is this just a US of A idea, or are these things talks happening in Europe, Asia, and elseware too?
In reality, the sweet spot is still the standard service. If I ever find myself needed an extra two or three Mbps of downstream transfer, it seems appropriate for me to pay an extra $10/month -- I'd obviously cease to be a typical "browsing and emailing" user.
nothing
The problem with the proposed schemes is that they want to meter *applications*, not bandwidth and usage. This is just wrong for any application. But it especially burns for email given the spam problem. I just installed an authentication filter for a client with a business class Cox cable account. He was getting 65000+ emails per day per domain for 20 domains, eating 3MB download bandwidth (they were just getting appended to a rotating log file since he couldn't even begin to try to find the legit mail in all the crap). All but 20 emails per day per domain are forgeries (and now get rejected in SMTP envelope thanks to the filter). Imagine the ISP charging per email SYN packet. Talk about unjust. Most of the 20 are still spam, but at least those spammers will say who they are (and so are closer to a "cold call").
Am I the only one who sees this reverting back to the time/transfer limits that even most dialups dropped years ago here in the US?
There are already tiers in place - you want more bandwith, you pay more - RCN used to charge $20 for 3Mb instead of 1.5Mb transfer rate. And I have 768 ADLS, but I could spend more & get 1,1.5,or 2 Mb. That's not what concerns me. What bother's me is that I do a lot of work over the net from home & a good portion of it involves good sized files. Reduced image quality/size is not really an option, nor is transfering only parts of the files. For 6 years now, I have been paying for the bandwith - not the transfer volume - if I have to go back to worrying about how much volume I have transfered, I am going to another service where I don't have to worry about it.
Also, if I have a monthly allotment, will the provider be counting all of the virus traffic coming to my router against me? I have a couple of MB/month of logs hitting my firewall of nothing but virus attacks against web servers. - That's not counting port scans and other crap.
Or can we then treat spam like faxed advertisements? IIRC, you can sue for something like $100/page if someone faxes you advertisements. That would be good. I have about $2bn sitting in my yahoo acct.
Just remember one thing -- if MegaCorp X is a monopoly provider of high speed bandwidth in your town, it isn't MegaCorp X's fault. Go blame the government who gave them the monopoly. If MegaCorp Y created their connections over previous monopoly status, don't ask MegaCorp Y to give you back what you gave them originally -- the right to be a monopoly. This is why I am against government licensing and regulations -- it creates these monopolies which come to affect us decades later.
What the hell happened to personal/corporate responsibility?
This may be true in some small areas. It has never been true anywhere I have lived (three cities in three states in the past 5 years). Right now I can purchase high speed internet from 4 different providers (Verizon, Comcast, Knology, BellSouth). And yes, I grew up in a small town in the midwest, single high speed providers are a rare circumstance there as well. Small town of 8,000 I grew up with in the middle of nowhere in WI has three high-speed providers, including wireless.
Not to mention this whole deal is prettymuch a non-issue anyways. Tiered pricing has existed for awhile. Comcast will sell you high-speed, or "premium" highspeed (6mbit or 8mbit). Knology will too (down to 256k). DSL has been offered in multiple "flavors" (for technical reasons, but you can downgrade at will... save a little money if you don't want the bandwidth).
...there is a well known mechanism already in place for them to oppose it in a straightforward way. It's called the 'market'. If they want our business, why don't they pay for our connections to them?
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
As a firm supporter of bronze, I'm shocked and appauled it was left out. Thank you for your time.
From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collusion
collusion takes place within an industry when rival companies cooperate for their mutual benefit. Collusion most often takes place within the market form of oligopoly, where the decision of a few firms to collude can significantly impact the market as a whole. Cartels are a special case of explicit collusion. Overt collusion, on the other hand, also known as tacit collusion.
According to game theory, the independence of suppliers forces prices to their minimum, increasing efficiency and decreasing the price determining ability of each individual firm. If one firm decreases its price, other firms will follow suit in order to maintain sales, and if one firm increases its price, its rivals are unlikely to follow, as their sales would only decrease. These rules are used as the basis of kinked-demand theory. If firms collude to increase prices as a cooperative, however, loss of sales is minimized as consumers lack alternative choices at lower prices. This benefits the colluding firms at the cost of efficiency to society.
Practices that facilitate tacit collusion include:
Uniform prices
A penalty for price discounts
Advance notice of price changes
Information exchanges
Swaps and exchanges
Collusion is largely illegal in the United States (and most of the EU) due to antitrust law, but implicit collusion in the form of price leadership and tacit understandings still takes place. Several recent examples of collusion in the United States include:
Looks like it to me...
Is if they do it, they'll be someone else who decides to try and make money by not doing it and advertising they don't. My bet? The cable companies go that route. They already like to fight that battle on the voice front. Cox is always advertising how their VoIP service comes with all this shit you have to pay extra for from Qwest. If Qwest started also restricting their data lines you can bet Cox would jump on it and advertise their unlimited service.
I also know it's something we won't stand for with our providers. When we negotiate contracts, we require no restrictions on access. that's not going to change, and I imagine other large institutions will be similar. While some people may not play ball, SOMEONE is going to want the million+ dollar per year contract.
Some posters are missing the point that this is tiering delivery for and charging premiums to content providers (read MPAssA, networks) for QOS over IP. Packet-level tiering is coming to you without touching your cable bill, but rolled into the cost of your DRM controlled media feed.
The Register has their typically informed and snarky take.
One more stake in the heart of the web. Even the bad new commercial internet will be gone soon. Plebes will be getting their government-mandated HD content at government-controlled pricing (think utility industries) and those of us in the know will be on the UnderNet.
illegitimii non ingravare
I don't know about you, but I only have two wires coming into my house that can be used for internet connectivity. The phone line and the cable TV line. That means that, eventually, there will only be at most two companies to choose from. In many areas, there will be only one. Yes, yes, there are lots of companies who can use those wires at the moment, but sooner or later, the big boys will successfully lobby to get those priviledges removed, and then we'll have a fine situation where you cannot chose your ISP. Then they can get away with whatever they want.
It's going to happen; you can bet on it.
Free Hans!
I have been online for over 20 years now, starting out with BBSs and compuserve at around $9 per hour for 300 baud and $20 per hour for 1200 baud for non prime time connection (30 and 120 characters per second for those of you accustomed to megabits). Slowly things have changed first the rates dropped, then fixed rate plans were offered, then we had AOL with their 1,000, 5,000,... 50,000 hours per month for free. For the last decade we have enjoyed an all you can eat for one low price buffet online. The problem with the all you can eat buffet model is it assumes that some people will eat very little, some will eat a lot and most will be somewhere in the middle. The problem for the internet is peoples appitie for bandwith is increasing, the average dsl user is transfering far more information than the average dsl user did 5 or 10 years ago. At one time the files were mp3s at about a meg or two each, then it was movies in various compressed forms at about a gig each, now with faster dsl, cable modems, etc. we are seeing people exchaning entire television series on a whim. This means price of the buffet must either go up, hurting the little old lady that only uses it for emailing the grand kids, and the occasional video clip. Or things must be switched to an a la cart menu where lite eaters can order just the basic "salad" and the real pigs can order 12 racks of ribs, 5 pounds of king crab, a full cheese cake, and 24 mugs of beer to wash it down.
Ike
"We don't care. We don't have to. (snort) We're the Phone Company!" -- Lily Tomlin from "Saturday Night Live: The First 20 Years" (1994 Cader Company).
It was Bronze, Gold, Silver...
Also dont forget encryption, If you can encrypt your stream then your ISP has no real clue what it is. I can foresee encryption becoming a major hurdle for this scheme.
Wireless will be so cheap that we'll just make our own wireless freenet. People won't even need to understand why. "Just put this thing on your roof, and you can have free Internet for life." "Sure, OK!"
Might have to find my old BBS day tape backups and get the modem out of storage and fire up Renegade. I guess this means we can all play LORD again on a 28.8k modem!
This sounds like it could be a good thing for small ISP's. Maybe the bell's and other cable companies will loose customers and come goto the local ISP's for service thats not tiered.
is to all turn to encrypted services. If everyone, from private users to content providers, switched to all SSL, then the networks would be unable to selectively cut services, they would only see a bunch of encrypted channels. The only reason they are trying this now is that they recently got software that could do a good enough job to cut specific services on an Internet link.
Let them be private. But don't let them connect to the REAL Internet. We should be pushing laws to prohibit them from using the Internet. Touche'
I'm telling you, this tiering of the commercial internet is a very, very bad idea. If this happens you'll see the internet fragment into local public networks similar to the old BBS days or you'll see someone come up with another national public network to compete with the Internet. Either way you'll see the information access divide between the poor and rich grow even larger. Just my 2 cents...
ConsultingFair.com
What happens to the Universities and other schools that helped to create the internet as a great way of knowledge sharing? IPv6 has been around for since the late 90's. IPv6 allows for all sorts of big brother controls on the stream. Anyone else get to work on the IPv6 network? The sucker is blazing fast! (Probably because no one is using it.) Anyhow--right now IPv6 is a great place to get just about anything being complained about in IPv4. All the music, movies, and porn are there if you know where to look. So while IPv6 does have the ability to control the datastream--I've not seen implemented. If the big telco's did try to force IPv6 with all its controls on the market place they would be shooting themselves in the foot. The door would be open for startups to offer the reliable IPv4 network all over again. Can you imagine going back to dialup!?
I don't know about you, but I personally would prefer not to be double billed.
<SARCASM>
What are you, some kind of hippie commie terrorist?
</SARCASM>
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
That's it, I quit the Internet.
Already paying $100 a month for my comcast broadband (no tv, just BB) and have often thought while looking the the multiple wireless routers in my local area that it wouldn't be that hard to partner and link with them as an out of band network; take this kind of pipe dream on a larger scale and you have a way to avoid much of the broadband hastle altogether, the internet grew as well as it has because it was a common carrier construct, take that away and you've turned each and every BB provider into the AOL of old, closed, lame and extremely limited in the content you might want. All of the large carriers today rode on the backs of others, this was a publicly (tax) funded network to start and this goes back to idea of selling air to breath; the money I pay is for a fast link in but certainly not for the "value" ad that comcast provides, I don't use their mail servers and would prefer not to see the ad-space they've sold to others........
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
Emails aren't accessed in the days of Compuserve, we can now download our emails off our phones. Also webmail to a network is just another webpage. How would they count webpages?
How about video? Watching one video is equivalent to thousands of webpages.
Isn't there already a tiered internet? We pay for speed, the more we pay, the faster and theoritically more MB we can download.
"Persistence is annoying success." - ghee22 11:28:1999 - 10:53:PM
Imagine if they start charging, say, 0.01 cent per packet. Internet radio would be a waste of money. We'd have to tweak our browsers to do maximum caching, and avoid unnecessary website visits, emails, or IMs. Web surfing would become costly, and VoIP or IPTV would be all but impractical. I have to hope that somehow, market forces would prevent that from making sense for the Verizons and Qwests to do.
Psi Xi
I just saw this link on MetaFilter, but haven't investigated it.
If anyone has more info, it'd be appreciated.
xpert Plus
1.5-6.0Mbps 384-608Kbps 1 Dynamic $49.99*
Pro
1.5-3.0Mbps 384-512Kbps 1 Dynamic $34.99*
Express
384Kbps-1.5Mbps 128-384Kbps 1 Dynamic $29.99*
A nice blog-post on this can be found here.
How is this a 5, Insightful? The point is being missed completely. It's not about metered access it's about metered access to specific applications. It's about telling someone they need to pay more to reliably to get point X. Who cares about metered bandwidth if that's what they want. It is the fact that they are trying to make the internet into private internets where you have to pay to play to access services.
Way back in the day (think Compuserve), this is how things used to be. However, eventually competition forced providers to offer flat-rate service because that's what the market demanded.
The reason we have the Internet as it exists today is not because "the market demanded it"; Compuserve and others could have prevented something like the Internet from happening indefinitely.
The reason why we got the Internet as it is today is because the government made a huge up-front investment and set the standards by which we all interoperate. That's what broke the logjam, managed to dislodge the old monopolies, and allowed small players to enter the market and compete.
Unfortunately, there was consolidation and we have a small number of big players again, and they are trying to repeat the Bell monopoly and all that. And they will succeed for a while, until the government eventually steps in and breaks them all up again.
The telcos may own the pipes, but the internet is more a series of protocols than the infrastructure that supports them.
... maybe the internet has to be destroyed in order to save it.
If the worst case happens and the telcos "destroy" the internet, why couldn't everybody with a wifi card get together over a metropolitan area and create an internet-like ad-hoc wireless network? It would be a little more complex because the nodes would be constantly moving around (so the routing tables would be hard to handle), but in principle it could work, and there would be no "pipe" for anyone to "own". Maybe this afternoon I will do some cocktail napkin calculations to see if this could work, but if anyone has a reference to something similar I'd like to hear about it.
Co-operatives could get together and arrange for microwave links between cities (or, they could buy some of the "dark fiber" that we keep hearing about).
No central servers, no routers, no single points of failure, no central logging facilities, no closed ports
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
if they should go tiered, I think they should lose their 'common carrier' status, and be liable for any and all illegal activities that occur on their networks.
Double billed is a lot better than tripled billed. You need to learn to put things in perspective. As my beloved Texas Tech coach once said "if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it."
My ISP has been doing this for months now.
Music is everybody's possession.
It's only publishers who think that people own it.
Fuck Beta
~John Lenno
I so wish these people would get out of the 18th century.
(MRC="insulate")
This will never happen. A few big corps that still don't understand what the Internet is are trying to buy it. Even if the megaISPs buy into this scheme, it'll fail because it will become such an important thing to so many people that you will have local miniISPs flaring up all over the place. One HOA that I've lived in actually purchased their own T1 and ran cable to all homes and the ISP service was part of the monthly HOA fee. It was faster and cheaper. The more you see these mega corps trying to force themselves into a controlling position, the more they will loose control. The reason... the very Internet they are trying to own. People are more educated and are communicating to defeat these things before they happen. We are a more aware public than we once were.
It'll never happen...
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
At first I was angered by these companies trying to charge twice for internet connectivity, once for the connection and again each time you use it.
But now I'm having second thoughts. Perhaps this tiered market is a good idea. I'm thinking that I'll introduce tiered service levels for access to the easement on my property, and I think as a citizen I will request a new tiered system for corporate access to public property. Perhaps something like this would work:
Silver Level, for a minimal fee of say $100 USD per foot per year I'll allow telecom's to lay cable through my backyard.
Gold Level, I'll actually let the telecom's use their cable they laid in my backyard for a minimal licensing fee of 20% of all revenues related to any data which traverses the lines in my backyard.
Platinum Level, for a minimal fee of $10 per connection I'll allow the telecom company to make data connections from their cable in my backyard to cables in the neighbors backyards.
The tiered program for public property will be similar but will require that all revenue from the program is paid back to all tax paying citizens.
This is just my first rough draft, it will need much more refining, but you know I really should have more control over how my property is used and I should be allowed to participate in the capitalization of said property.
burnin
If all of these companies are coming up with these ideas and circulating "white papers" among themselves with the intent of setting industry wide pricing hos is that not a violation of antitrust laws.
Is buying a Harley Davidson as your first motorcycle since you were 16 at age 49 a midlife crisis issue?
What happens if Google, Amazon, eBay, Apple etc decide to blacklist a telco? Bellsouth limits access to them so they respond by blocking all views coming form that network, and launching a media campaigh letting you know that you need to switch to another network to access them. I think I can tell you who would win that one. I persaonlly care little who provides my access, I care only about the content that I'm after. If I can't get it on one network, I'll go to another.
ESPN successfully broght pressure on Cox in a similar manner. Cox didn't want to pay as much as ESPN wanted and so threatened to take ESPN off the channel listings. ESPN in turn let all Cox customers know what was going on. Cox customers got mad and said they'd switch to sat service if this happened, ESPN is still on Cox.
Once they exhaust every other avenue of revenue the last thing to get attacked is always service. If they are expected to increase profits 5% well the simpliest way is to reduce service 5%. It's what's happened with helath insurance and even food. Try to buy a pound of prepackaged name brand coffee. They are all less than a pound for a reason. Most prepackaged foods went through a similar contraction. Instead of 50 olives we load 49 and change it to weight rather than number. Petty? With high volume items or services it can be millions a year. A friend that worked at Universal was given a raise that was calculated to the half cent. When he complainted to accounting that it was rediculous they calmly explained given the number of employees over the course of a year it saved them tens of thousands of dollars. Reductions in service are unavoidable as execs turn to bean counters to find the next profit increase so they can justify their new raise. Who looses? The consumer.
Look, I don't know about you guys, but I'd be more than happy to pay an extra $20 or even $50/month to have faster access than my existing cable internet (which is notably faster than the DSL service in my area). My problem is that the next tier in my area is about $500/month. Tiered access makes sense; you should pay for what you use. Otherwise you have the traditional economic problems of free-riding, adverse selection, and moral hazard.
Maybe you're all upset because you've been free-riding on lower-usage members, but think about it this way -- the people who have no clue that their computers are spam zombies will presumably be the lower-paying broadband users, and won't clog your access nearly as much.
Think about it.
This is an easy problem to solve. If the telcos want to provide tiered access to their lines, let them. But if they base their service on the content of the traffic, they're no longer a common carrier, are they? So take away their common carrier status, leaving them liable for all the traffic that traverses their network. I don't see any reason to allow them to have their cake and eat it too. But I think they should get to decide which side of the fence they would like to operate on.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
The article makes use of the ATT/SBC quote of "Why should I let them use my pipes?"
Well, when someone like Google pays their hosting bills, they're paying for access to that pipe. Isn't that why we PAY hosting bills? What did I miss?
If you don't want to sell access on your backbone, then don't. The Internet and its open access system made ATT/SBC its money, as well as many other companies. Do they seriously intend to turn it around and shut down the system that made them rich? Do they intend to create a private online service, like AOL? If that could work, then why are people concerned about AOLs future?
I hope all of this talk is just people over reacting, but some how, I suspect it's more than that.
-Patrick
"They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
It already exists. It is called free dialup (or paid) versus cable or dsl.
This is just a money grab.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
this is the ONLY reason that could make me stay longer in grad school (resist the temptation.. resist)
I'm already paying $60 a month for RR service, I pay a $10 PENALTY each month because I do not subscribe to cable TV.
/. combined will earn in a lifetime.
According to the contract, I get "UNLIMITED" 6Mb down/450Kb up service for $45 a month, plus the $10 penalty for no catv plus taxes and fees for a grand total of $60 a month.
You want to choke me off to make me pay MORE to regain what I'm getting/paying for now?
F*ck you and your Tony Soprano business plan.
You know, this reminds me of coffee.
I have two coffee cans. One of them I bought 12 years ago, one I bought last night. Both cans are identical in size and shape and volume, both from the same company.
The can from 12 years ago is stamped on the outside "Net weight 16oz." I paid 89cents for it.
The can from last night is stamped on the outside "Net weight 11.5oz." I paid $2.89 for this one.
Same thing with bleach. Now you get a "compact" and "concentrated" bottle of bleach.
2.5 quarts of 6% sodium hypochlorite costs you almost $2 now.
4 quarts of 5.25% sodium hypochlorite used to cost you about 59 cents, just about 4 years ago.
Cheap, stingy, greedy bastards.
I'm sick and F-ing tired of this less for more world. When are the people going to say enough is enough and pick up the pitchforks and torches and mob these crystal palaces and ivory towers and burn these greedy bastards at the stake?
They chip away at our lives, just a tiny bit today. And no one notices or cares because, hey, it's only a tiny bit. No problem. And tomorrow, it's just a tiny bit. And the next day, and the next.
When you allow the thief to rob you over and over, why should he ever stop when he has a willing victim?
These people that benefit from this, they make more money in one year than everybody on
How many Rolls Royces does one man need? 5? 25?
How many Lear Jets? 2? 10? How many homes? 4? One for each season?
Hell, we can sell less for more so why not buy a home in every country?
And a yacht and a jet to travel to them all!
And at the bottom, the little people grovel and moan quietly as they hold out their dirty tin pans for a smaller serving of gruel.
Yes, life is good at the bottom as long as your gruel is lukewarm.
There should be, innately, three tiers of service. General, for which we pay our flat standard amount. Low latency, which those who require it would pay for. (Hopefully it could be bought when needed.) And then "Emergency" traffic, which would be for special types of applications or reasons society deems important enough. For example, if a security system detects an intruder, and tries to start streaming video of the break-in to the cops or some security company, that should have presedence over that person's neighbor's 14 year old son playing WoW.
The types of applications that would qualify as "Emergency" applications would have to be defined "by society," but such provisions are needed IMO.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Where I live, I have two real choices for broadband internet. Cable at $50/month, or IDSL for $100/month. For those of us in semi-rural or rural areas, we don't have a ton of options, and the monopolies sure do take advantage. I pay Cablevision another $55/month just for basic cable (50 channels, 10 of which are free over-the-air but too far away to pick up with an antenna). In a place where an antenna would get me 4 channels, two of which are in Spanish. They have a captive market that has no one else to turn to, and they take unfair advantage of it. I used to have DirecTV, but given the strong winds we get off of the ocean, I got tired of paying someone $100 to re-mount it on the side of our house at least every year. And I'm just waiting for Cablevision to start blocking my Lingo VoIP service (at $20/month) to force me to use theirs at $40/month + higher international rates.
This is a company whose executives live very extravagantly and own sports venues and teams, as well as lay off half of their employees on a yearly cycle so they can re-hire them at entry-level wages.
If you ask me, cable and telephone service should have more government regulation, if not government ownership (provided that competition cannot be enforced). Our communications infrastructure is too valuable to leave in the hands of monopolists. Either enforce competition or hand over control to the government.
"mesh routing"?
Sustainability and energy independence essay
They own the pipes, so they have every right to charge what and how they please. If you don't like it, install your own pipes and network. Otherwise quit complaining.
1) As far as bandwidth, that's a non-starting issue. Since the dawn of the internet, the cost of access has been based on 1) the speed of the pipe and b) the quality of service. As anyone who's ever crammed 150 users through a 1.5/128k ADSL line knows, the bandwidth is a livable issue in most cases; reliability is not. Today, reliability feels less of an issue than previous so we're really focused on price of access here.
Sure, everything is flat-rate today on the consuming ending however that does not translate to the providing end. Looking at that, the pipe providers adopted a socialist pricing model to lure users to the system. For every 10 people that used 10% of their bandwidth a month, there was 1 pulling 1000% of the average. This worked well when most internet use was dynamic/static text/email/IM based.
With the advent of mp3s and now rich media, everyone is pulling more bandwidth and the social model falls apart at the current pricing levels since the providers have to pay for their bandwidth usage.
The solution is to meter bandwidth and charge for the use, much like every other product or service in your life. There are no gas stations (that I'm aware of) that charge you a flat-fee to fill up your tank nor any cellular company that provides flat-rate service for your calls. Everything is measured per use.
In the beginning days of the internet, there was enough capital investment to create an overcapacity; this was done to spur innovation and keep the barriers of entry low. Someone brought up the CompuServe example; the prices of CS were so high, that only those who NEEDED the services would pay. CS was a toll-booth that charged you access fees to hit the pre-Internet. You had to have a reason to go from point A to point B and that reason had to justify the charge.
With the advent of flat-fee, the road was a non-issue and people began erecting destinations in cyberspace... the rest is common knowledge.
Now we are at a point where internet bandwidth is a huge commodity yet the pricing model has not adapted. Personally, I'm all in favor of micropayments and the rest until the point at which everything runs over the internet and you pay a fee for essential a "data spigot". Until then, we must change the fact that my mother, who sends 40 emails a month, and myself, who hosts torrents and downloads massive amounts of photographs, pay the same fee for access.
On a philosophical point, I would say that 1) if you cannot measure something, you simply have not yet developed the technology to measure it and 2) once you can measure something, the Old Way (tm) of approximate pricing is obsolete. Previously, there has not been a huge movement to quantify traffic based on absolute use because it was enough to play the averages. Now that we can measure and different entities consumer different quantities of resource, we have to measure and charge equivalently else we drift away from the free market toward corporate socialism, which is not A Good Thing (tm).
2) The sticky issue is common carrier status. In order to classify traffic, companies must inspect it. Once they inspect traffic, they bring new liability for having interacted with the information. They can easily use broad metrics, like overall quantity of data transmitted as packets are being counted and routed yet using specific packet inspection technologies is a different animal. The solution is some class of router that examines just the headers, but then anything masquerading is going to pass through. So the plan to charge for access is valid and good yet the idea to charge based on the type of data is a bit tougher.
Overall what we are seeing here is the consolidation of two (maybe more) distinctly separate industries, that of content creation and content distribution. Previously, the telephone companies could care less what went over the wire and the content companies could care less about QOS concerns (beyond a dialtone and/or cable color bars).
Now that everything is so int
Someone mentioned it.
I think it's time for us to create tiny, RFID-like devices which can locate and propagate TCP/IP wireless transmissions using solar power.
Then, people interested in creating and using an unfettered 'net could start sprinkling millions of these things everywhere
Revolucion!
MjM
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
Frankly, the current business model does not seem sensible or even just to me. I live in a large apartment with 6 other tech-savvy college students. Needless to say we consume a lot of bandwidth. We pay the same amount for internet as my parents, who only have broadband because it makes Yahoo mail load faster. (Indeed, individually we pay less, as the bill is split between the seven of us.) I suspect the concept of "tiers" is what upsets people, rather than the underlying idea that people should be billed for internet usage consistent with their degree of use. I think a metered system would be more acceptable to the public. "Tiers" raises the possibility that the internet, or certain parts of it, could be "blocked," a notion which is anathema - and rightly so. If internet use were metered, your access would never be constrained - you'd just pay for it at the end of the month.
If this happens I predict an increase of web surfing at work and at public libraries.
This debate would be over in a day if the other networks simply unplugged the first network to try it.
The concept totally defeats the idea of the Internet and peering. The ultimate outcome of this is to remove all peering points and have Google/etc negotiate with each net individually.The last mile networks are simply holding their customers out for ransom to the highest bidder.
And you know what? Interner in Russia is well alive, and we shop online, and earn money online, and everything. So I can bet the earth is not going to shatter if Verizon starts doing something weird. Besides, if they do, there sure will be some daring competitors to outmarket them. Internet is decentralized and cannot be owned.
As for "other internet", i dont get it. Whatcha you people're talking' bout? Is there any sence in getting separated? And even if someone is really going to make that, there sure are going to be gateways...
These companies are already making huge profits from it's customers. Now they want to squeeze even more from us. They just want to squeeze all they can.
If they do pull this off, we will see something new pop up that will beat the bandwidth limitation they have and suck away thier profits.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
...I will lobby my ISP to charge these same companies for every incoming Email as well.
Madness.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
this is a terrible idea from greedy people. but on a positive note paying for bandwidth will destroy the market for tacky flash intros! on a negative note... anyone buying music/movies online will be paying extra. i cant imagine systems like itunes would support this concept...
Where privacy, consumers' rights, freedom and the few remaining shreds of democracy are concerned, everything seems to be going downhill fast :( Sometimes I have to ask myself, is this really happening? I wanna leave America. How hard is it to get citizenship in Canada, UK, Ireland, France, or Australia? Anybody know?
Gloomy today.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either.
Benjamin Franklin
Finally, a way to bury the knuckleheaded ILEC's and their knuckleheaded ways ...
They know that internet access is increasingly becoming a commoditiy service that gets cheaper by the minute.
They don't like that - so they are flailing around to try and invent some business model that they hope we all buy - guess what - nobody will!
Come on! Are they insane? retarded? or both?
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
The big technology companies (such as Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Apple, etc..) will erect alternate backbones and most likely will cover metropolitan areas with wifi. Expect major wars between the tech and data carriers if this were to occur.
Information will always get cheaper. it is inevitable.
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
. . . if that means Verizon, SBC, Comcast, and everyone else involved etc. will lose their common carrier status and legalized monopolies, allowing others to come in and offer superior services at better prices. :)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I think you are pretty close to the real problem.
The way the article read to me, it's not just the bandwidth available to my house. The issue is preferential treatment, or blocking, of content based on the type of content / application protocol and/or *WHO* the content is coming from.
I buy a service with a certain rated upload and download speed.
I read a political blog, which is hosted somewhere with a contract for certain up/down bandwidth.
In the middle of that, the powers that be decide it just isn't very important to deliver the message, at least quickly enough to be useful. It's kind of the equivalent of a cyber-bomb to Al Jazeera, in the worst case. Of course, this sort of BS probably won't usually happen, but it sucks that they want to deregulate to the point where it can.
Mmmm. I love the smell of fascism in the morning -- smells like, stupidity!
Yow! I'm supposed to have a plan?
This is just like the mobile companies. One byte of email information costs x, but one byte of jpeg information costs y. etc. Complete nonsense. Just vote with your feet when they try it.
The saving grace may be municipal wireless (or even wired through, say, power lines) Internet access. A city shouldn't have the marketing concerns for value-added services as these so-called regulated monopoly carriers. This is probably why the concept is being so vigorously fought by the telco and cable companies. As long as you have somewhere else to go they can't make you life too difficult -- or expensive.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It sounds like a chicken and egg argument. The CEO of AT&T doesn't think that Google should benefit from using AT&T's pipes. But if there was no Google, Yahoo, Amazon, etc, then nobody would want to use the pipes(or use it less). What the carriers don't realize is that consumers are paying these ISP's upwards of $50/month to get to Google and Amazon. AT&T should be thanking Google for giving consumers a reason to pay $50/month. Back when the internet sucked and you couldn't find anything, pre-google days, it was only worth $19.95 month and dial up was good enough. Now that we have P2P, Google, high quality streaming media, it's worth $40/month. You take away P2P and watch how many people drop back to dial-up.
I see a future where people don't have "free range" web access or email at home at all. You want the news? Subscribe to it. You want porn? Subscribe to it. Don't be surprised when email and web browsing becomes something you use at the office in a closed inTRAnet system.
Fellow slashdotters please, for the love of Jesus, Allah, Buddha, Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, and your Wiccan High Priestess:
PLEASE email and call and harass your state AND federal representatives and senators in any way, shape, or form. Let them know that you will make it your life's mission to remove them from office if they let the telcos and cable companies do this. We can be effective. Look at how the politicos crumbled when they threatened PBS funding and we rose up.
I already pay for my bandwidth and so do you.
Fsck the corporate overlords!
I can't belive that these ISP companies have the gaull to try this as technology is getting faster (eventually fiber to the home) and coutries like Korea offer cheaper internet at 100X faster (right now!) than the typical North American experience using existing cable technology.
It's not like the technology is slowing down, it's getting faster all the time. Besides, what is this going to do to the technological advancement here in North America when you can't send emails? (what is this? emails take up space (bing bong, you have exceeded your 3 emails/month at sloth level 1, please insert credit card, for faster, less interrupted web experience, please pay us $5.95 every day for the next month, thank you for using #@#$%$ and please stand by for 500 megs of new pop-ups..have a nice day!))
Shaw cable (here in Canada), decided that the "average" user uses 1 gig/day (extra use costs $$$ more)(bull), whereas Telus ASDL figured their users use 5 gigs/day...Sort of wants to make me switch over.
We are really going to resemble a 3rd world country here in North Amercia in 10 to 25 years with all the manufacturing is done in China, the product development is done in China, the new standards are set in China, the faster inernet is availible in China etc, now we are getting speed bumps in the internet and, of course, microsoft is going to help this along by requiring that drivers for vista be registered with a certain commercial 3rd party company so there goes all the millions of hardware/software (linux, OS?) inventors/developers who can't affor the $500 US to get their drivers registered (do you really think that MS is going to register linux (etc) drivers easily?.
What about all the billions of tons of hidden DRM crap that exisits now in your pc dvd player and XP, I can hardlly wait for vista's new "view of the world".
Perhaps Steve Jobs could make the new Intel iMacs require none of this driver registration crap to that the next USB pic-based micro project I build can work with imac (after all, that's why the PC became the platform for 99% of all hardware/software projets out there, it was not a closed system). Now, its Steve's turn to establish a slightlly less DRM enabled system that can run OSS stuff etc.
Just give me the slower DRM free internet/Operating system world of even 2 years ago!
As soon as its legal manufactures will be more then glad to sell us turn key and cheep hardware.
You say who will we talk to? I for one will be talking to google. and the rest will follow.
Until then who do I ask to offer Google access put up an antenna in my yard, I am on top of the hill, in exchange for Internet access.
While your listing the things that succeded due to internet freedom, don't forget about the things that failed because of ISP/Telco trickery.
*Video confencing still has not taken off. Not because of general bandwidth limitations, but because of upload caps.
*Telecommuting is limited due to blocks, throttleing, or "accidental" outages on ports necessary for telecommuters. (Those of us that do telecommute often pay dramatically more to not have artifical barriers.)
I'm sure others could add to the list. It is the video confrencing that pisses me off. The upload speeds are always so much lower than the download speeds in just about every package that you need a package with way more download speed than necessary just to get sub par upload speeds.
I telecommute, and work on projects that very often require team coding. As in two people sitting together looking at the same screen. Screen sharing works, and we are very productive, but sometimes it would be a whole lot easier if I could see the other coders finger pointing at the screen, or piece of paper.
And, before the trolls come out and tell me I should just move closer to my work, and go into the office, keep in mind. My clients and I are saving money, reducing infrastucture costs, saving air quality, while at the same time improving my quality of life as well as that of my family. I think it is good for me, my son, and society that I get to keep my child home with me most of the time instead of shipping him off to spend more time with a daycare provider than he does with his family. I also have no desire to move myself and my family next to an industrial complex.
Oh well...ditch the greedy bastards and simply have LAN parties. This is an easy way to cut out having to work from home after hours. The web is cool, but it ain't that cool - especially when I find myself scouring eBay for sweet Warhammer deals for hours upon end. And I pay for that? Tiered access can shove it!
It really depends on who can buy off Congress, oops, I meant lobby better to Congress.
Read the whole post next time... the point is that they cannot bring it to an unrealistic level of abstraction. Such as... You downloaded 4 ISO files last month and they're worth $40 a piece regardless of whether the were 30MB or 300MB.
YES they can charge by the amount of bandwidth you use. In this analogy I'm saying kW/h is like Mbps where a slice of toast is like an ISO file. Two of those are hard and fast units of measure, the others can vary on a case by case basis.
I then go on to say... customers are going to reject that pretty quickly. There are so many things on your computer that you cannot micromanage that use bandwidth... If they don't price it fairly people are going to get pissed off. That's still not enough though...
Now tell me... have you ever looked at a log from a firewall or a router to see how many times little packets are zooming back and forth because some asshole in China can't patch his pirate copy of Windows XP? How is it fair that I should pay for ANY of the bandwidth that jackass uses for me?
That's why residences pay flat fees and businesses tolerate sliding expenses because they have something to gain (money) by having a presence on the Internet. You think these business models happened by accident?
I'm sorry I went on a rant... you can go back to coding for Windows Vista again.
This kind of practice borders on collusion, doesn't it? Or is it a cartel? Personally, I don't believe that any _one_ company can take control of it, and those that have tried have found out why. But competitors talking about how to artificially raise prices by instituting artificial controls, would definately have some realm of viability. What is needed is atleast one major player refusing to join the pact. Which is why this disturbs me even more, since they are blatently sending messages to one another trying to see who's in...
The government seriously needs to bite this in the ass, but without going too far in the other direction.
Ok, I MAY need to put off my tin foil hat but hey, today is a good day to make wild conspiracy theories.
[tinfoil mode on]
Don't you find the timing is perfect for a governement to show how bad things can happen if companies continue to be unregulated ? Let the dark specter of an Internet fission haunt a few blogs and watch all the (*sighed*) blogosphere suddently in favor of worldwide internet regulations.
[tinfoil mode off]
Or it could be just usual greed...
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
You might recall this happened when Prodigy decided that some BBS were more equal than others and started censoring content to keep their Family Friendly image. The users of the spicier discussions set up e-mail distribution lists and Prodigy tried to stop them by suddenly imposing a cap on free monthly e-mail. They deserved to go down over this, and rightfully did so. Some in the industry still remember this lesson.
One hope I have for this new situation is that there will be a provider who realizes that just providing uncensored pipes is a very good business model, and they will succeed because of it.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The telco needs to stop milking their devoted customers for every little penny they can get. In America, I thought monopolies were illegal... How appropriate, too... the ad atop this page is for veriZon business-class DSL. Way to go /.
Just goes to show you that everyone has a price.
From TFA: 'At the core of the new power held by phone and cable companies are tools delivering what is known as "deep packet inspection." With these tools, AT&T and others can readily know the packets of information you are receiving online--from e-mail, to websites, to sharing of music, video and software downloads.'
Doesn't this deep packet inspection violate privacy laws? Obviously, I am not an attorney, but it seems illegal on the surface. What do the experts say about this?
Yes, your connection gets better when you pay more. Nobody is disputing that. I'm happy to pay more for DSL than dial up.
The dangerous part is if the nationwide networks effectively SHUT DOWN some kinds of traffic. What good does it do to be able to shuttle stuff up/down to your local ISP, if the nationwide carriers decide your content is to undesirable/subversive to carry it out across the "wide area" at a reasonable speed?
Folks, deregulating a public utility is just another inroad for corporate fascism.
Yow! I'm supposed to have a plan?
If you don't want others using your bandwidth, get out of the Internet business.
Not only that, but if someone's traffic is going through your company, you either already sold that network access to someone (who is probably, in turn, selling access to someone else), and are making your money, or those people broke into your system and you have other ways to fight that.
TFA is from "The Nation", which has a particular slant ... antiBigCorporation, TheSkyIsFallingBecauseWalMartIsTakingOver. Which has some merit, but can occasionally (and in this case definitely) be overly alarmist.
TFA furthermore makes references to white papers, but the link takes you NOT to primary source white papers, but to "democracticmedia.org", which links to "white papers" that are ... kept on the same site.
In other words: No primary source material. No proof other than innuendo and hype.
Now: would Verizon actually profit from a tiered system? Well -- it already does. Business-class DSL offers twice the bandwidth of Consumer-class DSL. Would they love to charge even more for a higher-differentiated tier system? Sure. Anyone surprised?
But now, the article would have us believe that in addition to a price tier for bandwidth, the telcoms are going to have a price tier for total usage (presumably per month, which is a type of bandwidth in a way). NONSENSE. It's unprofitable for the simple reasons that
(a) keeping the meter running on each little packet is a waste of their servers,
(b) customers are going to be very ticked when either they are "cut off" when they reach their limit or else are charged extra every month for overage (do you keep your cell phone plan if you get charged for extra minutes every month?),
(c) customers are going to be really ticked when little Johnny plays WoW for 36 hours straight and runs up a $130 bill.
As a result, sub-providers will spring up: people who pay Platinum for unlimited access -- and you know that telcos will have to have that top level available -- and then allow subscribers to tap in for a flat fee.
There is simply no way that a use-limited tiering system will prevent itself from collapsing.
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
Two points...
1. Internet access is not a necessity, we can live without it just like some people don't pay for television.
2. If people start dropping their internet service because of this behavior, the market would adjust. I happen to give the corporations a little credit though, I think they're smart enough to not implement bad ideas... Or at least no all at once. Comcast would be happy to watch Bellsouth do something stupid like raise rates or tier services and then market that they are cheaper and faster.
Go take off the tinfoil hat and get some Prozac. Even if a corporation is out there to try and stick it to you... You would have to let them.
take up drinking as a full time hobby instead of web surfing and playing BF2 online.
except for the fact that MSFT, Google, Apple, and Amazon need the telcos more than the telcos need them. By a wide margin -- and especially true for Google and Amazon (and eBay).
I don't know about all of that. Google, Amazon et al need users, the users need access. If there were no blogs, online stores, p2p sites, etc, there would be no need for "internet" access. I'm not paying for internet service just to have it - I'm paying because that is what it takes to get on the "interweb".
The problem is telco providers are in the middle and trying to get into the content control/creation/access game. If I were an Apple, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon or eBay, I'd ask the telcos: Aren't you rich enough; don't you make enough money selling access to our services? The phone company wants to become the cable company (which is itself a total screw job. you pay for access to channels that are in turn paying themselves by bombarding you with ads - it's like being taxed twice and no doubt how things would operate under this proposed system).
All-in-all: Where will this leave independent content creators? If something like this happened the big names would all get together and share the pie - the rest of us with small sites would be designated the "free Internet zone" and not get a fscking dime.
Stupid idea.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Intentional or not. Mismanagement, utterly stupid investments and missing opportunity after opportunity, the bell's have consistently lost huge sums of money over the twenty years. Why the hell should a company be allowed to exist if it can't compete?
Too bad Comcast and Venison don't see this, conspire to kill the bell and replace our nations obsolete telecommunications infrastructure. It's inefficient, excessive and is corporate welfare for companies well past their going out of business clearance sale.
I wouldn't mind too much if consumers had a choice. They don't and this falls into the realm of conspiracy, anti-competitive practice and monopoly.
At the Federal State and Local level, we need the right to build and maintain our own networks if providers are going to start doing this kind of bullshit. The back bone is ours anyways (or at least taxpayers have yet to be reimbursed). An extra 5 bucks a month in property taxes would be more then enough to cover a city with wireless, let the content providers and consumers decide who to choose.
It'll never actually stick. It's the same sort of idea as unlimited access. Remember back in the day, when you had 20 hours a month? Maybee 30, 40?
Long gone, aren't they..
If they do it, Google or the such will go ahead and build their own damned network, and eventually, anyone implementing this sort of idea will be forced to remove it to compete.
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
We make a gigantic TOKEN RING! And we can all sit around a campfire with our computers and sing songs and eat hotdogs from a stick in front of their headquarters'. That'll teach the providers, we'll hippy our asses out to them until they're too grossed out by the smell of our unwashed bodies and computers to care about tiered internets.
space is pretty cool.
...where each platform/service has exclusive content, and people who want multiple providers' exclusive content have to buy multiple machines/subscribe to multiple services.
I wonder how many people here on Slashdot have an Xbox and a PS2 (and maybe a GameCube), just for this reason...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
If they really wanted to limit the bandwidth of users because of costs, they should have done that years ago when High Speed internet became a common offering to users.
... and they should be!
I think they (Telcos) are being greedy!
VoIP is coming, and there nervious!
Why not. After all the RIAA is suing a woman who says she's never even owned, or turned on, a computer.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
dial-up, dsl/cable, T1, etc....
Well... I've been thinking about stockpiling all this bandwidth; I guess it's time to start storing it away for a rainy pay-to-play kinda day. :)
I'll be changing my nick to packet_pincher
If ISPs offer tiered service by lowering the price from current prices on slower service, the market might decide to tolerate this.
If they offer tiered service by charging current prices for the slowest service, and higher prices for faster service, the market will decide they don't really need internet access at all.
It is always a mistake to demand higher prices for the same service, or force lower service for the same price. People simply won't bother.
Changing it so that it is all cable acces, and some people get a discount from full cable price by accepting limits on how much bandwith is fine.
I do agree that it should be content nuetral. No way should they charge you more for going to Google instead of to Yahoo.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
This is going to bite companies in the butt, as they push more and more people to work from home. So instead of my paying $49.99/month for cable modem access, I'm gonna be charged $99.99/month for my 'gold tier' service? I'm sure my company isn't going to pay for that shit.
Great, now I'll have to try and itemize my Internet usage? Great...
...with all the potential regulation of the Internet, and perhaps price/package changes, I've noticed more and more BBS's pop up again. (thinking about opening my own) hmmm
I always will pay more than a non-metered service than a complexly metered service that would cost less. That's because it's just an extra set of variables that needs to be added to be considered with every usage of the system and that takes money and time. I would never get metered cell phone data services. I would happily pay $20/month for unmetered, as a I do with my sidekick. Adding service level restrictions would make it more ridiculous. In fact I recently rejected a DNS provider's pitch because they wanted to cap the number of unique queries I could do, even though they wanted a considerable monthly fee. I told them that I don't even WANT TO THINK about how many DNS queries people are doing a month and that was the deal breaker.
It seems that everyone thinks that the way to make more money is to play games with your customers. This is the same kind of thing with DRM schemes like Napster to Go, Mail-In Rebates, Credit Card Late fees, etc. All of this adds a whole new dimension of wasted economic activity because the company has to calculate and bill for the usage using ridiculously complicated software and the customer has to take all these crazy rules into account when using the product. You may hate Walmart but one of the reasons it has been so successful is it reduces the complexity of retail transactions. There are no sales. There are no rebates, gimmicks, etc. You don't have to jump through hoops, apply for a walmart rewards card or do anything to get the best deal. Never underestimate the power of simplicity.
Your head is up your ass, as always, and as is anybody that reads the far far far far far radical lefty rag The Nation.
I don't think that this will pass. with our government always so concerned about hurting the economy, I think they'll see that making a move like this will hurt businesses and stunt the growth of ALL THE BUSINESSES in the USA that use the internet regularly for communication, advertising, etc... it would place an undue burden on small businesses.
No one is going to let this idea really gather steam... no one's going to be ok with hurting all those businesses just for the sake of these (very large and vocal) few businesses.
What exactly are they trying to fix by discussing something like this? the internet isn't broken. this won't solve any problems... aren't most of the spammers and warez groups international anyway? pirate groups aren't all in the US.
This will only make money for those who own the lines and transmitters.
Additionally, a move like this will stunt the growth of emerging cyber culture. very human social identies and groups are emerging in online communities and online gaming culture, and this is really really fucking interesting to critical theorists and tech-culture theorists, and just anyone else who's fascinated by how a kid can multitask with a game, IM, do homework, write email, AND eat a corn dog at the same time while his parent's can't. The internet is TEACHING kids how to be productive and think and function on many levels at once. The internet is widening the "generation gap" as far as tech-literacy and ability to use new tools, and all of this change will be totally stunted if the internet switches to a pay-for-bandwidth model.
Scholars and geeks need to unite here!
My cable ISP, Rogers (located in Canada) is already capping BitTorrent traffic. Interesting enough, it will permit torrents with extension *.exe to download fast, but everything else (*.avi, *.mpg, etc...) is blocked virtually to a standstill (1-2 KB/s, and 5-10 KB/s if I'm lucky).
What can I do? Not much, other than try to switch to its only competitor where high speed is concerned, Bell. Is there any guarantee they won't do it soon either?
When contacting Rogers, I was told that they have the right to "prioritize" traffic, giving priority to email and web surfing (like I need 3 Mb/s for that!). They may introduce a new price plan that truly offers unlimited, or they may cripple bittorrent altogether because their infrastructure is taxed.
Well, I agree with you post except for one thing: What if *ALL* of the telcos/networks adopted this policy? It's certainly in their self interest as well as their financial interest to do so.
Sure, in theory, you can switch network providers easily. In practice, that's a little easier said than done. Especially for those of us who don't live in the 25 largest US cities.
I'd love to tell my current ISP to take a flying leap. Unfortunately, the alternative for me is dial-up. My ISP is the lesser of two evils - so I stay. If they were to implement this policy....again, I stay. Why? Because I don't have a *reasonable* alternative. (dial-up is NOT a reasonable substitute for broadband)
What the internet really needs is a major push to SSL for a majority of websites. If there is even a hint that ISPs want to start inspecting encrypted data (ssl proxies or whatever aliance they might make with ssl cert providers), E-commerce and online banking services will be greatly affected by the lack of consumer trust.
I'm trying to imagine how they could do this technically. The only things I can imagine would be to use something that filtered streams and checked them for content (which would require some big-time processing) or proxy-style access to the internet. I am talking about a regular outgoing mail server and a proxy incoming mail server, then a proxy web server. That means that you couldn't use any protocols except the ones your ISP supported.
Talk about dark ages. The only way something like this would work is if they started selling this limited service at a small fraction of the cost of real service. Then they'd slowly phase out the real service. As soon as real service is gone, they would be free to up the cost.
This will make the internet useful for what the telcos say it's used for, only. This will open other doors, though. You will have small companies pop up that provide services locally. Instead of having to go through telco to email your friends in your city, you'll connect to the local service provider and email them free. Then the local service providers could connect to each other. It would also make (wireless) mesh networks a whole lot more desirable. Without a reasonable internet connection between the meshes, people can chip in and get a fast connection to the next town to join these mesh networks together.
In any case, telcos trying to do this kind of shit will be faced with incredible competition and even with income so large they might not be able to ride it out.
According to Deploying Premium Services Using Cisco Service Control Technology, cisco looks at the application-layer aspect of each packet in order to determine which pricing strategy / routing technology to use. The solution is simple: use an encrypted transport protocol. This is really kind of silly - with privacy concerns completely rampant, I don't see why in the world we haven't widely adopted an encrypted transport protocol to begin with. Sure, we'll generate more traffic, but is that really a big deal? Of course, governments wouldn't like that solution for obvious reasons. And if cisco wanted to be an asshole, they can deny routing any transort protocol besides tcp and udp. We can still do encryption, but then it becomes an application-specific thing.
... what an incredibly indirect method to limit free speech - close off the largest access point for dissenting voices.
A block of code, sufficiently well-written, is indistinguishable from magick.
didn't we go through that cycle already...it was called compuserve and aol.
That's like saying that if my neighbour buys a car and doesn't use it as often as I use mine, I should have to pay more money.
You do pay more. Not just in the form of gas, but also in the TAXES on that gasoline. Ostensibly, the gas taxes are used to fund roadways. With the advent of hybrids and other advances in mileage, some states (most notable Oregon) have been investigating a mileage-based system for charging back use of the public roadways. In theory, the more you use the roads (the internet) the more you pay in taxes (your internet bill).
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
... from a realistic perspective.
:
Suppose someone wanted to restrict the internet so you could only send, say, 10 e-mails a day. For this to happen, a few basic points need to be under the control of that someone - or at least under the control of a body that can govern these restrictions:
1 prohibit arbitrary network data to be sent, and allow stopping the transfer of e-mail data from a client - network data can be anything, including multiple e-mails
2 collect information on the actual amount of mails you send - you need to be able to distinguish e-mail from other network data on an end-to-end basis
3 link the information collected back to the subscriber
4 form a sort of revenue plan that divides the money earned between the various parties
Now, how are these points realistic, or are they not ?
1. This could be done at an ISP or backbone level. Most likely at an ISP level. ISP's should log and block ports that are not allowed.
2. This could be done at an ISP level. You need to connect a subscriber to the amount of mails sent.
3. This could be done at an ISP level. Only the ISP knows subscriber information.
As an ISP is merely another uplink to a backbone, and a backbone alone cannot link information back to a subscriber, combined with the fact that ISP's are in competition with a whole lot of other ISP's, barring any legal requirements this will be impossible.
at least according to these Slashdot stories:
Google's own internet
Google's peering points
Google's free Wi-Fi
The US is already lagging behind other developed countries in terms of broadband access... and the telco companies want to limit us further? Dammit, when will people realize capitalism doesn't work!
Comcast already has this
they have regular speed and hi speed internet which they control via your modem.
They can remotely limit our modems to whatever speed they choose, and I already pay 10$ exta per month for the *8 Mb speed.
Don't forget AOL! They charged by the minute for quite a while. That was an effective bandwidth charge.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
The "little" ISPs aren't all pushovers. Sonic has taken issues to the PUC, courts, etc. So they're taken seriously by PacHell/SBC/ATT. I haven't had any issues with service so long as I go through Sonic and let them deal with the SBC crap.
I'm guessing that every major content provider would be against it, as it limits their potential revenue.
Let's do what we can to push for community-based fiber and wireless projects.
It's critical that we are represented fairly when it comes to making use of the spectrum to be given up when analog tv broadcasting shuts down. Think of spectrum as our atmosphere to breathe and speak electronically.
Don't let them sell our "air" to the monopolies.
Oh yeah? I don't think so. Not the way he means it. As far as I know the Internet subscribers together (companies and private homes) happen to pay for *all* of the network traffic they generate across the *entire* network.
Content providers and private homes are already being double-charged because large accounts get charged for the amount of traffic they generate, and individual subscribers are chrged for the average amount of traffic that someone in their position is likely to cause.
For example: when I use Google's website I initiate the connection and I pull information down the network towards me. The content provider (Google) is completely passive. Nonetheless I am charged for the amount of traffic that I cause (upload and download) and Google is charged for the amount of traffic that it causes. So ... double charging is here already (and has been since the start of the Internet). And somehow I cannot believe for an insstant that network operators are currently making a loss.
But that isn't the point of course. Network operators have caught on that they can raise their prices in two ways.
a) people may be made to pay more for the same service simply by practicing the age-old custom of "market segmentation" (platinum, gold, silver). And of course each market segment needs a certain amount of reserved bandwidth ("to ensure service levels for our customers"). Now one can think of plenty of innucuous "reserved bandwidth" schemes that will cause (purely artificial) bandwith shortages and hence a performance drop for the lower-priced segments. And hence incentives to "upgrade". Ca-ching !
b) businesses that totally depend on network access (Google, music sites, travel sites, Amazon, Ebay etc. etc.) can be "touched" for far more than they are paying now. In fact they can be "touched" for a percentage of their gross income! If only they can be cornered in a disadvantageous negotiation position. If telecoms companies can charge content providers what the service is *worth* to them, rather than what it costs the telecom providers to provide it, then the telecoms stand to gain. And that is where content differentiation comes in. Now you don't need a network monopoly anymore: you simply present itemised bills according to the traffic characteristics (origins and destinations of the IP packets!) on *your* network. Unless some other competitor has 100% the same network coverage as yourself there are areas where traffic needs to go through *your* network. That's where you've got them over a barrel. The effectivity of this scheme increases with the size of the netowrk that you control. Hence the incentive for telecoms companies to acquire and merge. Ca-ching!
I don't for an instance believe that the telco's are somehow "creating value" in this way. It's more like a tax. They are simply gearing up tp price-gauge their customers, helped by the current FCC stance that network operators aren't utility companies but can simply charge whatever the market will bear. And a properly differentiated market will bear so much more ... Not that this is particularly evil ... it's just what profit maximisers do.
The question is then: is it in our best interests to allow them to do so? And the really tragic part of the answer is that some people (the author of the parent post for example) seem to fall for this type of reasoning:
a) "if they think they can have free use they're nuts", and
b) therefore I should be able to charge them according to what my service is worth to them ... not what it costs me to provide it,
c) and I should have the freedom to arrange the market so that charging for content becomes the norm (lobbying in congress and with th
Marx claimed that global communism was inevitable. I'd say that mass-market tiered internet service is about equally likely. The first all-you-can-eat competitor in a given market will wipe up the floor with SBC.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
I currently pay about $8 a month for dial-up. If this sort of thing happens, then I'll just cancel my provider and find a better one. If I still can't find one, I'll just cancel access altogether and surf from work. (What are they going to do about that? Internet access is required where I work!) Or even from the library if I must access it after-hours. I'm already paying for unlimited service, and I won't even bother paying if that service becomes limited.
Not until they control spam.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
IMHO, it is inevitable that companies which control such networks will continue to seek ways to maximize their revenues from those networks as far as possible. This is simply axiomatic.
However, it is *not* inevitable that the Internet will succomb to this new species of economic parasitism.
The Internet is an open protocol - all that is required are the channels to make it work. It should be possible to disintermediate these powerful companies by bypassing them with new peer-to-peer wireless technologies at the last mile, while at the same time promoting and encouraging the "public" internet infrastructure in conjunction with big civil and educational users.
The Internet must remain free. Of course there will always be those who won't mind paying for it. But there must always be a choice in the matter.
That the internet dies.
But with its total degeration into commercialism, spam, viruses, scams, porn... Will anyone miss it?
Why do you think in the 80s when you had expensive time lmited access things never really took off? When the big players went to unlminted useage is when things 'started to happen'..
Lets kill the golden goose before it gets out of hand i guess. No great loss.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
rat, dog and Bull-shit service levels
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
1) Stop building the telecomunication infrastructure.
2) Wait until demand increases and charge more for "higher" bandwidth
3) $$$$$
4) Get wiped out when someone simply BUILDS MORE INFRASTRUCTURE!!!!!
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
With as much revenue they will lose forever if they blacklist an isp.. doubt they would have the balls to do it.
Even if they get people to swtich, the dollars lost during the 'blackout' could really hurt for a long time..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I'll admit this has little to do with the subject at hand, other than to illustrate how much Qwest sucks.
I'm in Seattle. I had Speakeasy One Link service (no Qwest phone line needed, $5 more) but when I moved to Northgate, by the mall I found out that Qwest had filled this particular wire center with lots of fiber and the amount of copper pairs was pretty low. The only way I got DSL was that the house I moved into already had it.
I have to have Speakeasy and Qwest now. I can't do the One Link service or Qwest will take back the copper pair back. So, instead of paying an additional $5 to Speakeasy that goes to Qwest, I get to pay $20 ($12.95 plus taxes) for a phone line I'll never use (I have Speakeasy VOIP). So $5 isn't good enough for Qwest, they want $12.95.
There's no way I'd want DSL through Qwest. The speeds they offer are slower and the uptime they gaurantee...oh, wait they don't guarantee that.
Qwest can suck it. Big time.
56k, the different speed levels of dsl and cable.
why do we need more?
For the rest of us, the Little People, its called "Assuming the Position".
You know the routine
1. Bend over
2. Get shafted in the ass
3. Profit!!!
Is it any wonder that the US is so cordially disliked in the rest of the world. It enforces its DOMESTIC laws on the rest of the world through World Trade Agreements so everyone else has to swallow the restrictive practices of American Business including cretinous copyright laws intended to permit the milking of ideas created before the majority of the world populations PARENTS were born.
Why do you think the terrorists selected the Twin Towers as a target on 9/11 - it was the headquarters of the WTO, busily screwing the rest of the world for the benefit of the great USA.
*shrug*
So long as you lot keep getting your knickers in a twist over Apple/Microsoft, instead of worrying about whats really going on, then the bastards in power will continue raping the rest of the world.
Don't know why I bothered with this rant..
You lot won't understand.
There is too much competition in the market for this to happen. If one provider starts doing this, they will lose customers to another provider. Someone will always be willing to provide services for a slightly lower cost just to attract more customers and get the attractive volumes.
If they all colluded on this and tried to standardize, they'd never get away with it and the FTC would be all over them.
My cable provider has more then 2 levels of connection. One is the light version for 20$, that gives you a thrid of the 'normal' bandwidth. That allows people that only check their mail and whatnot. The 50$ a month is what I have. The level of about 600 down 120 up or so. Then there is the 100$ pro version that opens up the ports for a mail server, as well as more bandwith. You pay for the acceessthat you need. I dont understand what the cuffual is about. If the telcos want other people to pay for your access thats defintly wrong. However the message can be strong if everyone switched to cable instead of the telcos. Demand better service by your money.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
...Could it be because there is no competition in broadband?
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
"But no one pays extra to make hour-long local calls, if they like, and this procedure has worked very well for quite some time too."
/.ers don't like it because they use the internet a lot, and they want others who use the internet less to pay more than their fair share, rather than giving them a choice.
I do. I do not have an unlimited local phone service plan. And I pay LESS because I don't make a lot of local calls than if I had unlimited local service. There should be tiered rates on the internet, because it give consumers and providers more freedom and flexibility.
Vote for Pedro
What the carriers don't realize is that consumers are paying these ISP's upwards of $50/month to get to Google and Amazon.
The carriers realize it perfectly. They're just selling their line of BS to the politicians and public. Make no mistake, it's not about "paying for the pipes", it's about gaining control over content and making money hand over fist off it.
In other words, they want to turn the internet into AOL.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
In order to save $10,000 per year by paying each employee $0.005 less per year, you would need two million employees. Universal has 28,000.
Lately I've seen an increasing number of comercials put out by verizon and comcast centering around thier network's. Verizon's says something to the tune of 'its our network' repeated by what seems to be several different Verizon employees.
Could this be an initial attempt to enlist public support for these new trends? The more I think about it, the more it all starts to make sense.
I work at a small internet based ASP, its a fast growing company, but something like this could certainly stifle its growth. So for me, its not just my personal internet participation that I'm worried about as much as my livelihood. Will the internet die to the point that I will need to look for another line of work? Or will my already post bubble salary shrink even more, requiring me to take on a second job to feed my kids?
Scary stuff...
I just hope that Ed Whitacre enjoys his new pile of cash, and I hope his kids don't go without shoes...
Thank god we can all route around you idiots in the US. Rein in your corporations already.
Switch! There's plenty of independant ISPs out there that have NO intention of charging for crap like that. The telcos can't control bandwidth when the bandwidth isn't purchased from them. So why don't we just buy bandwidth from non ILECs....in otherwords, buy from OTHER places. SCR can service almost all of CA and we will never pull this kind of crap. Nor will our upstream providers. The customer pays us for the bandwidth, the sites they go to pay for THEIR bandwidth. I don't see the problem. I'm making my money and I'm not a greedy @#$%@#$%.
There are over 5000 Independant ISPs in this nation, pick one and switch. Most charge the same as the ILECs and they don't even route their support overseas if you need help. Plus, they'll actually be happy to help instead of feel like support is a burden they shouldn't have to bare.
If more people did this, the more honest companies out there would quickly start seizing control and the ILECs would lose even more power because the independants don't have the $ to do anything but bend over and take it. Help us help you by using our services so we can afford to invest in R&D and/or new tech to avoid this kind of crap in the future.
All they have to do is forbid encrption that they dont have the key too.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
That whatever is done, whatever we find,however nobly we make a thing dedicated to communication and human advancement the same pattern will follow. Armies of self-serving cretuins will immediately follow, try to plant their flag on it, claim it as if they had made it and then get around to dividing the corpse and eating it all the while whining whenever we try to use it that we are "Violating their rights".
It's like the drug companies who take taxpayer-developed drugs (AZT, Viagra, etc) that were produced at the NIH, sell them for a profit and then whine that the U.S. government has to spend our tax dollars to protect "their rights" from being infringed both in the U.S. and in places like africa. Apparently the right of parasite to make money far outweighs the right of an HIV infected patient to live.
Media/Communications/Entertainment Honcho: "All of this unimpeded access to communications technology by average Schmoes was really starting to get out of hand. Don't these morons understand that we create the news and entertainment and they just rent it from us? Sheesh."
MjM
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
You *should* pay more for your Linux distro downloading and massive P2P traffic because you are consuming more of the limited amount of bandwidth that the network offers and, ultimately, if everyone used their connection like yours, the whole thing would grind to a halt.
/.ers are exceedingly lucky in that their broadband is subsidised (in a sense) by the hordes of users that pay $50/month for much more bandwidth than they need (ie, web, email and an occasional episode of Lost from iTunes) while people like us (and I am particularly guilty in this respect) keep our outbound connections at >90%. We are using more than our share of the resources and should honestly be required to pay more.
/. user that wants to get more than he pai
Most
To extend your car/road analogy, consider that you lived in a sub-division (ugh . . i know, bear with me) that connects to a super-highway a little ways away through a small toll loop. Initially, most houses aren't connected to the road but slowly they get connected. Some people just drive their Geo-Metro (SSH + PINE) to the email-store, most people drive medium sized cars and others still drive the SUV to the iTunes store and fill their trunk. A small percentage, however, have Mack Trucks making deliveries all day every day.
This analogy is apt because the local cable ciruit (in the case of cable to the last mile, by far the most common form of broadband in the USA) is a lot like the common road leading to the highway. Unused space is wasted but when it gets filled, everyone's traffic suffers. If everyone is to maintain the same quality of service in the face of increasing numbers of trucks they are going to either have to add lanes (capital intensive) or make some lanes that the trucks aren't allowed to enter (throttling).
Those trucks ought to pay a higher toll than everyone else or perhaps they should confine their deliveries to off-peak hours to as not to clog up the morning rush - that's just plain fairness to the other drivers. They are getting more out of it.
The parent's claim that the fact that the rest of the users aren't using their connection to the fullest misses the point for two reasons:
(1) Currently, the service in the US is unlimited transfer at a fixed bandwidth. This is like the subdivision road-builder sinking the cost of a two-lane road in capital invesetment and trying to recoup it by allowing any and all traffic for a fixed monthly fee. He has already built the road and its capacity is so underutilised that he doesn't care what sort of traffic he attracts so long as they pay him *something*. As traffic increases, those trucks will be more and more of a burden since he won't want to add more lanes for a small fraction of users while the rest complain of long commutes.
My prediction is that as network utilisation rises in the last-mile situations (especially as more legitimate media downloading sites come online), those providers will be keen on keeping their costs down for the majority of users that aren't saturating the pipe every second of every day. Furthermore, this is clearly in the interests of the majority of consumers since the bottom 90% of them use about 50% of the bandwidth. Again, this isn't a concern now because of network over-capacity but it will be soon.
Thos 90% of users would be perfeclty OK with traffic shaping and throttling because it will IMPROVE their quality of service and LOWER their prices. Joe Sixpack doesn't want to subsidize the delivery of your Linux Distros and he shouldn't have to. I have no problem paying for business-class services becuase I use it like business class service and I frankly think it would be unethical for me to get a home-class service and fill it like a business one.
In the end, the consumer will win. And by consumer, i mean the guy that uses his internet connection reasonably and in a way that does not over-tax the system and require massive capital upgrades (or will chip in to pay for those upgrades) not the whiny
What do you think speed profiles are called? They're tiers. Either you pay $35/mth for 3mbit or you pay $50/mth for 5mbit.
Where is that illegal?
Unethical, yes. Illegal, no, unless they're actively killing the pet to do it. Taking old corpses and grinding them up into hot-dogs is perfectly legal.
You're right about it not making them money, though. Fluffy's Fingers doesn't have the greatest of rings...
Disclaimer: I work for a cable company that offers high-speed internet.
I love this idea. Absolutely love it. Why? Because it's going to make me money. I live in an area of the country that is serviced by Qwest. Qwest is already known for their poor service quality, so I won't go into that. And since Qwest can't have an original idea of their own, once they catch wind of the tiered internet plan, they will jump all over it.
I live in a community of about 25,000 in Nebraska, and granted there truly is a lot of cornfields and cows, but these folks know their technology. We have 3 different citywide WiFi providers, plus Qwest DSL, plus us, CableOne. That's 5 HSD providers in a community of 25k. Yeah, there is just a bit of competition. However, the majority of the people here who want HSD have determined that the wireless sucks (two use a microwave peer-to-peer link...not good in a hilly part of the state, and one just has a antenna on the water tower). That has left them with DSL or cable internet.
We run 3 Mbps service for 29.95/mo (5 Mbps 39.95...and more plans as well) and I dont have any idea what speed Qwest offers. But once they start throttling their customers, I'll start making my $15 commission every time I see a Qwest DSL router and I tell them why the internet is so slow. Lemme hear you say "Ka-ching!!" Thanks, Qwest!
The greatest part of this? Our fiber link to the Internet backbone is managed by Level 3, which so far has stayed out of the tiered service talk so far...correct me if I am wrong.
khasim (12/9/06): In a blind taste test, more people preferred Coke over the Pepsi that I had previously pissed in.
Imagine they would provide the standard 10Mb for whatever price but then also say ok, we can add 1Mb up/down guaranteed QOS delivery on top of that with 25ms (or something) latency within their own network for whatever price. Then start working with other networks to expand the guarantee so that enough providers get together to make it actually useful.
This could create an overlay network that would (finally) have guaranteed delivery. This would of course make it so they get their voip money, but would open the door to real videoconferencing and not to mention gaming would be sooooooo much better.
The new network would end up with some trendy name but the providers would finally have a new source of income.
The providers couldn't really do this without providing a simple tool to users that would let us choose which programs can use the guaranteed bandwidth.
I would pay for that.
Four words: tiered internet is bullshit
This is one good reason for some of the big online players with huge market caps to take equity positions in telcos like AT&T. Like MS has.
If Google or eBay is a big stock-holder, idiot telco CEO's won't be so inclined to pursue dumb plans like these.
Make that "was looked down upon". We now have a very "business-friendly" justice department. Remember the Microsoft case? After Reno's justice department had already won a guilty verdict, the new justice department actually negotiated a settlement involving a mere slap on the wrist for the penalty. I always thought settlements were negotiated to avoid having to seek a verdict, not something you negotiate after the verdict is won.
This would be like Grog inventing the wheel, then carving it square and charging extra for the round one. The internet is a collaboration; the more people who have access to it, the better it gets.
this isn't about getting paid. this is about getting paid MORE.
everyone wants 20-30% growth to continue. $1,000,000 or $2,000,000 in CEO compensation is for th SLCEO... soup line ceo. THEY WANT MORE AND IT IS EVERYONE ELSE'S JOB TO GIVE IT TO THEM, DARN IT! shaddup and pay, already! -ng-
Hey, we've all been saying we need something to push encryption. Maybe this is it. Everything becomes encrypted so that telecos can't tell what is what. They can't tell how many downloads I've used if all my traffic is point to point encrypted when crossing their network.
I do security
An article from "The Nation"? Shame shame shame . For those of you who are unaware, "The Nation" is a far, far, extraordinarily far left publication that specializes in sensationalizing rumors and hear-say. Anything that they print can be discarded as pessimistic, far-left filth. Putting one of their stories on the /. frontpage just encourages their irresponsible type of journalism.
Life is offtopic.
It is *not* inevitable. Get your head out of your ass and stop trolling your readership.
What am I saying? This is Slashdot.. telling it to change its ways I suppose is like ordering a donkey not to bray.
Forget I said anything.
Something pretty simerlar has been/currently is being tried in the UK. About 3 years most of the major ISP's who are also telco's put bandwidth limits on all their customers (without reducing the price) . Some other ISP's followed suit (mainly where they were operating on a minimal margin already and used those telco's for their network) Result? Mass exodus (even by people who never hit those limits) to the ISP's that were not restricting bandwidth Now most of them had to change the limited bandwidth to low cost options (anything up to half normal price) and reinstate unlimited (or with limits so high you would have to be a MASSIVE p2p user to hit them) Things like this don't work if just one telco breaks rank and with the profits to be made break ranks they will...sucks for those with only one isp/telco in their area though
The compromise provided will be a weak encryption, anything stronger will be made illegal.
Have doubts to this or any other fucked up thing a corporation can do to you?
Then look at what's going on with corporations getting towns and local banned form makign their own ISP's
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
If a provider here in Australia tried to implement crap like this, people would jump ship. (I know I would)
The really sad thing is that it's clearly basic political corruption that's allowed the telcos to buy themselves back into monopoly power, like the mercury bot in T2.
Fortunately for those of us in the rest of the world - apart from India (and Pakistan?) which I believe are still saddled with state monopoly telcos) we mostly have a thing called 'competition'; if BT started treating customers like that they'd rapidly find they wouldn't have any left. I hate to admit it but Thatcher's tyrannical regieme *did* actually do the Right Thing on a few occasions, and the BT privatisation was one of them. (Shame they didn't pursue them as vigorously as they should have to allow competitors to get infrastructure access, and LLU is only just getting going now, almost 20 years later... but we do now have a good market for basic IP connectivity, with lots of smaller sub-markets. This comes to you down a 2 Mbps line which costs £15/month, no b/w cap as far as I know, and they seem to be doing a good job keeping worm traffic & suchlike from my friend's totally unsecured W2K laptop, which remains miraculously uncompromised as far as I can see. (I have a packet sniffer on a stealthed linux box, BTW, I'm not relying on windows' netstat to tell me that :)
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
with wimax hardware on board? maybe a self made "fuck you telco" wisp box?
would you sign up for google broadband to skip this crap?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
'Nuff said.
:T:R:A:N:S:
I think that the problem is caused by the telco's. Trying to price each other out of business, trying to see who can be the biggest loss-leader they have priced themselves out of business. Now they are scrambling to make money on bandwidth, but now there's a problem; Consumers want high-speed internet access, and they want it cheap. As my mother, who is addicted to yard sales says "You can always go down, but you can never go up."
Shouldn't the government be stepping in at some point? The FCC maybe? Who knows what agency will think that it's their job to look after and police the internet. Does anyone REALLY think that the free and open internet as we know it is at risk?
this stuff makes me want to crawl into a hole and cry. if this is true and we continue on this path, stuff will eventually end up like the matrix or some other scifi movie with a horrible future.
Well this will probably last as long as physicle acess is controlled by ISP's. You see some ISP's will probably (if the legistlation passes) "bill" people. They never said how much they are allowed to charge. I personally would find it hillarious if my local ISP (quest) decided to "bill" their customers two pennies per a level of acess and grant a "rebate". Oh bell can wine all they want about that. and they will. Say what you want. Pass what ever laws you want. So long as physicle acess is considered by virtue of conventention, case law and certain portions of this little document called the Bill Of Rights and Constition. (Look them up sometime)the (and the old cootz we call the Supreme Court) say in effect that a private entity (rougue ISP's and me offering free acess) may do what they wish with their property (my hub). No one can say otherwise(The raving raving lunatics, people in power the utility company etc etc.)
Maybe I'm missing something. but how could this work? If every single company didnt do this then the one that didnt do it would get all the business and the others would be screwed. It seems like the time for something like this to actualyl hapepn would have been in the earlier days of the net and the time has passed.
So, instead ... WE will be the "other provider." And because we are a CLEC, we are very enthusiastic about taking customers away from Verizon and Qworst.
my cell phone company already does this...
oh.. wait... i DO have unlimited incoming calling... but the fact that they can advertize that as a "feature"
It's too bad /. doesn't have editors. I'm used to not reading the comments; do I have to stop reading the posts, as well? It may be inevitable.
sic
But here in sonoma country we can get wirless SDSL http://www.sonic.net/sales/wba/ take a look at Cotati, or Petaluma. It may be expensive, but if telecommuting is essential to your job the buisness you work for should be willing to pay for a chunk. If video conferencing is a want and not a need, pay for it yourself.
I've had it down a few days when they were upgrading lines, and it gets slow in the early evening when most people are browsing. But the rest of the day it is super fast.
set up a few powerful servers on a fiber connection, and charge people $5 a month to proxy everything through my servers over a secure channel, and have enough IPs that the ISPs couldn't block connections. The ISP wouldn't be able to inspect the packets. Their only option would be to block encrypted data, and I'm sure that won't happen.
Hmmm... does anybody remember what the on-line "world" was like before the Internet? The most "advanced" was the terribly slow and ultra-expensive GEnie, Compu$erve, and other commercial online services. It was so bad overall, with not only monthly subscription fees but exaggerated per hour charges (10$ / month and 4$ / hour towards the end, had been 8$/h at first!), that GEnie had trouble growing, by just barely topping out at 400K subscribers sometime in 1994 or 1995 (they would even boast about it, when it didn't practically appear like it ever grew at all!), and never evolved beyond extremely primitive text mode at 2400 BPS, and added a few half-baked graphical games and some shitty little forums...
:D :D :D
then their worst nightmare happened...
Within about a year, the sudden and total collapse of these services by losing subscribers en masse to the Internet (ie cheap ISPs). Why? The Internet was much, much, much cheaper and could do much more! It was like going from a bicycle to a super-sonic jet instantaneously, for much less money! It confirmed what a lot of people suspected: GEnie and Compu$erve were ripping everyone off. Communication costs were never super expensive like they led us on to believe, and trying to lock us at 2400 BPS was a huge mistake. I dropped GEnie in Nov 95 for an ISP, and by mid-1996, they shut down, suddenly a relic of the pre-Internet past. I'd say the situation was so bad before the Internet, that these services are barely a footnote to computer communication history.
Now, if the Internet is suddenly going to cost more, with time limits, or hourly fees, etc... it's just going to slam on the brakes of Internet innovation, and a lot of ISPs will crash and burn, not to mention all the services (online games, Google, EBay, Amazon.com, etc.). The "revolution" will be over, or even be reversed. People will use the Internet like people used GEnie... they'll use software adjusted around time-based costs by connecting really fast, doing the absolute minimum, and disconnect. Anything like games and other recreational uses will be extremely limited to a very small group of fanatics and people with a lot of money to waste (which isn't much more than a few million people... in the whole world!) Backbone ISPs, who seem to be the ones pushing for this shit, will repeat the mistakes of the past: they'll suddenly see a huge drop in bandwidth usage and lose customers en-masse. People won't believe the high prices for communication services because the Internet is now too old to be considered a money losing operation for ISPs... because if it was, we'd still be using GEnie and Compu$erve with slow telephone modems at high hourly charges (ISPs would have gone bankrupt before 2000). If they do implement some kind of super-high-cost plan, perhaps something else will emerge (a big wireless Internet, independent of backbone ISPs), and the ones trying to make the Internet into some kind of rip-off operation like the commercial online services were will crash and burn fast.
To all you Big Business types that don't really understand the middle class: WE'RE NOT MADE OF MONEY!!! We'll do without most of the Internet if it becomes too expensive. A lot of people already find paying for Internet access a big chunk of their budget... if they weren't getting such a big "bang for their buck", they wouldn't have even bothered in the first place! Many would certainly do away with it if it becomes too expensive and practically everyone they know unsubscribes permanently from it, or downgrade to a minimal plan and only use it for essentials.
Go ahead and try charging too much... all your big expensive backbone bandwidth will go UNUSED. All that investement DOWN THE TUBES, and you'll never make it back. People will find other things to do and stop using the Internet beyond the basics. It's not like we forgot how to use the telephone.
If the telcos push this too hard I can't wait for GoogleNet. Pay for unlimited service, or enjoy the Internet, free of charge, witha google ad on the top of every page or some such.
Generally, Google can be said to do great things because they find information that isn't currently being used and then utilize that information at a huge scale. That produces some amazing results. Everyone wins (except for maybe their competitors).
This is a question of policy, not a technical advancement. Some users are being subsidized by other users. Yes, that's you with the P2P client. Probably many Slashdotters are being subsidized by other users today, which is probably why the idea isn't popular here.
However, in terms of efficiency for the industry, it's a good thing. You want to not force people to pay for what they aren't themselves using. My parents barely use the Internet at all -- why should they be forced to pay for the dozens of gigs a month the kid down the block is pulling down? You want to encourage people not to waste bandwidth -- this will help promote network-friendly software and behavior.
Plus, if the tiers get fine-grained enough, they'd be great for techies. Right now, there is a very, very rough-grained tiering currently happening at most ISPs. You have "business class" and "home class". Unfortunately, most techies wind up uncomfortably best fit by "business class" service. They'd like to have multiple static IP addresses, they don't want any ports to be blocked in or out, they don't really give a damn about the ISP's webmail, and so forth. They don't need technical support, and don't really want to subsidize the cost of having some minimum-wage worker repeat -- for the thousandth time -- his troubleshooting flowchart to Joe Sixpack.
The problem is, "business class" service is expensive. Bob Techie isn't actually much more expensive to service than a typical residential user, but he currently gets lumped in with businesses in terms of what he values.
Second, I'm hoping against hope that maybe some ISPs will start offering QoS as part of their tiered packages. That would be *fantastic*. It's in everyone's interest to provide a little extra information that lets routers handle their data more efficiently. If I get, say, 100MB of high-priority data (ToS bit set in the IP header for minimize latency, a la ssh, ftp control, and so forth) a month with my tier, I can get really good performance on the things that I care about -- like, say, playing network games with extremely low latency or sshing into another machine. I don't really care, in comparison, how long it takes my mailserver to shove some mail out. I'm perfectly happy to mark that as "low priority" (or rather, just use software that already does so). P2P software doesn't need high priority, and is there to soak up any available excess bandwidth, and should definitely be low priority.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
I'm just waiting for someone who knows networks well enough to put out a $300-400 box with a wireless adapter that does all the configuration and routing necessary to automatically hook me up to any *other* boxes in range. If anyone else gets another machine hooked up to the network, that router gets pulled in too. If a hard line is present, that line is used in preference to wireless.
Now, there are problems. This is a *hard* security problem -- there are lots of ways that someone could attack or DoS a system like this. You're talking about peer-to-peer routing, which could be asking for problems -- but peer-to-peer file transfer would have seem pretty farfetched and abusable just a couple of years ago too.
If Average Joe can get on his citywide network by just buying a box and plugging it in (and then see his city webpage and stream video and transfer data at high speed with anyone else in town), then life is good. Every person has incentive to become a node, and every person on the network increases the value of the network. Point is, what Average Joe needs is network expertise packaged, not the running of some cables. It's not hard to plug in and turn on a wireless router, and not much harder to run a cable or two. It *is* hard to have enough network administration knowledge to set up and maintain something like this -- it has to be zero-maintence and configuration.
The problems that have to be solved with this are almost entirely network-security related. It's not hard to make a zero-configuration Linux router, and lots of people already do so. It's a little more difficult to make a system that can't be DoSed by any jackass that connects to the system.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
First off, on the surface, sure, it is a bad idea- but it already exists. If you are under a certain limit of internet use, you pay for dialup. If you are moderate/normal you buy broadband. If you have excessive needs, you start to look at "business class" solutions which can go all the way up to big bonded OC-XXX and fiber. What they're really talking about it standardizing cutting up the midrange portion, and here's the thing - with the advent of wireless networking, and the enormous improvment on computer resources in therms of memory, processing power, storage, etc, and the fact that mainstream internet providers don't use ipv6 - do you really think people woudln't start putting up beacons on their wireless routers and running some kind of dynamic routing protocol like bgp/ebgp/ospf if the prices/annoyance factor got too high? Calling up comcast and having them send someone to the house and "install your internet" is pretty nice and all, but if it became a huge hassle, or overly expensive, how long do you think that would last? We used to run bbs's that would connect to each other and transmit email from one end of the country to the other over 9600bps modems... do you really think we couldn't put together a gurillanet? I mean, damn folks - ip includes a 'broadcast address' for a reason.
RandomAndInteresting.comdefending the world from stupidity since 1979
A lot of people are nostalgic for the internet as it was back when Mosaic was the browser of choice.
WHO?!
Not to shoot your idea down, because I suggested the same thing. But dude. The internet used to SUCK. A LOT.
+++ATH0
Lessee. OK, I have "unlimited" dialup. At about 1 MB/hr download rates, that's not too much fun. Remember when it used to cost extra to use a 14.4kbps modem vs 9600?
Now, I have 768kbps wireless SDSL, but there's still physical limits to how much I can download. But at least what I usually download daily (e-mail, AV updates, etc) is much faster than dialup.
If I wanted faster, then I'd have to move, but buying a T1 or higher dedicated line is always an option, too.
The telcos have in the past put on daily or monthly max download caps on DSL as well, which seems fine to me, except then they should not then get to market it as "unlimited" service. Just like "unlimited" DSL service that you are expected to "logout" when you're not using it or it logs you out after N hours of inactivity.
And most of all: What idiot invented the idea that the more you threat your customers like crap, the more cash you'll earn?
Oh, well... maybe it was the same one who recognized that his customers were that stupid that they would accept that threatment.
And who made them that stupid?
I guess(!) it became pretty easy to survive, in a world with products that even a baby with half a brain could use perfectly and where the advancement you get (from the state or from poeple) is directly proportional to your incompetence to survive. (instead of how valuable you are for those who give it to you)
In other words: Regenerative inverse evolution made them that stupid.
So i only can quote another slashdot user: "Pull the warning labels off of everything, and let the problem solve itself." (if i remember it correctly)
Well... Now we possibly get to the core: Why do we have this inverse evolution?
I guess mainly because of two things:
C1. Companys live for the profit. Only for the profit. They get nothing for caring for their customers because poeple still buy if they don't care.
C2. Somhow poeple began to confuse supporting the biggest losers in town with being social. Really being social means helping those that are valuabe for us, and for those who are valuabe for us. Right? Simple example: If someone living on the street asks for money: Check if he's woth the dollar before giving it to him.
So how do we solve those two problems? (I ask you too!)
S1. We have to make the price of a product its worth again. So poeple have to realize what it's worth. For example they shoud have the possibility to buy in another place if the company or their product sucks. Nowadays they can't really do that because all companys of one sector normally have the same terms and conditions, like if they were a cartel. So you can ony get out fo the frying pan into the fire.
Okay. Now this seems to be the core problem:
In poeple don't care anymore. Not if they get dupered and not if poeple are valuable to them.
And i only call this the core problem because i'm stuck with solutions here...
Anyone...?
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Okay, i have a web server out there. So i'll create an encrypted tunnel from here to my webserver and to "industry planners" this looks like one single commection.
FACE IT, "industry planners"/MPAA/RIAA: Poeple will *always* fild a trick around it if they want to. It's one of the most basic principles of being a human to find solutions for problems (if they suck enough).
And guess what's: There'S an ultimate solution for us, but not for you: We can live *without* your products. We can for example make our own net out of interconnected wlan nodes.
But you can't live without us! HA!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
In 7 years or so we'll be online all the time, 24-7-365, speeds starting at 1024mbps and full desktop power inside your ipod sized machines wired to The Grid through cell towers. peeps, you ain't seen nothing yet. We are about to become Borg. Remember how people felt driving their model-T Ford cars around? Well that is us with computers right now, just imagine what the future holds. This crap about limiting our already pathetic bandwidth is just silly, just you wait for REAL access to begin in 5-7 years.
Tiered internet in the sense of how much bandwidth you get is already here. There is a distinct difference between broadband and nonbroadband and a smaller difference between different levels of broadband.
However, tiered internet in any broader sense that limits network neutrality, such as limiting e-mails or any other specific use of the bandwidth can and should be opposed. It is inevitable only if lawmakers, consumers, and businesses accept that it is inevitable. I think(and hope) market forces will strongly discourage this idea, but even if they fail, gaurunteeing network neutrality is one area in which Congress has every right to intervene as it will have a major impact on interstate commerce.
There are many, many ways to classify traffic by type that don't need to go up to layer seven to get the job done. You're assuming that tiered service would be "per application" and not "per customer".
If I wanted to sell you class A, B, or C internet service, I could mark every packet with a src or dst IP addr matching you--with a normal layer three header inspection--and queue those packets for egress priorities defined by each of my service classes.
Encryption at higher layers would be a nonissue.
Several factors have combined to bring us to this frustrating position. First, ISPs and telcos started merging, so telcos could profit from internet popularity and ISPs could benefit from CLEC wholesale access circuit pricing. At the same time, with those pricing advantages these larger ISP/Telcos absorbed or killed smaller ISPs that weren't financially attractive enough for purchase or merger.
This drove bandwidth and access prices way, way down to commodity levels, especially with broadband, and reduced margins to nil on internet services.
Now, all sorts of providers are trying to figure out how to "add value" to their network so they can increase margins by charging for that added value. Many have moved towards offering premium IP applications--VoIP, IPTV--with QoS network grooming. Apparently now some are moving towards traffic prioritization based not on application, but on who will pay more.
This new move is putting customers in a pretty untennable position, if you ask me, but I don't see any magic bullet solution...
Honestly, I don't fucking care what you guys need to do to get your job done.
It is not like your are doing it for charity.
If your industry wants to create artifical scarcity all consumers will line up behind anybody that fights such idiotic plans.
If ISP and Telcos don't want to offer consumer satisfaction, new features and value added options, and instead want to throw a little cartel-like tantrum and strangle artificially the offer of a service, go ahead and test the consumer.
Tell your bosses to try it. Internet users world wide dare them.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I have been in many nice hotels and I only use Internet from the room if is either free or absolutely indispensable (working out of hours while on a bussiness trip? Is that really necessary?).
Most areas where a good hotel is will have reasonable priced internet cafes or bussiness centers that charge reasonable rates (I have worked in many diverse countries in Asia, AFrica, Europe and the US, thsi has been the case almost always).
Money that is wasted on outrageous costs for Internet access (we know it does not cost that much) is money you can tick in the column of ineficency. The inneficency column adds up very quickly if one does not take care of it.
That is an expense that a firm should not absorb because most likely is not really necessary.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Here in God's Own, Telecom has a state granted monopoly on the phone lines. Thanks to that, and a control over the incoming internet pipeline, they set artificial upload and download limits and tiers which other "competing" ISP's have to pay for. Since they pass this along to the customer, the result is tiered access plans with download limits as well as an almost universal 128k upload throttle between all of the ISP's. Welcome to the future.
What are you talking about? Why will people even purchase internet if they have to pay to use it. Its like paying for data usage on a cell phone. Most people around here do not even care for it. The telco companys DO need these companies. How many people do you know goto a telco company to download porn??? The telco companies need to stuff it and take it like they should. With out the internet being a free meduim who is going to go on to it to do anything for fear of being charged for something they didnt do. Having your computer hacked will cost you more then the average whore. No one wants that. This is just a bad idea its like asking fat people to stop eating and start charging them per eggroll. Imagin getting a 300 dollar internet cable bill because your 15 year old watched 13 gig of midjet porn. People would cancel thier internet perrty quick.
Ignorance of the people that actually use your service seems to be a requirment of good business habits.
http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/telecom.dogmas .spectrum.ps
another great article on the stupidity of the telecom industry.