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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.
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
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
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"
...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.
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 ...
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.
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 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.
[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
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....
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.
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
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").
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.
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.
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
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.
Unless the main providers can create an illegal cartel (and evade government prosecution for doing so)
Kind of like the Republican party?
You're a little off on how they'd do things.
New model:
500 power user customers @ $100/month = $50,000
4500 email and light web users @ $50/month = $225,000
New Income: $275K
"mesh routing"?
Sustainability and energy independence essay
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.
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.
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.
I think I would likely be willing to pay $20-$25 a month for that... (assuming 1Mbps/384Kbps or some such)
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Let's do what we can to push for community-based fiber and wireless projects.
It's critical that we are represented fairly when it comes to making use of the spectrum to be given up when analog tv broadcasting shuts down. Think of spectrum as our atmosphere to breathe and speak electronically.
Don't let them sell our "air" to the monopolies.
No, it's more like David, Goliath's brother, and an amy of pitbull laywers vrs Goliath.
Afterall, with M$, Amazon, Google, all pulling for net neutrality? I would hope it would would stand out a little better.
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
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.