Slashdot Mirror
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
...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.
I hope this isn't the platinium quality service ...
[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
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.
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.
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
True. I don't see any problem with Internet providers offerring tiered services so long as you're talking about bandwidth as a commodity, which is specificly a product like salt or water which is "homogenous" and freely interchangable.
However, as soon as you start talking about charging more or less based on which web sites you go to, or which emails you get (and from whom), Internet service *isn't* being treated as a commodity where all connections are essentially just another stream of bits passing by the routers.
"The human race's favorite method for being in control of the facts is to ignore them." -Celia Green
This isn't a commentary on your personal knowledge/understanding of the subject, but I just find it amusing that this is the second Slashdot story today (along with Verizon Hog) where people are shocked...SHOCKED...that these big Ultra-Mega-Form-Devastator corporations that have been forming over the past decade might actually be bad for the consumer.
What the hell do you expect to happen when you let these companies conglomerate all this power without so much as a "Remember Ma Bell"? Of course they're going to screw us over, they're corporations. If it was legal and made them money they would feed kitten entrails to school-children.
Common Carrier, per FCC rule, only applies to voiceband channels less than 64Kbps. You can have all the Common Carrier you want, so long as you go back to Dial-up.
Telecommunications companies don't like Common Carrier restrictions. They agreed to them, years ago, because the Public offered them something in return which they would have been fools to pass up: access to public rights-of-way. (Public. That's right. Stuff you owned that got handed over to Private Companies by the Government; that's a tax. In return, you got the Internet. Fair deal?)
We (the People) could impose Common Carrier rules on broadband providers using public right-of-way facilities through a simple FCC rule change. Companies which own their entire network could still discriminate as they want (as would you, as the owner of all the ethernet in your house) but companies running packets through FCC-controlled spectrum (that's everything) or along public rights-of-way (poles, underground cables along roads, etc) would be required to follow the same rules the phone companies have had to follow for 150 years.
Will that happen? Never. Too many slash dotters who still can't think past the FCC is part of the Government, and everything the Government does is bad, so there's no way I'm going to let the FCC impose their laws on my beloved Internet...
Now, where did I put my remote control and bag of quarters?
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.