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Why The Net Should Stay Neutral
Dino wrote to mention a BBC opinion piece on why tiered Internet setups are a bad idea. From the article: "What is being proposed is more like building two roads into every town and up to every house, one smooth and well-maintained tarmac and the other a dirt track, and then letting Tesco and Waitrose bid for the right to use the good road. This issue just the latest round of a long-running debate about how much government - of whatever type, in whatever country - should be involved in the growth and development of the internet."
Public utuilities are normally regulated. The reasons for that are well established. Companies in the utility markets are not generally are not cherry pick the most profitable customers. Instead for being allowed to operate they are also required to serve the public interest in other matters. That's why you have the public access channel on cable TV , the public alert systems on radio, why rural communities have electricity, and why the power company cant simply shut off the juice to the old/infirm without certain procedures. Some of those Odious fees on your phone bill pay for things like universal 911 connectivity.
We generally strived to avoid two tierer public power or phone service in their early days. Of course deregulation did take place in the phone arena eventually did make sense but only after ubiquitous access had been achieved and was affordable.
So we have to be careful about two tiered proposals for the internet. It might be okay but it should be scrutinized from a public policy perspective not a bussiness perspective.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
"After all, once we get away from the idea that the pipes just move bits around without really caring what data is being transmitted, it's a small step to discriminating against some forms of content and then targeting specific sites, services or users."
What if all the big ISPs start charging $0.10/min for VOIP? Or $1.00/mb from "long-distance" sites? Where does it end?non-US countries?
It would seem to me that shortly after some big corporation tries to segregate the Net, if there is
any marginal advantage to the bandwidth carrying their segregated service, somebody will devise a way
to tunnel other services through the "premium" bandwidth. If I can send you bits, I can code my data
into those bits, steganographically if necessary, but there's no way the channel can stop me from
sending whatever I want.
So I say, bring it on. We'll have fun writing ironic tools like IPOV -- IP tunneling over Voice Channels -- betcha we can send up to 56K bits/sec on a 3 kHz analog voice link.
I have heard for years about the "Digital Divide" that separates those with computer/internet access and those without. To offer multi level internet access would actually physically impose such a divide and make the internet a place for wealthy elitists. The low end internet would get worse and worse as companies wouldn't want to advertise to the people that don't have enough cash to get the higher level internet in the first place, thus you would get less content.
I'm sorry, but no one has the right to have broadband.
... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_fiber
t m
..."scum"
.... "Tiered Internet"
... Once again greed wins .
While your statement has some truth, it is also like saying why don't we do away with
municipal libraries . If people want books they can buy them !!!
You may be thinking I have taken this too far as a case and point, but here is why
you may have that perception, your own personal usage of the Internet .
Some people do their homework via the web, some do business via the web, some do research and our send e-mail instead of letters . The internet is slowly replacing the way we do a lot of things .
We can print thousands of text books for school, or we can make it a torrent on the net .
We can print millions of voting cards, or we can make it an encrypted multi-point user
verified voting system that works much better than the current corporate model .
We can pay per minute voice charges, or we can use VoIP .
We can pay postage on each e-mail we send , or we can mass e-mail all our family members photos of our newborn child, wedding, or graduation .
We can choose to realize its fiber with light pulses being turned on and off and using
VERY little electricity, or we can say it costs TWICE as much to send 2 meg as it does 1 meg .
We should all easily realize the cost of sending 2 meg of data vs. 1 meg of data is not simply double all expenses .
Why did an OC-3 from chicago to washington cost 3 million per month in the late 90's ???
I understand recouping the cost of implementation, but that OC-3 was but one virtual channel
of many signals being sent down a DWDM fiber line that was a OC-192 as a single strand
of fiber that had been laid for long distance phone calls over a decade before .
The glass and putting it in the ground had long been paid for .
$36 million USD a year for less than 2% of the pipe means that the pipe would make them over 50 times that a month at that rate, roughly 1.8 billion .
They never laid just single strands, they laid bundles of multiple strands .
But we must recognize one pricing scheme of long haul fiber, quadruple the bandwidth, half the price per Mbit cost .
But then you come to the consumer, the more you want the more we are going to charge .
Also consider the dark fiber situation
Some areas have 30 times the fiber they need , and it just sits dark and has for years .
With better and better DWDM and other compression technologies this just becomes even more pronounced .
US taxpayers shelled out $200 Billion, yes billion, not million , to the major Telcos
for a deployment of fiber to all homes in the US .
This is what we got => http://www.newnetworks.com/Scandalreslease13006.h
The telcos much like bernie ebers of WCOM are nothing but a bunch of corrupt , crooked
scam artists , and my uncle worked as a union steward for one for 30 years, so
I have heard ALL the inside dirt from SBC .
I got one word for the corporate whoring of the internet
Other countries who were further behind us are now far ahead of us, and citizens have 100 Mega-bit fiber to their homes for reasonable prices .
In the country that made the internet possible our corporate pimps are too wrapped in
greed, and our politicians take 200 billion of tax payer dollars from us to give to the
corporate pricks to just screw us all and want more money thru
Excuse me but this is Horseshit
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"