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Game Theory Computer Model Backs Net Neutrality
Stu writes "'A world without net neutrality is one devoid of intellectual development' said Sir Tim Berners Lee in a presentation to congress last week. Well, now there's a computer model that uses game theory to back that forecast up. Developed at the University of Florida, the model shows that everyone loses if the IPs get their way — even, eventually, the IPs."
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I always lose it when people say loose when they mean lose.
Looses what, now? Seriously, people. Intervention time. Lose != Loose. It's... not that difficult.
let me be the first to point out that "looses" doesn't mean what you think it means. It's "loses", as in to no longer have posession of something.
Grammar Nazis seem to be "loosing" the war against spelling idiocy. To bad Slashdot isn't edited.
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
FTFS:
What is an IP? It can't be an intellectual property, since they don't have will, so they can't get their way. I'm pretty sure it can't be internet protocol.
Did you perhaps mean ISP?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The only way to win is not to play.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
Well, at least they don't get tight. I mean, I hate it when people get all tight about things, don't you?
While I applaud the advocacy, the bad new is "intellectual development" is not what the telcos and media conglomerates have in mind.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
... dont you realize it's just a bunch of tubes?
Or is it a truck you can just dump stuff on? I forget.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
... we don't need regulations to enforce it. The companies who refuse to get it will eventually be forced to change, suffer from disruptive technology, or be eliminated from the gene pool.
SF Bay Area indie music: bandega.com - Never miss a show again
A world without net neutrality is one devoid of intellectual development. There will be no kittens or puppy dogs. Nobody will come to your birthday party.
It makes sense that an ISP with a given set of customers would want to extort content providers by slowing down the connections to those who don't engage in payola. But wouldn't that put the ISP at a big disadvantage compared to another ISP that continues to upgrade the speed of connections and not charge the content providers?
Hey, the rest of the world can run these internets and intarwebs however they like, but THIS IS AMERICA and we don't appreciate none of that intellectual development garbgage. We prefer our internets to be about sending videos of people getting hit in the testicles, underage girls shaking their ass on their webcams and flash videogames targeted at school children on Kraft Foods' websites.
Because the government would have to define and regulate "neutrality".
Does anyone really think that's going to help the internet?
I'm not sure, but I got 4 or 5 internets in my inbox just today...
The top 4 largest cities in S. Korea make up a bit less than 50% (48 million)
In terms of size, to paraphrase from someone in another thread: In Texas we call that a county.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I think a neutral network is a great idea, but it doesn't have to be enforced by the government exactly because those who abuse the market willlose out quite naturally. Neutrality is the natural state of the network.
Oh, and on the quote... "A world/b without net neutrality"? Really? Someone puts some charges on a network and suddenly the whole world becomes dumb?
Deleted
My take: the real fear is monopoly control of the Internet. Since monopolies are a problem independent of the Internet, we need to strengthen anti-monopoly laws rather than pretend we're living like it's 1969 on the ARPANET.
Deregulate phone service, and it will become monopolized. Right?
Deregulate airlines, and people will have no air travel choices. Right?
But no, the internet needs government regulation because you say so.
It was very easy for us to "prove" a wide range of conflicting hypotheses by tweaking the rules until we got the results we wanted. Without knowing the assumptions behind the simulation, it's really impossible to judge the accuracy of the simulations.
Their model do not account for innovation, they use fixed parameters, a very neat toy model. The real world doesn't behave like that, it is much more complicated.
Do they foresee Google raising WiMax masts? Do they foresee P2P based webservices?
The article says:
"More important, the researchers found that the incentive for broadband service providers to expand and upgrade their service actually declines if net neutrality ends. Improving the infrastructure reduces the need for online content providers to pay for preferential treatment, Bandyopadhyay said."
Of course it does, but then your competitor has an incentive to expand and upgrade their service so that they can charge lower prices. How can the model not take *that* into account?
If this kind of simulation had any validity, planned economy and sovietism would work. We know it doesn't.
\u262D = \u5350
Wow. A computer program came up with a result that supports a particular political position. This is a surprise?
Any computer program that predicts that folks will act against their best interest needs to be looked at very sceptically.
Look, let me explain something about group dynamics in general and geek psychology in particular. Every group develops little markers that let members know if someone is a part of the group. Particular ways of speaking, writing, or acting, little jokes, that sort of thing.
Many geeks grew up as outsiders. We were smarter, but lacked social skills. Dumber but more popular people felt threatened by our brains and put us down, picked on us, and so forth. One characteristic that groups of those dumber people adopted as their group marker was a disdain for all things intellectual. One thing many geeks have adopted is just the opposite, a respect for all things intellectual, to distinguish ourselves from them.
Do you see where this is going?
You come on a geek message board spouting anti-intellectualism, "Oh, you dorks, proper spelling and grammar don't matter. Get over yourselves." You have just identified yourself as "one of them," an outsider, probably anti-intellectual, most likely of the same sort that picked on many of us as kids.
Proper spelling and grammar are one of our shibboleths, along with Natalie Portman, hot grits, and Beowulf clusters. It isn't primarily about communication, although that is a factor. It is about identity. We are geeks. Geeks are smart. Smart people spell words correctly and use proper grammar. That is who we are.
When people here correct your spelling or grammar, they are really just trying to carry on our culture, and help you fit in. You don't have to, but if you don't, you will be seen as an outsider by many here. That's just how it is with people. You know the old saying, "When in Rome..."
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Dont forget typos from hell.. And being too lazy to edit/review.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The problem is that pricing has been pushed down to the point where it is almost a losing game to win market share. That's nice for the consumer and it was nice that all this service could be provided without much hardware investment.
That was great when the connections were not being used much.
The issue today is who is going to pay. And nobody wants to just raise end-user prices. While that might be the fairest way to do it, it would shrink market share and be a shakeup for the entire ISP industry.
We could have government subsidies pay for it all, as is mostly done in other countries to keep prices low. That means taxes pay for cheap Internet service. So the people that don't have it have to pay - not so fair.
Someone came up with the bright idea of charging the other end. Google is paying almost nothing for their connection (check prices on OC-192 connections) and is making billions off the people looking there. Maybe they could pay more?
Of course, making Google, CBS Sports and CNN pay more for their connections just comes back around to the consumers anyway. There is no escaping that prices are going up. The consumer is going to end up paying, one way or another. The only question is how many middlemen are involved.
The question is, did the game theory model include competition among ISPs? In my area we have a choice of DSL or Cable for broadband, but some customers live where there is only one provider (or none!). The optimal game theory strategy should be very different for cases where there is a monopoly on broadband internet access vs where two or more companies have to compete for customers. Their model would have to take that into consideration.
The fact that the article didn't say anything about it makes me suspect that they only modeled monopoly ISPs, in which case their results are not too surprising. Monopoly ISPs are in a much better position to appropriate the lion's share of the benefits than those who have to compete.
While I applaud the advocacy, the bad new is "intellectual development" is not what the telcos and media conglomerates have in mind.
Exactly. It's profit maximization they're after.
If they think they can make Google pay to serve their customers, they'll have a customer revolt over not being able to access Google. Google's packets are more valuable than those originating at a leaf-node ISP. Leaf-node ISPs will find themselves paying Google's ISP, not Google paying them, to get their users access to Google. They'll create a money flux across the network that won't change the status quo of their profits. It'll just be alternating currency between ISPs rather than direct currency profiting them: A¢, not D¢.
(I'd have actual cent signs there if this forum would allow the Unicode character CENT SIGN (U+00A2) as a numerical entity (), named entity (), or literal character (), yet none of those come through in my Previews.)
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
where everyone wound up fighting over the last tree, or something like that, because their belief structure demanded something that as short sighted and ultimately destructive.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Here's the deal, people. There are only 10 of the so-called Tier 1 ISP. They are AOL, AT&T, Global Crossing, Level 3, Verizon, NTT, Qwest, SAVVIS, Sprint, and XO. You'll notice that many of these guys have absorbed many of other Tier 1 providers. For example Verizon now owns what used to be UUNET. They've also absorbed many of the Tier 2 ISP's. Quoting Wikipedia, "By definition, a Tier 1 network does not purchase IP transit from any other network to reach any other portion of the Internet." which is a definition I can live with.
What that means to you lay people is that whole freakin' globe is being carved up by 10 companies. Everyone else ultimately pays one of these 10 guys for bandwidth. How hard do you think it would be to get 10 CEO's to agree to charge Google for example, at the rate of 1 cent per click?
I'm not the kind of person to start screaming for the government to step in an start regulating things, but I would like to see the internet adjusted so that there are peering points that match the physical borders. I'd like to see the US goverment say that if you start charging content providers the peering points for the USA will be unavailable to you. If you're stateside, we'll charge with Anti Trust and RICO violations. Since American's buy more stuff on line than most anyone else, I think that this would prove an effective deterrent to this sort of stupidity out of the ISP's. They're already fat from the profits that they make off selling the rest of us bandwidth that must be used to send worms, viruses, and spam to each of us every day.
If they want to be more profitable, stop the worms, viruses, and spammers. That will leave plenty of bandwidth for the rest of us to do some thing amazing.
2 cents,
QueenB.
HDGary secures my bank
Part of out identity should be concentration on building a space ship that will carry away all of the "telephone washers."
So, if we get Net Neutrality, does that mean that I my VoIP is going to go to shit every time my neighbor fires up BitTorrent?
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
Yea, sure, I'll just switch to my other cable provider... Oh wait, I only have comcast in my area...
Lets see, the pressure to keep comcast honest in the net neutrality thin is my threat to switch to dialup.
That doesn't seem that threatening.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
The truth of the matter is that its the content that drives adoption of the net and drives expansion of the infrastuture, not the other way around, however the content and infrastructure are symbiotic, nto parasitic.
However, the idea of an ISP billing a content provider is parasitic.
In the hey day of the dot.com's, huge amounts of content were created using investor cash which was "burned". Now that the cash has been burned, for the most part this content is drying up.
Without an ability to make money, most websites, other than those that are put up by businesses or for advertising reasons, will cease to exist.
Non-net neutrality will hasten this... although I personally thing the issue with non-net neutrality os one of finding a way to kill VoIP and related technologies... IE to find a way to kill the competition by offering preferential communication speeds to packets the carriers favour verses those they carry from their competition.
In any event, IMHO it doesn't take a rocket scientist or even a computer scientist to see what is afoot here.
Seeing as they would be risking prison by colluding illegally. As the federal government is a customer anybody could sue them and take home 10% of the recovery as a reward.
Much more likely they would all wink at each other and do it. But it still only takes one to break any potential ISP cartels. Further some of these companies already get paid for bandwidth by the potential targets of the extortion.
Even though tier 1s don't pay to reach any part of the net, they do count on the peering agreements between themselves. Blocking a sight (or slowing it) would likely violate these agreements. Even if it didn't violate the letter of the agreements it would start a pissing contest between (in you example) the tier 1 ISPs that already host Google sights and those who were trying to tax Google.
The last mile providers are much more likely to try to extort. They, sometimes, at least have local monopolies (not for long if they tried to much BS).
Any laws mandating net neutrality are almost certainly going to be more destructive then the problem they are designed to fix.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I don't know about others, but I hack code and I don't give two shits about spelling and grammar.
So, your code rarely works correctly?
FalconShould there be a Law?
They talk as if we have a lot of choice of which providers we can pick from, well most people don't.
This whole thing of charging Content Providers more to built better pipes is BS. Thats what the whole tax cut for ISP's was about, to build better pipes and to save money by the tax cuts.
As we all know cable internet is much faster then phone copper. And to update copper they need too put in fiber, which cost us.
Cable doesn't have that issue. It does cost a bit more, but you get much better speeds.
So what if all the ISP's started charging CP's? Cable would make a killing with no return to the consumer, DSL wouldn't get that much of an upgrade, not for awhile. Even if DSL co's did put in more fiber to the neighborhood DSLAMs, they still cant match what Cable can do.
So its a Loose Loose for both sides. Cable, no better speeds, DSL, a little better speeds... when ever they get around to it, and not that much better of speeds.
From what ive been told is that they(ISP's) need a better backbone, and better pipes within the ISP. For the copper lines they really need to have a damn good plan in place.
the model shows that everyone looses if the IPs get their way
If the IPs get their way, trust me, you'll be loose.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
One scenario that immediately came to mind when I started thinking about the consequences of phasing out network neutrality is just what would happen to the smaller network providers. Many small ISP's reside "within" larger networks almost exclusively. Granted, they may have peering agreements with one or two other providers for the sake of redundancy or traffic management but the fact is that those small ISP's depend on their larger peers for survival. As ISP's they have paying customers who know nothing about net neutrality or peering agreements. For the sake of the argument let's say these ISP's choose to remain net neutral meaning that they don't prioritize traffic with the intention of charging content providers a use fee. But what happens in situations where one of their peers is NOT practicing network neutrality? Is traffic that originated within the small ISP network at the mercy of the larger, fee charging peer? Would the small ISP have to pay the larger ISP a fee to safely traverse the larger network? Would the small ISP's traffic be subject to whatever usage agreements made by the larger network? And in situations where the small ISP does not remain neutral, would the Googles and the Yahoo's of the world have to pay them both to ensure that customers will have unfettered access to their content?
In my opinion, ending net neutrality would be a big mistake. It would just be one more example of Congress caving in to the demands of big business in an attempt to "solve" a problem that doesn't exist on a topic that I'm sure few in Congress truly understand.
-Gonnosuke
> Grammar Nazis seem to be "loosing" the war against spelling idiocy.
> To bad Slashdot isn't edited.
Mod this +5 funny! It is "too bad", not "to bad"! Grammar Nazi, my ass...
The artists formerly known as ISPs would like very much for us to think that the Internet is something that they provide to us, rather than what it is: an increasingly-all-pervasive state of affairs where everyone is connected to everyone else -- with or without Verizon, ATT, and friends.
I'm not saying a cabal of these guys got together and tried to revamp our way of speaking. I'm just saying, words have meanings and we forget that at our own peril.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
... we don't need regulations to enforce it. The companies who refuse to get it will eventually be forced to change, suffer from disruptive technology, or be eliminated from the gene pool
While this is true when there's competition most places in the US don't have a choice as to who they get broadband from. Many places still can't even get broadband, at least without needing a satellite dish. I'm looking forward to widespread WiMax however even it has a limited range.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Wouldn't reasonable people value both the quality AND the content of communication? It doesn't matter how perfectly Britney Spears enunciates (hypothetically) when she sings -- her songs are still moose-dribble. And Kurt Cobain may have had deeply profound lyrics, but hardly anyone would know because his singing was totally incomprehensible. The drooling mumbly guy at the psych hospital may be speaking deep truths, but how would you know? Karl Marx communicated and Ayn Rand both communicated their ideas extremely well (judging by the number of people that don't laugh out loud at the mere mention of them), but that doesn't make their ideas any less stupid and irrational.
Everyone loses because there is no incentive to upgrade infrastructure... as you would have realized if you had READ the WHOLE article.
I mean would you really settle for one highspeed ISP for the phone or cable conection when someone else could leae the lines at cost and sell the service to you at a discount?
Without regulations opening up the market why would any business that owns the cable or phone lines open up those lines to competitors? Especially when they know a competitor may be able to sell services cheaper than the incumbent? While I believe in free market capitalism, this is one area I believe a local agency or government should own the infrastructure, which then opens up access so anybody with the capabilities can offer services using the infrastructure.
Sure anyone could go through all the channels, get the rightaway, lay cables on top of cables, push it the last mile (to the house or business) and seel the same Internet that the ISP's already use.
The problem with this is more than likely the local government won't allow competitors to lay cable, fiber, or other landlines on the same right of way. Instead that local government has given the incumbent a monopoly. Then there's also the fact that governments have given telcos and others money directly or indirectly in the form of tax beaks for building the infrastructure, and now they're whining they need more money to build it.
Don't take a sloppy implementation of deregulation like what happended in a primarily democrate california and their energy market as fact that deregulation doesn't work.
Ah, how people fall for California's so called deregulation of the energy market. CA did not deregulate the market, what they did was shift regulations around. They got rid of some regulations but started others. For instance where before companies where allowed to own both powerplants and transmission lines, now the same company can not own both of them. This was called "decoupling". Then they also told the businesses that owned the lines and sold power to endusers they couldn't raise their prices, but they don't bar the power companies from raising their prices to the transporters. As stated above I think the best way to solve this is for a local agency or government to own the infrastructure then allow open access to resellers of services.
It just isn't a fair statment to say deregulation is evil when a lot of the regulation is the problem.
Ah, we agree!!! However it's usually those who are being regulated who create the regulations. They then create regulations to prevent competition in thier markets.
FalconShould there be a Law?
No kidding -- if coding teaches us anything, it is that precision counts every time a finger hits a key. That means proper syntax, proper spelling, consistent structures. This reinforces standardized grammar, punctuation and spelling *unless* you are going out of your way to be incompetent.
Take the OP's subject (which I've corrected). If you had a token, e.g. and, you continually typed incorrectly (ansd) your code wouldn't ever compile. Can't write code that compiles? You're a shite coder, or no coder at all.
Why 'Sir' Bernie Lee-Taupins? Lord this, Baron that (hello Conrad). I've got a PhD but I don't call myself Doctor Who. Fluff, that's what it is. At least the buggers have been voted out of existence. But they'll have to be beaten with sticks before they go away. 'Sir' my ass. That's what you call the guy at the store, unless you call him George. And I'm a brit in London
Down with categorical imperatives
"We are geeks. Geeks are smart. Smart people spell words correctly and use proper grammar. That is who we are."
That is one of the dumbest sterotypical posts I have ever read on slashdot. It can be summed up by what my dog is thinking when we go for a walk (ie: "we are pack").
Dumber but more popular people felt threatened by our brains and put us down, picked on us, and so forth. One characteristic that groups of those dumber people adopted as their group marker was a disdain for all things intellectual.
No, that is a mental cage built by your phyche in order to rationalise the social isolation your intellectual snobbery has brought apon you. (ref:sig).
Besides, the GP said "Oh, you dorks, proper spelling and grammar don't matter. Get over yourselves.", as a vintage geek I object to being mistaken for a whale's dick, you insesitive clod.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Then let me ask you a question: can you explain why in the U.S., where there is most definietly not a monopoly air carrier, that travel between two given cities at a certain time of day costs roughly the same for a given class of service across all of the major airlines (Southwest being the obvious exception)?
Because as you say there is no monopoly in airlines. However there are monopolies in phone and cable service. Provided they have the money anyone can start thier own airline however people are blocked from starting thier own cable and phone businesses as they won't be allowed to lay thier own cables or fiber, not without government okay, and how many government allow, forget 10, but only three companies to lay them to offer phone or cable service? Then you have to add the money the government gave to the cable and phone companies the money to build out the network. They received millions of dollars for this.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Government does subsidize the network. Governments have given telcommunications companies money and or tax breaks to buildout the networks therefore they are being subsidized.
Someone came up with the bright idea of charging the other end. Google is paying almost nothing for their connection (check prices on OC-192 connections) and is making billions off the people looking there. Maybe they could pay more?
Google does pay for their connection, they pay thier provider. What the telcoms want is to double bill them. If thier provider isn't making money it's thier responsibility to raise prices, it's not my ISP's responsibility to try to extort more money from Google.
FalconShould there be a Law?
There was probably no need for a single phone company in the US but a Mr. Bush (not our Bush), convinced the US Gov. that we needed a single provider. It sounds like that article supports the case for both net neural model as well as a single provider model (which of course the government would love, since they only have to tap and monitor one network...).
http://www.hawknest.com/
Once most people have enough speed to do most of the things they want to do, the broadband providers will have to compete on things like ping times, SLA-type guarantees, and minimum hops. That is not a good market for the broadband providers to compete in as those are all much more expensive than raw MB/s. 100 MB/s is nice but not if it only works 70% of the time. I'd prever 70 MB/s all of the time but that would cost about 10000 times as much.
Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
about a month ago i was watching law and order and a set of commercials comes up, one of them is about net neutrality.
the entire thing was an outright bald faced lie exclaiming "silicon valley millionaires are trying to avoid having to pay for internet".
there are laws against false advertising, libel, and slander, and while disclaimers and clever wording help most companies avoid these laws, the anti-neutrality laws have none of these.. theyre outright lies and invective.
so.. why isnt anyone suing? it's absolutely ludicrous nobody has at this point.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
If I win every fight to the death and I fight everyone, after a long time, I'm the only person alive. Since I can't reproduce asexually, I'm going to die.
I may be the last one to lose, but I don't win.
For a more every-day example: Ma Bell was split up into the baby bells. The baby bells were within 5 years earning as much as the entire Ma Bell was. Add them up and it was no contest. So Ma Bell was harming themselves (as in the total of the company compared with "losing" monopoly) so NOBODY was winning.
If you're good and an asshole, you're still an asshole.
In order for you to consider negative use of "elitist" equivalent to "terrified of excellence", you must consider "elitism" and "excellence" as equivalent. They are not!
Elitism is a mix of self-righteousness, self-aggrandizement, contempt for others, and closed-mindedness. None of these things are "excellent" or even "close to optimal", let alone "optimal". Elitism is a social entity, not an analytical one. It is abhorrent precisely because it disregards analysis and merit.
There is no innate utility to recommend elitism. Every time (typically that is) I hear someone use "elitist" negatively, I hear someone being called out for their unnecessary and counterproductive assholery.
"Certainly if you hold rationality to be an important trait, as most geeks do..."
No, being a geek in the participating-in-geek-culture sense is absolutely not a rational activity. We're not vulcans, we do have to take some time off from pouring pure logic into our compilers and do some social interaction things to satisfy our emotional needs occasionally.
Playing with lego, wardriving, dungeons and dragons, rebuilding obsolete computers and watching anime aren't rational either, but they're all part of geek culture.
You make it sound like a conspiracy.
Create debt. Maintain debt. Keep people in debt. Work them until they die of debt.
I can see how the system you've described fits this. It also explains why the Federal government takes the approach that it does.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Create debt. Maintain debt. Keep people in debt. Work them until they die of debt.
What part of that system would government subsidy fit into? The solution to the problem described above is decentralization.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
They used this as an excuse to just build them in somone elses back yard but that cam back to byte them when california couldn't pay their own electric bills and some of these out of state agencies sold elswhere are stopped production.
It wasn't just a matter of NIMBYism what caused to blackout and brownouts in CA. I wish I could find the article I used to have, but shortly after those rolling blackouts a newspaper in Australia, I think the Sydney Morning Herald, had an article about how one powerplant in CA sat idle during this tyme. The powerplant was a wind farm and because there wasn't enough power cables running to the wind gennies they just sat there when they could of been producing electricity. Now there's the Govinator pushing his million solar rooftops program. If there had been a million rofftops with PVs back then those blackouts very well may never of had happened. What's worse is that if pres Jimmy Carter had been successful, he pushed a program like this as president but Reagan put a stop to it when he became president, there would of been no reason for them to happen.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Market regulation vs. Government regulation. I find two different issues often get mixed, for poor results, in this sort of analysis.
One may ask the question, "what is the importance of unsensored information" (including censorship via speed regulations), and one may ask the question "what is the importance of uncensored TCP/IP". These two things are related, but discreet.
Is uncensored information important? Absolutely. And I think it should never be abandoned.
But the question is, what is the best way to maintain this precept. Should the government regulate the use of TCP/IP? Indeed as many have already commented, a primary fear is monopolistic control of the network. But we do have antitrust laws.
At some point, though, one must address the fact that TCP/IP has become much more robust than it was perhaps ever concieved. Data, and information, and entertainment are all converging, and they are moving to the economics provided by this protocol suite. Eventually, I believe, technologies will be unrealizable except on a weighted network, due to the high bandwidth and real time demand on TCP/IP, largely by streaming multimedia applications (i.e. TV over IP).
TCP/IP was never intended for this real time application, and I believe that is why it is receiving such harsh criticism moving towards enabling more reliable communication over the net. More reliable communication at, albiet, the price of other communications.
But everyone's resentment should make it clear from the fear, or anger, which arises when considering soft (speed) sensorship, that there will always be a strong demand for uncensored information. And where there's demand, there's money to be made.
As for me, and this should be taken with a grain of salt, separate from the above, If it takes me ten minutes longer to download the latest linux kernel just so I can get High Definition, quality, commercial and independent television and movies from a small company other than AT&T via TV-IP, hell, I'm in. But one must be careful, and be aware of monopolistic tendancies. And this is where the real fear may be.
Internet Discrimination. If somebody is willing to fork over money to the telecos for the highest bandwidth rate possible, and that telecos denies them strictly because that person/company is competing with the telecos, then I have an issue. But this kind of discrimination very much appears to fall under a more classic anti-trust issue.
is not to play at all.
As true for net neutrality as for global thermonuclear war.
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
I would say that one of the biggest reasons developed countries can afford roads as opposed to fibre optics is the fact that the roads have been there a lot longer and are essential for life. While the Internet IS a computer highway and is causing a lot of changes, positive and negative, it is not quite as important as that expensive strip of black dirt.
Another reason is the transportation industry. There is a massive amount of political backing for roads and other non-Internet transportation like air travel. While they use the Internet, their liveblood is the money spent on the more expensive connections like roads. That probably won't change for a while either.
Do note that fibre optic broadband does have certain limits.
One, while you can order things through broadband connections, it is a little difficult to deliver physical items like food, drink, clothing, network hardware and other physical essentials over broadband. You still need roads for that, given existing tech limits.
Two, people sometimes leave their homes to do things like go to school, work, go shopping, attend non-network meetings/events, get medical help, eat out and other activities that require physical presence. This also requires roads.
Now it would be nice if broadband could enable people to reduce the amount of physical travel they do, thus reducing the need for a lot of that 'black strip of dirt' in front of my property. In time, I think it could IF people realized how much money they are spending on it. (I would love to turn the semi-arterial in front of my property to a tree lined residential street. I think it could be done if people drove less because they could do more with broadband.)
While I would love to have fibre optic cables to every location in the country, I don't want the companies putting it in to make a mess out of everything while they are putting it in.
For example, if they are going to be tearing up expensive roads to put in underground fiber optic cables, they need to pay the full cost of repairing the roads to the original quality of the roads. Furthermore, they need to coordinate with local governments and utilities so that the roads aren't being torn up every six months when yet another company puts in fibre. (Yes it creates more expense. But those roads are going to be needed for a few more decades.)
Now if the companies are using the telephone poles in my back yard, then they need to work with the organizations that control those poles as well as local government. Too many lines strung to the same poles can create an eyesore. Abandoned lines can also create an eyesore. A bit of cooperation among all the groups trying to use those poles would go a long way to getting broadband to everybody AND keep expenses down.
There is still the problem of distance, especially in rural areas. While fibre optic cables may be cheap relative to paved roads, it is still expensive if you are trying to connect a group of houses that are a couple of miles away from the main trunk. This happens a lot more in the United States than it does in a much smaller and more urbanized area like Japan or South Korea.
Do note that Japan and South Korea should be considered developed countries. But their size and population densities make it easier to do the connections. (If you combine the areas and population of Japan and South Korea, using some Wikipedia numbers, you have an area of about 477,000 square kilometers and a population of 176 million. Compare this to Texas with an area of 695,000 square kilometers and a population of almost 24 million. Even with 'cheap' fiber optics, it is still expensive to make those connections.)
It would be interesting to do comparisions of fibre optic cable installation costs versus types of roads on a per linear foot basis. This would need to include such things as repeater stations for the fibre and signage for the roads. I suspect that dirt roads in the country may be cheaper, especially in places that don't get much rain.
I'm not saying MA Bell nor in today's networking climate that single provider is economically sound, nor sound for any other reason. My point was that the study could be turned on it's head and used to support the claim that only one network is a good thing.
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