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Will Netflix Destroy the Internet?
nicholasjay writes "Netflix is swallowing America's bandwidth and it probably won't be long before it comes for the rest of the world. That's one of the headlines from Sandvine's Fall 2010 Global Internet Phenomena Report, an exhaustive look at what people around the world are doing with their Internet lines. According to Sandvine, Netflix accounts for 20 percent of downstream Internet traffic during peak home Internet usage hours in North America. That's an amazing share — it beats that of YouTube, iTunes, Hulu, and, perhaps most tellingly, the peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol BitTorrent."
im with you.
Scare stories like this are used as a marketing chess move by the anti net neutrality lot of lobbyists.
Yes and of course, they are simple minded merchants. Chess is played by merchants and accountants; while philosophers and warriors play Go.
It is unfortunate that the people in power are also merchants and accountants. They will be more apt to respect the chess moves; while those of us who see the larger game in Go-- looking at the whole of the board, seeing how this move doesn't just change this area for the next few moves but alters future positions until the very end of the game dozens of moves later-- will see these chess moves as short-sighted self-serving drivel, and see the larger game taking better shape only if more care and consideration is taken before playing any move.
Of course, the merchants in power will play out with their fellow chess players, haggling over their simple goal of capturing or defending the king with no regard to how many pieces are lost on the board in the process by either side. Even if the businesses don't capture their king, they'll likely spread disaster before submitting to a checkmate; and both sides will think nothing of the destruction wrought, because one side won and the other lost.
Who cares about lost pawns when you won?
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Why would I need an opinion on that in this context?
Perhaps you should read, think, reread, think.
The first question you should ask is: why does Netflix matter? The answer, in this context, is because it's an argument being used for net neutrality.
Okay. Netflix no longer matters then. Why does net neutrality matter?
Hmm. I'll have to revise my analogy: it makes more direct sense if we consider Congress as the chess game rather than a player; and thus that the ISPs are playing against the Content Providers. I do not rescind my claim that Congress is also made up of merchant-minded chess players; only that I identified the wrong game here.
Now we're getting somewhere. The merchants (ISP companies) are haggling with the other merchants (Content providers) over "Netflix is eating our bandwidth, please make it stop, we didn't plan for this and it is an untenable exploitation of an oversight in our business operations!" As I said in the chess analogy, the merchants are playing chess: they are playing to capture the king. ISPs want the goal of taking the Net Neutrality king, winning the right to bill the Content Providers for all this shit. The Content Providers are trying to capture the ISPs king, winning the game for Net Neutrality and earning the right to keep the status quo.
Analogies are funny. We can't translate a Chess game into a Go game, or vice versa; however, when speaking philosophically, we can construct ridiculous allusions to such things. Further, in a philosophical sense, these allusions make sense by the reasoning that the analogy of a Chess game to the real world issue at hand does not make sense.
And so it is here. As I said, in a game of Go, every move you play adds to the board state. A stone placed here does nothing, and can easily be surrounded and taken. A stone played there does nothing. These stones cannot escape. Later in the game, though, it develops that those stones are near new constructs; territory is made, and the game is impacted greatly
The merchants are playing Chess. They don't realize that the result of the game they play will have far reaching results. The game they play is as a single stone laid in Go: it may be nothing; or it may suddenly become a huge strategic placement shifting the balance of power by 20 or 40 points... just one stone.
But that's the winning or losing of the game, yes? On a wider scale, though, what happens in between? They destroy each others' pawns and queens-- completely immaterial in Chess. But in reality, even if the ISPs lose and Net Neutrality is affixed in place, the battle itself can leave scars, laws that change the way the Internet works, laws that mute technology here and there. In this way, the game of Chess that they play is many stones being played on the Go board; and the play is haphazard, creating unforeseen effects on the outcome of the game, gaining and losing and destroying potential here and there.
I suppose my opinion is that these people are short-sighted, single-minded, and completely incapable of considering the broader ramifications of what they do. They only understand a single end goal; they don't understand profits made by careful play, but only the profit made by winning or by positioning themselves to settle a single goal or to mow a path down towards that single goal. They want to drive a spike straight into the heart of their opponent's defenses and take their prize: that is the extent of their planning and understanding.
It is foolishness. The entire battle is foolishness and it is waged by fools. That is my opinion.
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Thankfully, I can think of nothing else that will get the average American more in a tiff than their chosen source of entertainment suddenly not working.
Don't mention gay marriage or legalizing pot. I may be slightly off topic here, but only /.ers and the like will know who to blame, and why to be mad. And that's not the average American. We're lucky if we make up 5%.
If only we could become the archetypal American, Joe the IT guy, as opposed to Joe the plumber.
--"insert clever quote here"
In Go, often the few moves in the endgame can swing 5 or 10 points and turn an obvious loss into an obvious win.
Chess is a horrible analogy for the real world. If I wanted to make this a pure Go analogy, I would have to go into a really deep discussion about two players trying foolishly for specific goals such as capturing a set of corner stones, which wouldn't make sense to most people any more than my already horrible analogy.
In chess, people resign when they can't win. In Go, loss of an area of play can be walked away from, and possibly recovered from later due to a changed state of the board. My analogy sucks mainly because I have to somehow argue that losing pawns somehow matters when you manage to checkmate the king; in Chess it really doesn't, but in such an analogy it would be ridiculous to say that pawns lost along the way are meaningless when you ultimately win. Stupid laws go on the books, even if they're not the laws you WANT.
It's hard. But the funny thing is that the analogy to playing Go as you would play Chess-- directing your energy to concrete goals, which in the game of Go is harmful-- is actually highly relevant to people who are only concerned with their tiny little sphere of influence and their single-minded goals in the middle of such volatile and far-reaching issues.
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