Look Forward To Per-Service, Per-Page Fees

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Wired: "[Two] companies, Allot Communications and Openet — suppliers to large wireless companies including AT&T and Verizon — showed off a new product in a web seminar Tuesday, which included a PowerPoint presentation (1.5-MB .pdf) that was sent to Wired by a trusted source. The idea? Make it possible for your wireless provider to monitor everything you do online and charge you extra for using Facebook, Skype or Netflix. For instance, in the seventh slide of the above PowerPoint, a Vodafone user would be charged two cents per MB for using Facebook, three euros a month to use Skype and $0.50 monthly for a speed-limited version of YouTube."

Comments

scary for net neutrality

[alain94040]

One wireless carrier alone like Verizon couldn't implement such a net-killing feature: their customers would abandon them cold. And if all the US carriers adopted that together, that would be the best case to start an antitrust investigation and shake the wireless landscape once and for all.

That being said, you got to look a slide #6: it's one of the best expression of greed I have ever seen.

--
Foundrs.com: have you signed up your co-founders yet?

Re:scary for net neutrality

[TheGratefulNet]

blame DPI.

its everywhere and it gives power to greedy bastards that never deserved to wield such power.

with DPI in ever router and switch (its getting to that point, in the enterprise and certainly backbones) there's no end of how ABUSIVE carriers and network ops can be, now.

I have not heard a more compelling argument FOR net neutrality than the mere existence and aggressive use of DPI.

because they 'can' and because we know what human nature is, we should stop this before it gets any worse.

then again, with republicans fucking things up, I'm not so sure we can fix this one before its too late.

the real question is: what year will be marked as the end of the free internet? this year or the next? I feel it will be one of those.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[redemtionboy]

Your entire argument falls apart when one company simply decides not to join in with the ridiculous and cumbersome practices and instead offer superior service. If profit is motivation, then surely one company would realize that "hey, if everyone else is being a dick, I can make a ton of profit by not being a dick and simply getting all the frustrated customers." The legion of doom argument that supposes all corporations sit and plot the downfall of the working class together always seems to amaze me, because it goes against the very fundamentals of capitalism. It's no different than game theory. Everyone talks about it on paper, but no one uses it in reality, because EVERYONE has to use and play along, or it doesn't freaking work.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[tepples]

Your entire argument falls apart when one company simply decides not to join in with the ridiculous and cumbersome practices and instead offer superior service.

Then why did all four major U.S. cell phone carriers raise their SMS rates at the same time?

Re:scary for net neutrality

[Lord Bitman]

Why would their customers abandon them? This won't be marketed as "We charge you more depending on what you do", it will be marketed as "and now, your favourite sites cost less per minute!"

Re:scary for net neutrality

[Bert64]

No, because if one company did that the others would soon follow suit resulting in increased competition and lower profits all round..
Sure, that's how a free market is *supposed* to work, but more likely the operators would simply collude so they each have their share of of a market with fatter margins.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[postbigbang]

Remember when the argument against deep packet inspection was that it would inject gruesome latency, and be thwarted by privacy concerns? It shows that if you wait long enough, and remain persistent, that you can do fiendish things when people are either worn down, or not looking.

The grain of the carriers is to charge you for everything, just like it's the mantra of every hotel-- at least in the US. Is it a plot? No-- while you cite that going against the grain is a way to make money, the most efficient distribution mechanism will be rewarded, viz Walmart and Dell. The way you will pay will be by the packet, it just takes a wave of carriers to agree to go this route (pardon the pun). This is why net neutrality from end point to end point, is so critically important. Cranked-up MBAs will try to find a way to do it, make no mistake. Unless we fight it at all edges, we're going to be buying Internet by the expensive, pseudo-market-based gallon, not by the pipe size.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[countertrolling]

blame DPI.

May as well blame it on the bossa nova for all the good it will do you. DPI is no worse than a borescope, it just depends where you're using it..

Re:scary for net neutrality

[redemtionboy]

So Sprint growing huge strides by offering great service and cheap plans isn't evidence that I'm right? AT&T is being a fat cow at the top and losing customers and smaller companies like sprint, US Cellular, and Virgin mobile are growing because of it. You can only maximize profits to the point that it doesn't piss off your consumers. As long as there are options, capitalism works.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[Graff]

Queue the conspiracy theorists.

You know, stuff like this CAN be used in a way that consumers might like. Maybe you you'll be able to sign up with a plan that gives you free internet but you're charged a usage fee on certain popular sites. That'd be great for someone who doesn't use those sites enough to justify paying a monthly fee.

I see this going one of several ways:

• provides customers more choice, everyone wins including the provider (more customers)
• one provider tries this in an "evil" way, loses customers and backpedals
• a bunch of providers try this in an "evil" way, they don't lose customers because there's no where else to go, customers scream to their lawmakers and the government steps in

Overall I think it will all go the way of the first option. There may be some wailing and gnashing of teeth before that but eventually the companies will only win if they keep the customers happy.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[camperslo]

One wireless carrier alone like Verizon couldn't implement such a net-killing feature: their customers would abandon them cold.

One would think so, but I never expected people would actually pay for ring tones or watch reality tv. It seems if one isn't boycotting slime you're helping it grow.

The greed is sickening. Or is this the Verizon way of dealing with more traffic on getting the iPhone?

As poor as the pricing/bandwidth ratio is for much U.S. home net access, many mobile plans still give people lower caps for a month than many home users eat in a day. If not using WiFi, some of the new owners of these mobile devices will be in for a serious shock if they try to use them heavily.

We also gave some of these providers subsidies to build out their networks. What did we get in return?

Re:scary for net neutrality

[redemtionboy]

This is simply really a great marketing ploy to get people into texting plans. All major carriers offer them and they're far cheaper than the pure pay per text model. If they didn't offer texting plans, this wouldn't work. Instead making the pay per text inconvenient, you get people into the text plans which guarantees their income and grows texting as people use it more frivolously, resulting in a wider spread of texting overall. In contrast, if carriers made texting purely inconvenient and pricey, you'd get less usage, resulting in less texting overall. This works in the same way people like to have the government tax things to discourage usage, like taxing oil and giving breaks to solar

Re:scary for net neutrality

[cdrguru]

The problem with this thinking is that the mode all of the operators have been in is market share capture. In order to build market share they were willing to do almost anything including operations at a loss. So what if 50% of your customers are costing you money if it is made up for by the other 50%? And, you are dominating in the market place?

Well, it may very well be time to pay for what they have built up. Market share is nice, but it doesn't pay in the end. And with usage going up they may lose market share because of network congestion anyway. So how to retain customers and increase revenue?

Simple answer is of course to just raise monthly rates. The problem with the flat-rate charging is that some users are way, way over consuming while others are way, way under consuming. This works out more or less OK until you have some new killer application that everyone wants to use. Should that occur - and I don't think it has yet - the operator is left with an unusable network and operating at a severe loss.

So just raising everyones monthly rate is probably not the right answer. It would shift customers around until everyone has their increases and makes people unhappy with network congestion.

A much better way is self-limiting for the users so congestion doesn't happen. You drive this by charging for things that load up the network more than for things that do not. Google is no problem, watching a movie is. Plugging the EVO phone into an HDMI monitor to watch a movie is a huge load. Texting is almost nothing and can be ignored.

So you have a whole new plan coming down where some things (applications, services) cost and others are included in the new low, low monthly rates. But the idea of flat-rate bandwidth on wireless cell networks is gone.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[JaredOfEuropa]

Consumers generally favour all-you-can-eat plans over this nickle&diming for separate items. They like to pay 50 euro/month every month instead of paying 30 some months and 70 on other months. And thankfully we have enough competition... a few carriers have tried to introduce metered traffic, low data caps and/or bandwidth throttling, but each time there has been such a consumer backlash and people switching en masse to the competition that to date, internet traffic (either wired or mobile) is cheap and in practice unlimited. And plans to charge extra for certain services will probably meet the same fate.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[CodeBuster]

This works in the same way people like to have the government tax things to discourage usage, like taxing oil and giving breaks to solar

Except that solar, which has far fewer users than gasoline, is still too expensive and now I'm angry that I have to pay more at the gas pump. I have to drive to work each day, so gas taxes hit me hard right now and I don't own a mansion covered in solar panels like Al Gore does. Has anyone else noticed that "green" subsidies for electric cars and solar panels seem primarily to benefit those who can afford to pay full price anyway? Why should ordinary working folks pay more at the gas pump so that hybrid limousine liberals can have their "green" fetishes satisfied at a subsidized rate?

Re:scary for net neutrality

[Wannabe Code Monkey]

That being said, you got to look a slide #6: it's one of the best expression of greed I have ever seen.

The entire slideshow makes me want to throw up. But I really think slide 18 takes the cake:

Use Case: Split Billing

• First 15 minutes of the movie streamed for free to user as a promotion
• If user doesn't purchase movie, content provider is billed for the 15 minutes of network consumption
• If user purchases movie, revenue is shared between operator and content provider

Are you kidding me! So someone else actually creates content worth viewing and for some reason Verizon gets a cut no matter whether I buy it or not? I just have to preview it. Verizon already benefits from there being interesting things on the internet, it makes people buy network connections. And it's not like they're hurting if you use your connection for high bandwidth content because a user gets the speed they pay for. If there are more interesting videos on the internet then users will pay for faster network connections.

I really can't express my outrage well enough. I want to scream, cry, and throw up all at once after having read through that presentation. The worst part is that we'll all suffer as a result of this. Even if you can find and ISP who wouldn't pull this shit, all the content providers will still have to pay shakedown money to the big ISPs in order to get their stuff in front of people's eyes. This will create monopolies where only the big boys can afford to pay for play. The smaller guys, or the ones who refuse to pay extortion will suffer and probably not be able to compete. So even if you can find an ISP who won't play these games, and even if there are content providers that don't want to pay up, they'll be few and far between because the youtubes and the hulus and the ABCs of the world will pay for better service and the others will go out of business.

I love slide 5 which shows the ISPs valiantly trying to carry popular services on their backs as money flows out of their pockets and sweat drips off their brow. <ispviewpoint>Yeah, what jerks facebook, youtube, and skype are for creating popular services that our users actually want to use, that actually make the service we provide useful. We'd have it so much easier if only there weren't popular services on the internet. Why can't everyone just buy expensive connections, and then not use them, that would totally be the best.</ispviewpoint>.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[rbphilip]

Yawn. I'm an ordinary working person and I have a small (by McMansion standards) house covered with solar panels. And I drive a car that gets 34 mpg. I don't care a bit what gasoline costs ($8-10/gallon would be fine, to encourage SUVs off the roads) and I like not paying for electricity. And the 75% of the cost of my panels covered by various government entities subsidized my panels from other *electric* customers, not gasoline taxes. You too could invest a paltry $15K to avoid electric bills for the rest of your time in your house, ordinary working person though you might be..

Re:scary for net neutrality

[clarkkent09]

Because of the competition in text messaging "plans" (where the price per message has actually been falling). The other three carriers copied AT&T marketing practice which was to encourage people to sign up for plans by increasing rates per message and reduce the plan rates. Dept. of Justice looked into this and found no collusion to raise prices, but obviously you know better.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[redemtionboy]

Perhaps this was a bad example, because Solar is currently a dumb and less useful energy, no where near the level of capabilities of gasoline, and inconvenient to switch over to. The texting model works because it is super easy for the consumer to switch over, and gives them more bang for their buck.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[Grishnakh]

And if all the US carriers adopted that together, that would be the best case to start an antitrust investigation and shake the wireless landscape once and for all.

Wrong. This is the USA, and antitrust law is not enforced here, at all. What'll likely happen is the US carriers will all adopt this at the same time, and their paid-off servants in the government will look the other way. And no, it doesn't matter if Democrats or Republicans are in office, because they're both equally corrupt.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[Anonymous Coward]

No collusion != no intent to thwart competition.

If a bunch of companies independently realise that they will collectively make more money screwing customers than by competing then they haven't broken any law. It's only collusion if they agree beforehand. The customer gets screwed either way but The Justice Department only cares (naturally) if the law was broken.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[Grishnakh]

You can buy a used car that gets 30+ mpg for less than $5k, and probably for free after selling your current gas guzzler and using the proceeds from that. Last time I checked, you could buy an early-model Honda Insight (58 mpg) for $5k, and they're probably cheaper now.

If you're complaining about gas prices, then you're just an idiot who feels entitled to drive around in a 6500lb 8mpg behemoth.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time I see someone hoping for the price of gas to go up because they "hate SUVs", it is ironic that they are the first to complain when prices of goods and services go up.

Why is this? It isn't the porcine Moon Pie gobblers who use the Hoverrounds in Wal-Mart driving the Suburbans who are just affected. The whole transportation infrastructure is. You know those additional fuel charges airlines tacked on in 2008? We are still paying for them now.

Another ironic thing? The annoying people with the 30 inch wheels on the Escalades will be the least affected by gas prices. It will be consumers barely getting by who now get stung by another $100 a month.

So, please stop wishing ill for everyone but the people who don't like. When your wish comes true, it just means you end up bitching how much everything costs because the $10/gallon gas prices affect everyone.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[Grishnakh]

No, when all the companies act like dicks together, they all end up making more money. It's called a "cartel", and is the primary business method in the USA today.

Don't forget, many of these companies don't actually want to put each other out of business. The CEOs of these companies are all golf buddies and great friends of each other. They sit on the boards of each others' companies. Why would they want to put each other out of business? If they do that, they'll lose all their friends, and then when they need a little help (maybe a new CEO job after they've incompetently run their current company into the ground), they won't get it.

You seem to think that competition is alive and well in America, when that clearly isn't the case at all.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[SuricouRaven]

"Or is this the Verizon way of dealing with more traffic on getting the iPhone?"

Probably. The mobile networks are in the same position with smartphones as the fixed broadband ISPs are with P2P and video streaming. They hugely oversell capacity, on the assumption that the vast majority of customers would use only a tiny fraction of what they have paid for: Most of the time the phone just sits in a pocket, waiting. With smartphones (Or p2p/video) this assumption becomes invalid, and the business model collapses. The only solutions are either raise prices, build a more capable infrastructure, or find some way to penalise heavy use of the service. ISPs do just what corporations are expected to do: Consider all options, and go for the one that provides the optimal return. That would be #3, the one that neither deters customers with high prices nor requires very expensive investment in an eternal upgrade cycle.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[CodeBuster]

Try squeezing your family and their luggage into that early-model Honda insight. There are many ordinary working families in America who require a "family hauler" type vehicle. Why should we punish them with excessive gas taxes? For those who say, "your gas taxes don't subsidize my solar" you just aren't seeing the big picture. Those federal gas taxes go to pay for lots of other things besides highways and road maintenance. You can earmark tax revenues for specific projects all you want but governments always find a way to get their hands back in the cookie jar to fund unrelated things from the pool of gas tax revenues.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[ideonexus]

Slide #17 is the one that really scares me. They are talking about having foreigners visiting American sites being greeted with a "You Need Our ISP to View this Site, PAY UP TO CONTINUE". I recently predicted this sort of thing would start an online trade war. They even use the word "Tariff" to describe the strategy.

This sort of dangerous nonsense is exactly why we need Net Neutrality.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[CodeBuster]

You too could invest a paltry $15K to avoid electric bills for the rest of your time in your house

The middle class in the United States is under tremendous pressure right now what with the recession, high unemployment and the collapsed housing market. They don't have an extra $15k to invest and their home equity is negative so where are they going to get the money? Have you tried to get an unsecured consumer loan lately? It's tough. As I have already said, the solar subsidies primarily benefit the upper middle class (pseudo-rich) and the wealthy ($250K+ households) at the expense of the broader group of working class Americans.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[rrossman2]

It's why sometimes have a smaller, more local carrier is a better option. I have Immix Wireless, and while they don't have 3G (yet, early next year) they are small and provide fair service. 500 minutes, unlimited texting to anyone, unlimited data, uses T-Mobile, AT&T, and 10 other GSM providers when you aren't on their towers, all for $60 a month for my Android phone. Also, they don't lock their phones, they all come unlocked.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[rrossman2]

You could always get a used Accord, Civic, VW Golf or Jetta (especially the diesels) and be over 30 mpg and have enough room for a normal family. Obviously if you have 8 kids you're in a different boat

Re:scary for net neutrality

[McGiraf]

Oil get way more subsidies than electric power, even if you remove the US army budget from the oil subsidies.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[Maxo-Texas]

Wow, completely agree. This is just an excellent way to push me to a trakfone.

If my phone is no good without extra charges, why on earth would I need a phone with those capabilities.

I think this is greedy blue skying as you surmise and that they will try but fail as someone else will be around to undercut them.

Data is data is data. If you want to limit me to 5 gig, fine. If that makes sense, I'll keep doing it. If not, I'll quit.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[Maxo-Texas]

They will work as a cartel but they ultimately do want to crush their ceo buddies and hear the lamentation of their women.

CEO is a smiling, socio-pathic blood sport.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[camperdave]

People complain about gas prices because they fluctuate so much. A tankful may cost $50 one week, $60 next week, and $52 the day after next week. No other commodity fluctuates in price so much. If the price slowly rose, hardly anyone would complain. And don't feed me that felgercarb about crude oil prices, because the price of a quart of oil remains the same for months at a time, and never changes "coincidentally" for the long weekend.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[drooling-dog]

Congratulations for getting through the first 3 weeks of Econ 101. If you show up next week too, you'll learn about oligopoly and cartels, which, while impossible (or benign) in the libertarian fantasy universe, are actually more the rule than the exception in modern capitalism.

Texting services are nearly costless for the telecomms, so you'd think that at least one would offer it to customers at no (additional) charge to gain market share, wouldn't you? Price equals marginal cost to maximize profit, right? But they all know that if they did so, all of the others would have to follow, hence killing the goose that laid the golden egg and leaving them all worse off than they were before. That's the way things work when only a few companies dominate an industry.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[lgw]

The texting example had no mentionof cars. This is Slashdot: we do car analogies here.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[RaymondKurzweil]

Wow, you think a "quart" of oil to lubricate engines sold in retail packaging is closer to the crude oil market than gasoline. Hint... it's not.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[Antisyzygy]

Price fixing.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[Antisyzygy]

Corporations don't plot the downfall of the working class, they plot the expansion of the coffers of the wealthy class. It just so happens the way to do that is pay people less money for more work and charge more money for things while driving the corporate cost of production or service of it down. In the US companies have learned to cooperate and all reap greater rewards. Its illegal, but they do it anyway. A prime example is the telecomm industry. Its essentially an oligopoly with behind the scenes price fixing.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[tomhudson]

Yawn. I'm an ordinary working person and I have a small (by McMansion standards) house covered with solar panels. And I drive a car that gets 34 mpg. I don't care a bit what gasoline costs ($8-10/gallon would be fine, to encourage SUVs off the roads) and I like not paying for electricity. And the 75% of the cost of my panels covered by various government entities subsidized my panels from other *electric* customers, not gasoline taxes. You too could invest a paltry $15K to avoid electric bills for the rest of your time in your house, ordinary working person though you might be..

In other words

1. your solar panels would be a real money-pit without government cheese to pay 75% of the cost;
2. You aren't planning on living there for more than another decade or so (solar cells decrease in efficiency over time, so eventually they have to be replace)

Also, your solar panel production contributed to the unregulated release of NF3 - 17,000 times more potent greenhouse gas than CO2

Re:scary for net neutrality

[Totenglocke]

And I'll market it to the ISP's as "and now I cancel my service and go net-free!"

Re:scary for net neutrality

[Grishnakh]

If you can afford 8 kids, you have no place complaining about gas prices. If you can't afford gas with 8 kids, then you should have invested in condoms or the pill.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[Anonymous Coward]

Free markets are a pipe dream, however that's precisely because of government, and not in spite of it.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[hairyfeet]

I'm afraid you are wrong, and here is why: The "big money" for the telecos is NOT in scamming customers from each other, it is in ridiculous "butt raped to the 900th power" long term contracts that they offer with the latest iShiny. If they were to leech massive amount of customers from another, why then they'd have to build new infrastructure, and that would cut into the quarterly earnings which is bad. No instead just like how ALL FOUR TELECOS raised the price of SMS at the exact same time, they will simply get together and set a date for the raping to commence.

No you can scream anti-trust all you want, nobody in Washington gives a shit anymore, and hasn't in decades. If they did the telecos/cablecos would have been busted a LONG time ago for their sleazy tactics and ass raping of customers. Instead a couple of the fringe politicians will give lip service to doing something about it, will have some meetings in some committee, where it will promptly die hard thanks to bribes....err I mean lobbyist suggestions.

So I'm sorry friend, but your premise hinges on having a "free market" which hasn't actually existed in a long time, if it ever did in the telecommunications industry. In reality most have their own little monopolies, where the competitors if you want to call them that have truly shitastic service if you can even get a signal. Look up something like "teleco cherry picking" to see how they only really compete with each other in a few really juicy markets, whereas everywhere else is lock in city. And the simple fact is they can compete in the cherry pick areas by offering nicer iShiny phones than the other guy while STILL ass raping on the contract, so it will be profit city! Meanwhile we will get farther and farther behind everyone else, the equivalent of the short bus on the information superhighway. Welcome to corporatist Amerika! Please enjoy your free groping on the way in and out!

Re:scary for net neutrality

[noidentity]

What does Foundrs.com have to do with slide #6? If that's part of your signature, you can put it in your Slashdot signature. One benefit of this is that people who aren't interested in signatures can disable their display.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[noidentity]

The worst part about this is that the average internet-surfing population will probably find this bullshit perfectly acceptable, and never know what they lost.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[turbidostato]

"If profit is motivation, then surely one company would realize that "hey, if everyone else is being a dick, I can make a ton of profit by not being a dick and simply getting all the frustrated customers." The legion of doom argument that supposes all corporations sit and plot the downfall of the working class together always seems to amaze me, because it goes against the very fundamentals of capitalism. It's no different than game theory."

In fact it *is* game theory, a variant of the prisioner's dilemma. In this case your "clever company" would indeed get a great benefit, then the other competitors would go by the same price scheme and at the end they *all* would end up losing a ton o money (well, squeezing a lot less money from the people).

Certainly, when you have a lot of competitors you are almost guaranteed than at least one will go for the short time profits. That's how competition works and that's why it's good having flourishing competition for a healthy market. When you have just a short bunch of big competitors (say, three, four) with a high entry barrier it's much easier for them to "play by their rules" and at the same time watch out each other in short range to be sure they comply to "their rules". This way they all are able to go with higher margins.

Which of those market models do you think fits better the telcos? The one with high competition or the oligopoly with high entry barriers, uh?

Re:scary for net neutrality

[tepples]

Why don't people just get together and start a co-op ISP? Rent the line from a bigger ISP.

Do you mean become an MVNO? I don't see any regional MVNOs on this list.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[KermodeBear]

Wrong. This is the USA, and antitrust law is not enforced here, at all.

ADM would like to have a word with you.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[Grishnakh]

That case was 15 years ago! And the people involved got off with a slap on the wrist. ADM is still in business and quite strong. Why? Shouldn't a company convicted of criminal cartel activity simply be dissolved? And their executives got a whopping 3 years in a country-club prison. In China, those guys would have gotten a bullet in the head, like they should have.

Care to point to any significant antitrust cases in the last, oh, decade? Well, there was the Microsoft case, which resulted in a conviction and then no penalty whatsoever after Bush took power, almost exactly 10 years ago.

As I said, antitrust law is not enforced here, at all. Maybe it was back in the distant past, but not any more.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[CodeBuster]

Did someone make them have a giant family and own lots of things?

Translation: To American families with 3+ kids, house and car, "drop dead".

In case you hadn't noticed, anti-family arguments and ridiculing family values are political non-starters here in the United States

Re:scary for net neutrality

[vuffi_raa]

what's even worse is that it's being shopped to AT&T- being a public utility the idea of redirecting cost based on usage like that is akin to charging you based on the conversation that you are having - or which phone you use.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[Requiem18th]

Google is no problem, watching a movie is. Plugging the EVO phone into an HDMI monitor to watch a movie is a huge load. Texting is almost nothing and can be ignored.

But you don't have to charge by WHAT is being used, only for the how much. A movie is a huge load because it carries a lot of packages, not because "it's YouTube". On the same tune, there is no reason why a visit to Vodafone should be free of charge while a visit to facebook 2cents/MB. It's entirely possible that someone will just visit a single facebook page, to check a link in a mail for instance, then download several MBs of html from vodafone's site, looking through the TOS and trying to figure out how to fill a complaint. Why does vodafone get a free pass?

Never ever is is right to charge for who is transferring data. Charge for QoS, charge for traffic charge for service maintenance, never for identity, that's just evil.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[twoHats]

Off these greedy pigs!

Re:scary for net neutrality

[twoHats]

Cut verizon off at the knees! They offer you no value and constantly rip you off!

Re:scary for net neutrality

[vegiVamp]

You know why it's tough to get unsecured loans ? Because those are exactly what got the whole fucking world into a crisis.

The gratuitous giving out of loans created a period where too many people were able to live on more money than they had; and the consequence is that there is now a period where those same people plus quite a few casualties have to live on less money. It may not be fun, but the latter is a direct consequence of the former.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[GameboyRMH]

The "legion of doom" argument is totally valid, that's basically how it works - by working together to milk consumers out of money in ways that wouldn't be possible in a highly competitive market (which it isn't, with telcos sometimes having a monopoly on huge parts of a country, and just a small handful of telcos overall), the telcos can make FAR more money. It's in all their best interests to collude. That's why they have these trade groups and why they tend to do things that screw consumers all at the same time. It's much better for all of them.

Let's say we have 3 telcos and each has a monopoly over a large area with only slight overlap between the three (not unrealistic). Telcos A and B decide to go to a hellish tiered, throttled, capped and per-service plan, and C decides to remain neutral.

A and B are now hauling in unholy amounts of money while C is making good profit, but nowhere near as much. C's stock gets dumped while A and B's goes through the roof (IRL, this could even happen when the plans are announced). There are even situations possible here where the leadership of C could be sued by their shareholders.

Now A and B are making enough money to spread into C's turf. They undercut C (still not making a loss, just less outrageous profits) and put C out of business.

Now there is a duopoly, and there is very little competition between A and B, even if consumers have a choice between the two. B just offers things like discounts for people who use all B services and cheap B to B calls while B to A calls are outrageously expensive. A does something similar. Soon the two achieve a sort of equilibrium and there is no competition whatsoever. I have first-hand experience with this type of situtation so I'm not guessing.

See when you're working with things like telcos that charge artificial scarcity prices on a post-scarcity service, the old conventional laws of capitalism don't even apply at all. In a sane world you'd pay a flat monthly fee for unlimited bits over your whatever connection, because it doesn't really cost more for the telco to run their business regardless of how much traffic goes over a connection. They'd just offer sustainable unlimited plans and put some of their profits towards expanding network capacity.

But that's not how it works in our post-Reagan micro-trading sci-fi dystopia.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[GameboyRMH]

You're on the right track! The only way to save the Internet is to bring its administration and infrastructure under community control, but it must also be decentralized:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1634334&cid=32019410

Re:scary for net neutrality

[Decker-Mage]

Unfortunately you did not take into account all of the financial factors involved. I seriously doubt very many middle-class families have $15K available in their checking and/or savings accounts. Therefore they are going to have to borrow. Ignoring the bank end of the deal, with market valuation of their homes below the pre-mortgage assessed value, you can forget second mortgages, lines of credit, and the like. It'd be interesting to see how many could do it with their credit cards, although the interest rates are high and going higher. BTW, assuming an interest rate of 20%, you would end up paying out approximately $60K, so you are better off just paying the j$200 a month utility bill. Even at 10% interest rate it will take 10 years to pay off the loan, so that isn't exactly a great ROI either. Interest rates have to be very close to the prime rate to make this a wise investment. In any case, what we are seeing in middle-class families is a serious attempt to reduce debt, not increase it. This behavior is historically normal whenever the financial system suffers a collapse or near collapse.

The other part of the equation is a willing lender. As has been repeatedly reported, banks aren't loaning money to anyone. No wonder either as I think that they are reeling from the near collapse, so the historical norm of behavior happens to be 'wait and see', and I firmly believe that the mortgage foreclosure mess is farther reaching than has been publicized to date. Between forced mergers and lax lending and similarly lax documentation of same, the banks are going to be a while trying to sort it all out. God help them if/when the states AG's get documentary evidence on this, and they will.

If you have studied American Economic History, which btw has very little to do with the history of the 'science' of economics, these things fall into patterns (Toynbee is right about that). Near as I can tell, it'll be about seven years to unravel the knot that resulted from the policies (decades before Bush II came along) that created this. Thus it will be about that long before the advice on solar will have a chance of actually happening. Given recent developments in solar technology, and I expect even better improvements by then*, not only will it be economic, it will be rampant stupidity that would oppose it. People have no problems practicing that, but that's people.

*: Pure conjecture on my part, but there are several interesting combinations possible with recent advances that could result in a close order improvement in true power out. If that happens, and the price-point sufficiently reasonable, you would not only stop paying the power company but actually reap a signicant profit. It'd be interesting to see the contortions utility companies would go about when the customer-base becomes a high-minor to low-major player in power generation. Sadly I probably won't be around to see it.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[choko]

The major carriers often collude with each other instead of competing. No one said they are plotting the downfall of the working class, or that this is some sort of shadowy conspiracy. If they all decide to go the route described in the article, it means greater profits for all without the "hassle" of competing. Sure, it goes against the tenants of capitalism, but I don't think the major players really care. They do whatever will make them the most profit, and competing is not always good for profits. You seem to think that companies will uphold the tenants of capitalism even when they have to sacrifice profits to do so, and that amazes me.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[innerweb]

Free markets are a pipe dream as they neither maximize profit nor minimize risk. No sanely managed company would encourage a free market unless they are shut out of that market.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[The End Of Days]

*shrug* it's not gonna hurt me in the long run. They are totally welcome to continue fucking themselves in the name of greed until something gives. Doesn't make me wrong.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[Tuoqui]

If is walks like duck, quacks like a duck and tastes like a duck when you cook it for supper... You're not gonna say it's a cow... Unless you're the Dept. of Justice in the US of A.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[Gizzmonic]

Try squeezing your family and their luggage into that early-model Honda insight. There are many ordinary working families in America who require a "family hauler" type vehicle.

Remember that old-timey vehicle called the station wagon? It's nearly extinct here because Congress doesn't want to enforce fuel, safety, and pollution standards on SUVs, so people buy those instead. Meanwhile, they increase diesel particulate regs *on small cars only* which has the effect of chasing the fuel-efficient VWs and Audi diesels off the road. If these regulations really reflected a commitment to curb pollution and increase fuel efficiency, SUV sales would go down and station wagon sales would go up (as it is in Europe).

Re:scary for net neutrality

[Sunrun]

The problem is that it because of the way SMS messages are sent (i.e. along with other data that was "already going that'a'way" (in the packet headers for the nerds) it functionally costs the wireless carriers nothing to provide the service for which they charge money. In other words, it's 100% profit, no matter how much they charge.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[redemtionboy]

So you have a problem with profit? Isn't that the model of a business? They have created value in something and people are willing to pay. I see no issues with this.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[Sunrun]

The problem I have is with the artificiality of the price they charge -- it is motivated purely by greed. People think the price they pay for texting services is based on what it costs the carriers to provide the service. But the cost is more closely associated with the operating overhead involved in actually charging their customers for the service, not the service itself, and it's certainly not even 1% of the amount of money they charge. It amounts to price gouging, pure and simple, and it's in the carriers' best interest to hide this fact from consumers. I'm fine with them making a reasonable profit -- emphasis on 'reasonable'. Then again, P. T. Barnum said, "There's a sucker born every minute," and Theodore Geisel wrote in The Lorax, "You never can tell what some people will buy." In all honesty, I do have a texting plan on my phone -- $5/mo. for 200, which roughly equates to 2.5/message, but only if I send/recieve 200 messages. The reality is closer to 10/message (50 messages for my $5), and while that's still cheaper than the 20/message à la carte rate, they don't have to charge even that much to make a tidy profit. Again, it's just greed. It may be basic supply/demand economics and the status quo but that doesn't mean it isn't dishonest.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[redemtionboy]

People pay what they value something at. Soda for example costs maybe $0.05 to fill up a glass in a restaurant. Yet people pay $2.00 for sodas in sit down restaurants. Just because something has a high profit margin doesn't mean something's dishonest. It just means you found a successful product. It would be dishonest if they were telling me I was paying for Soda and instead getting some inferior concoction, but when a product is clearly labeled and the consumer agrees to pay a price for that product, it isn't dishonest. Also, a lot of times businesses will lose money a in certain areas like when they sell you your phone under a 2 year contract, expecting to make that money back from services like this. Is it dishonest for them to sell me a phone at a loss and make money back by charging more for texting? Dishonesty would be if I went to best buy and they tell me that monster cables are amazingly superior to the $5 cables I can get from monoprice, but best buy simply selling monster cables for $50 is not dishonest, even though it's not worth that money, because they sell their TVs a lot lower than competition and expect to make it back on such accessories and service plans. That's not dishonesty, that's me being an uniformed consumer.

Re:scary for net neutrality

[Sunrun]

People pay what they value something at. Soda for example costs maybe $0.05 to fill up a glass in a restaurant. Yet people pay $2.00 for sodas in sit down restaurants. Just because something has a high profit margin doesn't mean something's dishonest. It just means you found a successful product. It would be dishonest if they were telling me I was paying for Soda and instead getting some inferior concoction, but when a product is clearly labeled and the consumer agrees to pay a price for that product, it isn't dishonest.

...Which is the other reason I tend to stick to ordering just tap water when eating out (the first being that I just don't drink soft drinks for health reasons). That's a very apt analogy I hadn't considered -- point well made. Kudos!

Also, a lot of times businesses will lose money a in certain areas like when they sell you your phone under a 2 year contract, expecting to make that money back from services like this. Is it dishonest for them to sell me a phone at a loss and make money back by charging more for texting? Dishonesty would be if I went to best buy and they tell me that monster cables are amazingly superior to the $5 cables I can get from monoprice, but best buy simply selling monster cables for $50 is not dishonest, even though it's not worth that money, because they sell their TVs a lot lower than competition and expect to make it back on such accessories and service plans. That's not dishonesty, that's me being an uniformed consumer.

Funny you should mention Worst^H^H^H^H^HBest Buy and Monster Cables.. I've actually been told that exact thing by a Best Buy salesperson. I, too, happen to know better, but I would say this still constitutes dishonesty on their part, regardless of my level of awareness. Unless there's a difference between 'telling the consumer an outright lie' and 'not telling them anything about a product (or at least hoping they don't ask) and assuming they know all about it already', this seems to turn the "simply selling Monster Cables for $50" or 'selling text plans for $5/month' or 'selling unhealthy $2.00 soft drinks in restaurants' into a bit grayer of an issue than suggested. (Quite a bit grayer in the area of soft drinks.. Whose responsibility is it to look out for a consumer's health: the vendor or the consumer himself? Restaurants sell alcoholic beverages as well, also at a tidy profit. Yet it's clear that alcohol impairs judgment and physical coordination even at low levels, which makes driving away from said restaurant an inherently dangerous undertaking. AFAIK, vendors of on- and off-sale alcoholic beverages have been successfully sued by the deceased's family for wrongful death caused by a driver impaired by the alcohol the vendor supplied. But this is now WAY off topic (not that it wasn't before...).)

That being said, I do agree that caveat emptor is a useful axiom to live by. I just wish it wasn't necessary to do so. :)

Inevitable

[stoolpigeon]

I think we all understand that bits from some sites clog up more of the tubes than bits from other sites. I know netflix bits are much heavier than fluffy fark bits.

We all new the free ride couldn't go on for ever, shoving our super dense bittorrent bits down the pipes to the detriment of all the innocent cnn.com users and their non-obstructive bits.

Finally my telco can start making real money, like they deserve after all these years of selflessly giving away bandwidth.

Re:Inevitable

[Garble Snarky]

Obviously there is no issue of "bit density" as you describe it, but what are the telcos supposed to do as traffic increases significantly? Does it really make more sense to increase service charges uniformly for everybody? If you can clearly identify the 1% of users that create 20% of the traffic, then isn't it best for everybody to charge those users appropriately?

Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of these companies, and I absolutely dread the day that practices like this start to go into effect. But I have trouble seeing alternatives.

Re:Inevitable

[swrider]

Bits is bits! Bandwidth is not free, but it is only bandwidth that the carriers should be selling. They should not be charging different rates for different flavors of bits. They should not even be aware that the bits are reaching my phone from Google, or YouTube, or my e-mail server. All, they need to know is that I requested a specified number of bits to enter their network to be relayed through to my mobile device.

This is why the cellular carriers should not be omitted from any type of net neutrality rules put into place by the FCC. And this is why the Republicans actions to prevent the FCC from issuing net neutrality rulings needs to be prevented. See http://slashdot.org/story/10/12/17/2045244/Republicans-Create-Rider-To-Stop-Net-Neutrality

Re:Inevitable

[stoolpigeon]

Exactly. The telcos have no business snooping around in what I do on the web.

Imagine if they did this to voice. Calling work is premium, immediate relatives sort of premium but distant relatives we'll give you at the base rate. You can call our business partners for a reduced rate, calling our competitors will cost triple.

Re:Inevitable

[mikkelm]

What you're suggesting would work just fine if ISPs actually carried it out without taking a huge dump on the consumer. What ISPs know, and what you should know, too, is that the cost of serving the 5% of users generating 25% of the traffic is minuscule next to the profit generated from overselling "unlimited" connections to people who don't generate more than a gigabyte or two of traffic per month at most. That's why you don't see straight usage based billing, but rather static caps, or caps set relative to the throughput of the connections offered. They want to keep overcharging the 95%, while keeping the 5% from making the ISP eat the cost of their business model.

It's like offering only $100 unlimited* distance cab rides. (* Up to 10 miles or 20 minutes, whichever comes first.) No cab company would have a motivation to return to metered service.

Re:Inevitable

[MoonBuggy]

But I have trouble seeing alternatives.

The sensible alternative is straightforward usage-based billing. You charge for the quantity of traffic, not the type of traffic. It's not the most popular solution, partly because ISPs are going to use it as an unfair excuse for a price hike, but it recognises that 'unlimited' is impossible and it beats the hell out of arbitrary distinctions on identical bits purely intended to extort the most cash from both consumer and content provider.

Re:Inevitable

[poopdeville]

Exactly. The telcos have no business snooping around in what I do on the web.

That is their business, full stop. If they are to optimize their network for real-life traffic patterns, they must "snoop".

Imagine if they did this to voice. Calling work is premium, immediate relatives sort of premium but distant relatives we'll give you at the base rate. You can call our business partners for a reduced rate, calling our competitors will cost triple.

Ever heard of "long distance"? "Calling our competitors" cost a lot more than triple, not too long ago.

Re:Inevitable

[zm]

If the service providers see a possibility to sign up more people on their data plans by offering discounts on bandwidth to some particular resource, like FB, they are going to do just that. Of course, the discounted access will be appropriately traffic shaped to allow them to charge more people for using the network at the same time. As the OP put it, it is inevitable, and has been in the development for many years now, just lookup the 3GPP policy enforcement specifications.

Re:Inevitable

[Edmund Blackadder]

Nobody is preventing carriers from charging for bandwidth. If net neutrality was enacted into law tomorrow carriers could still charge per MB downloaded or something like that.

The problem is that they want to charge depending on what is in the data. They want to charge you more for getting 100 MB worth of movies or voice than 100 MB worth of random webpages. Now that is fucked up, because (a) the carriers have no business looking at the stuff i download and (b) if they are allowed to do that they will just tax the popular websites and web services ensuring that any innovation or success on the web is quickly punished.

Re:Inevitable

[JohnFen]

Does it really make more sense to increase service charges uniformly for everybody?

Yes.

If you can clearly identify the 1% of users that create 20% of the traffic, then isn't it best for everybody to charge those users appropriately?

I don't know abut "best for everybody", but it certainly is a reasonable approach. And a reasonable way to do it is simply to charge on a per-bit basis. It still doesn't matter where the bits are coming from and going to, and so the ISPs don't have to pay attention to you on that level. ...and this is the way billing is done right now. Facebook, Google, etc.,, pays more for their internet service than you do, because they use a whole lot more than you.

If the current pricing means that the ISPs really can't make enough money to build infrastructure, they need to raise their prices, not start instituting baseless surcharges on specific sites. They shouldn't care what sites you go to, period.

But the fact is that the telecoms are making bank, and that they want to do things like the presentation outlines is pure, unmitigated greed.

Re:Inevitable

[jakykong]

Whoosh.

Yeah, but it's a free country...

[nysus]

...where corporations are free to fuck you in the ass.

Re:Yeah, but it's a free country...

[Zumbs]

No, no, you don't get it: Corporations are free to fuck you in the ass, but you are also free to disconnect from the internet and go live in a cave somewhere ... if someone will rent you a cave, and that someone will accept cash payment and snailmail correspondence. And you can get your employer or bank to accept cash payments as well.

Re:Yeah, but it's a free country...

[Anonymous Coward]

No no no!

You misunderstand libertarian thought entirely.

You are free to disconnect from the internet and build your own internet. This is obviously fair, and your freedom to do this will clearly keep folks who want to gouge you from doing so.

Re:Yeah, but it's a free country...

[crisper]

or charge you and try to make a profit for a service that isn't free. I bet you get paid for what you do right?

Re:Yeah, but it's a free country...

[Thad Zurich]

Corporations are not free to do that, you have to pay them for the privilege.

Re:Yeah, but it's a free country...

[Chemisor]

> you are also free to disconnect from the internet and go live in a cave somewhere ... if someone will rent you a cave

Yes, someone will, and for only $1200 a month. Of course, most of us would prefer to find cheaper and more comfortable rent somewhere. In a rural area you should easily be able to find something really cheap.

> and that someone will accept cash payment and snailmail correspondence.

That someone will if he is the owner of the place you are renting. As a former smalltime landlord myself, let me say that please please rent from a real person, not a giant apartment complex corporation. Your money will not be wasted on superfluous office staff, luxurious swimming pools, or fully equipped gyms, none of which you actually use. I also would be able to repair stuff as soon as it's broken instead of forcing you to wait for weeks until somebody upstairs approves a work order. And yes, I'd love to take cash for rent. You don't even need snailmail; just come by and give it to me. That's small town life for you. Much less stress than where you're living now.

> And you can get your employer or bank to accept cash payments as well.

If you're working for a small business, it might be possible to get paid in cash. But really, unless you really want to avoid the banking system, it is still very easy to get a bank account, if only for cashing checks. No internet connection required. Just go to your friendly neighborhood bank (or, preferably, a credit union) branch office and talk to a real person. They'll be happy to help you.

Re:Yeah, but it's a free country...

[Xyrus]

I'll say this about American style capitalism: It makes socialism look good.

Re:Yeah, but it's a free country...

[deathguppie]

I would build my own internet if I could. In fact if you could get the government to give me the same amount of money and tax incentives that they have given the telcoms in the last ten years. Then get me the same conditions on land lease and access to public utilities. I would.

Re:Yeah, but it's a free country...

[Pi1grim]

You know it's wrong to be happy that the corporation will rape you in your ass, just because they will not torture you and kill your family. They should be stopped before they get to rape you. Or the next thing you will be happy about is being just tortured and raped in the ass, as long as the family's fine. The next thing you know, there won't be anything to be happy about, but it will be too late.

Re:Encryption, end-to-end, now

[Anonymous Coward]

How would that prevent this sort of pricing scheme? ISPs would still know that you're accessing slashdot, and price accordingly.

Re:T-Mobile already does.

[tepples]

This page claims that the "content restricted" is due to an optional censorware service that you have turned on.

Land (line) Ahoy!

[retech]

Time to abandon ship and roll back the timeline.

Money talks

[Manfre]

If my cell provider implements this, I'll switch carriers. If they all try this, then I'll just drop to a pay as you go phone without internet access. Checking my email and surfing the web for those rare moments when I'm not near a desktop or laptop are a luxury I can do without. I can think of many other better uses for the ~$150/mo I'm paying now for multiple lines.

Re:Money talks

[biryokumaru]

Switch now. We were paying $220 for two lines and no internet. Now we pay $50, and it's only $5 for each additional line.

Re:Money talks

[UncleBex]

Might be easier to just route everything through a VPN instead of jumping carriers... of course that assumes that VPNs aren't blocked by your carrier for this very reason. I'm sure they could come up with a justification for VPN being a "business class" service which requires a hefty additional fee of some sort. You know, just in case it means that they are missing out on double billing you for bits they cannot see/classify/bill you for.

Re:Money talks

[patro]

What if ISPs will do the same thing?

Re:Money talks

[demiurg]

Many cellular operators deploy DPI as we speak. Welcome to reality, my friend.

Re:Money talks

[kimvette]

Then communities should build their own local ISPs and revoke the monopolies they granted, and if the telephone company, cable company, etc. complains about using their rights of way, use eminent domain since this is a rare case where eminent domain would actually be for the public good.

Re:Money talks

[soupforare]

Virgin mobile! If you can put up with their small phone selection, plans with unlimited data/sms/mms start at $25. I switched from T-mobile, while I miss my Treo, it was just too cheap to pass up.

Re:Money talks

[swrider]

You have it backwards. As noted by tepples, the incumbents have sued many localities to prevent them from creating their own service provider, even when the incumbent had no plans to provide service in that local. In many case, the big telcos and cable companies have lobbied state legislators to pass laws making it very difficult, if not impossible, for localities to create a service provider.

And, it is the telcos and cable companies who want to use the city's right-of-way without paying for that use. They don't need eminent domain. Your legislature probably has already given them the ability to rip up your street and yard to run fiber and cable, and not pay a penny for that use! And, then you can try to fight them to get your street and yard put back the way it was.

Re:Money talks

[zm]

not many... all of them.

Re:T-Mobile already does.

[stoolpigeon]

You have any examples? I'm on t-mobile and I've never run across this. It wouldn't surprise me and I'm not saying you are wrong, would just like to test it out myself.

Who has more rights?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it's time as well for general people to start charging companies for the time they spend watching/hearing their services and advertisements they don't need or want.

Lets see if a human person still has more rights than a company/enterprise/corporation/economic group/etc. They entrench themselves behind paywalls, then by all rights so should we!

3 €/$ a month just for me allowing *insert company here* being eligible to show advertisements/information regarding their services/products to me, with 50cents peer advertisement shown peer page in any output device, digital, analogic, biological or any platform used to carry the information/data.

Re:Who has more rights?

[TheRaven64]

The joke's on you - you can't see his basement from the street!

Passenger with laptop

[tepples]

Checking my email and surfing the web for those rare moments when I'm not near a desktop or laptop are a luxury I can do without.

What about checking your e-mail or surfing the web when you have a laptop but are riding in a vehicle?

Re:Passenger with laptop

[rhavenn]

Read a book. It can wait, barring business emergencies and your workplace should be paying for it if you're in the car.

Re:Passenger with laptop

[Manfre]

You could always have a conversation with the driver or other passengers. If you're driving by yourself, don't fiddle with the phone.

Re:Passenger with laptop

[tepples]

You could always have a conversation with the driver or other passengers.

How do I politely start an intelligent conversation with a random stranger on the bus?

Re:Passenger with laptop

[Manfre]

Leading off with "Hello", "Good morning" or your preferred introduction is a good starting point. Not all conversations are intelligent, but you won't know until you try.

Re:Passenger with laptop

[HornWumpus]

You walk up to her and say 'Hey baby, come to tepples'.

Re:Passenger with laptop

[drinkypoo]

How do I politely start an intelligent conversation with a random stranger on the bus?

Why am I not surprised to see you ask this question?

Re:Passenger with laptop

[RightSaidFred99]

Well, how would I look up the reason you're not surprised? I can't just guess, and what if I'm in the Andes mountains and I remember this conversation and decide I want to do some Internet research to look for precedents, how would I look them up then?

Re:Passenger with laptop

[tepples]

How do I politely start an intelligent conversation with a random stranger on the bus?

Why am I not surprised to see you ask this question?

Because I have a diagnosed social disability. But seriously, I was under the impression that one should assume that other passengers on public transit wish to be left alone.

Re:Passenger with laptop

[hazem]

But seriously, I was under the impression that one should assume that other passengers on public transit wish to be left alone.

Some do, but others don't mind, or even enjoy passing the time with some interesting conversation. You clearly read a lot and you might have some very interesting things to say.

Usually start with eye contact of some kind. Maybe as you're sitting down you say, "hi", or "good morning", or ask a social lubricant question like, "how are you doing?", or "nice weather, huh?", or "So, are you ready for the holidays?", or "wow, the bus isn't usually this packed".

The reason people ask questions about the weather, the current season, etc, is not because they're soliciting information about actual opinions. It's because it's something you both have in common (you're both experiencing the weather) and it provides a context to possibly engage in deeper conversation. "It sure is cold today.", "Yeah, I just got back from Brazil. It was 50 degrees warmer"... now you see they're willing to talk. "Wow, I've never been to Brazil. Where did you go? Was it for a vacation?"... and the next thing you know, you've had an interesting peak into someone else's life, and maybe shared some of yours, and you might have even learned some things to look up when you get where you're going.

Maybe someone's reading a book you've enjoyed, so as they're turning a page, make a comment on it. If you only read heavy-reading material that requires lots of source-checking and they're reading the same book, then you already have something in common and you might enjoy sharing perspectives and opinions on the book.

If they're not interested in talking, they'll typically answer briefly and return to whatever they were doing and ignore you. Fine... but you tried. If they answer in more depth, they might actually be up for a conversation, particularly if they ask questions back.

If you really do have a social disability, then trying interactions like this might actually be helpful. Whether we like it or not, we are social creatures and social interactions, even trivial ones, are important for our mental health. And these are safe, low-risk situations where it doesn't matter if someone likes you or not. The practice could be valuable for times when you need to meet and interact with people who can make a difference in your ability to achieve your life goals (interview, seeking a grant, etc). And who knows, you might even make a new friend... or at least a friend you can consistently talk with on the bus.

HTTPS is a /. subscriber feature

[tepples]

https://slashdot.org STILL redirects to http://slashdot.org./

This has an easy fix. Create an account, activate it, log in, and subscribe to Slashdot, and it won't redirect you back to an unencrypted connection anymore.

Re:HTTPS is a /. subscriber feature

[Graff]

This has an easy fix. Create an account, activate it, log in, and subscribe to Slashdot, and it won't redirect you back to an unencrypted connection anymore.

Nope, I'm logged in and it still redirects back to an unencrypted connection.

Re:HTTPS is a /. subscriber feature

[Known Nutter]

You're not a subscriber.

Re:HTTPS is a /. subscriber feature

[tepples]

I'm logged in and it still redirects back to an unencrypted connection.

Then fix it.

Re:HTTPS is a /. subscriber feature

[Graff]

Ok I see what you're saying now. I thought you just meant the normal registered user thing, not a paid subscriber.

I probably would buy a subscription but I see they use PayPal and yeah, I don't buy anything through PayPal. I had some serious problems with them in the past and now I avoid them like the plague. I especially don't trust doing credit card transactions through them.

Re:HTTPS is a /. subscriber feature

[Graff]

What have they done in regards to credit card transactions? I just pay with a credit card without logging in; works fine for me

Well, years ago they mucked up my credit when I tried to register with a credit card. I never even got to buy anything through PayPal but somehow stuff got charged to my card. It was a long, drawn-out process to get everything sorted out and ever since then I haven't bothered to do anything with PayPal. I really don't miss using the service, there are so few places that actually require it.

Maybe PayPal has cleaned up its act since then but once bitten, twice shy...

The bright side....

[Fantasio]

That's the best way to push full encryption for all internet communications, something that all governments want to avoid at all cost.

Re:The bright side....

[TaoPhoenix]

Simple, they'll just make it illegal.

Re:The bright side....

[GuldKalle]

It won't matter as long as your incoming packets all have a source address in (google|facebook|netflix) ip space

Disneyland Analogy

[webdog314]

There was a time, not so long ago, when a good business strategy was to make you product as appealing as possible so that everyone would want to buy it. That's exactly the opposite of today. Today, the business models for the major carriers all focus on just how much they can screw us for before we yelp. They are literally destroying their own market. The reason the internet has been so successful is that once you have paid for access, where you go has been mostly free. This is like Disneyland going back to a ticket system. The only real question is, who will be the "E" ticket rides...

Re:Disneyland Analogy

[ffejie]

The internet might be free to you and me after a flat monthly charge, but it hasn't been free for a long time. There are billions of dollars flowing into online advertising that are supporting nearly every site you go on. Aside from Wikipedia and state run sites (think *.gov) I can't name a site that I go to that doesn't have ads or a monthly subscription. Can you?

Re:Disneyland Analogy

[cdrguru]

You are thinking of a model where building market share is the goal. The major carriers have market share now, so they need to change strategy.

When building market share you can operate with some users at a loss with the hope the loss is made up for by other users. You can even run the entire operation at a loss for a while just to get users or subscribers.

When that period comes to an end you better hope that people view your service as a "utility" or a necessity. Then you have them. Sure, they can jump to a different service but everyone has been market share building, so everyone is going to be looking for revenue. The customers will come back, eventually.

So, are we all convinced that the mobile Internet is now a necessity and should be a utility? Right, that is exactly the marketing view of it.

Re:Disneyland Analogy

[Simon80]

Those are the endpoints. The network itself is mostly flat rate though.

Re:Disneyland Analogy

[webdog314]

Not this again... By "free" I was referring to the idea that I am free to go where I want and not be charged yet again by my access provider. Sure, there are many (if not most) sites that individually may charge me for access (via ads or literal subscription - and thus pay for "the internet"), and I am free to pay the fee or not. But it's double-dipping by my access provider to hit me up for a specific site simply because they can't provide what they are charging me for. Either raise your price for access, or stop advertising "internet access" to your customer base. The problem is that the "access" providers, such as Verizon, want to be "content" providers, even though they aren't actually producing the content. Cable TV has been doing this for decades.

Re:Disneyland Analogy

[serutan]

There's a site called Slashdot.com where if you have good karma you can disable ads, so from a user experience point of view it doesn't have a subscription or ads. But seriously, what the poster obviously meant by "free" was that people can use it without paying for it, like over-the-air television or radio.

Re:Disneyland Analogy

[elashish14]

Any university website to name a few. The same argument for most commercial/business websites. Or more generally, for any work-related website. There are legitimate needs for the pages that aren't entirely based on advertising revenue. There are probably many other general examples that I'm missing too....

Re:Disneyland Analogy

[TaoPhoenix]

(Creepy!)
Ooh, go ahead and yelp! You're so exploitable when you're yelping!
(/Creepy)

Re:Disneyland Analogy

[zarzu]

There are loads. The first that just came to mind was xkcd. Most websites of corporations do not have any kind of ads since they do not need to make money over their internet presentation, it's simply an additional service. Web shops generally do not have ads either, they only feature their own products. Then there are tons and tons of personal web sites without ads because they are low traffic and hardly cost anything per month/year. The whole ad thing only comes into play for sites that have high traffic requirements but do not have anything to sell themselves (other than space for ads). So in conclusion mostly social platforms and information providers that aren't able to sell registrations because the information they provide is too easily accessible from thousands of other sources.

Re:Disneyland Analogy

[foniksonik]

Ecommerce sites are always free and 99% free of advertising.

They have a dream....

[dogsbreath]

Of the days that were good, of long ago, a fabled past, when...

- you needed a business line to install a modem
- data charges were on top of phone charges and it was per KB each way
- you could make real money on long distance phone calls
- a number belonged to the company, not the customer

Ahhhh! Don't all of you YEARN for the past? Of course you do!

You just don't know it yet.

Re:They have a dream....

[ColdWetDog]

Party lines.
No third party equipment on the line.
Rotary dial.
A telephone heavy enough to use as a weapon.
300 baud.
err, 75 baud, it's raining.
CompuServe
AOL

It's so warm and fuzzy here in the past, I think I'll stay here.
Tuna.
Taiwan.
Richard Nixon
The Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders.

Re:They have a dream....

[NickFortune]

Ahhhh! Don't all of you YEARN for the past? Of course you do!

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And if you go back far enough, dinosaurs walked the earth and human beings hadn't even evolved yet.

It's always possible to cherry pick a point in time where things were worse than they are now. That doesn't imply that every change going forward is necessarily for the better.

Re:They have a dream....

[dogsbreath]

Ahhhh! Don't all of you YEARN for the past? Of course you do!

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And if you go back far enough, dinosaurs walked the earth and human beings hadn't even evolved yet.

It's always possible to cherry pick a point in time where things were worse than they are now. That doesn't imply
that every change going forward is necessarily for the better.

Hey.. Not cherry picking at all! Must be my sense of humour I guess.

Just making an obscure suggestion that this type of billing (per unit, per item, per customer, per service and all piled together) is reminiscent of the days when competition was limited and there was, perhaps, a real need for natural monopolies and heavy government regulation.

In the Telco/Cable industry there are many who would like to see a return to that level of power and control. This type of billing model appeals to that mindset, and why not? They are in it to make money and the telco industry has had to invest huge sums in technology for limited returns. eg: the company I work for spent over $1 billion last year upgrading DSL equipment while the per month per customer revenue dropped. This just kept us competitive. No tears necessary; its a cost of doing business. However, profitability is not guaranteed from year to year; it is definitely 'swim or die'.

Problem is that these type of billing plans are predicated on sucking some money off of the services that someone else created. The thing that really sticks in the craw of a telco CEO is that the telco carries all of the data that others get rich off of. This is seen as an unfair burden, hence the desire to act like a vampire and drink from the flow. So the telco adds nothing to the equation and wants to be paid for it. Understand that they are already being paid by their subscribers for the "bandwidth".

From a telco/cable view, the subscriber has only paid for connectivity and not for the data. This is definitely old school.

There is no recognition that this train left the station a long time ago and that they need to do something positive/imaginative/creative for the subscriber in order to generate more revenue. Telcos do NOT do positive/imaginative/creative. Telcos are run by CPAs and lawyers; they are not technology/service driven.

Sigh, I thought I was being funny and creative but obviously not. I have worked in telecoms for too long.

Re:They have a dream....

[dogsbreath]

A telephone heavy enough to use as a weapon.

And they were useful as weapons. Plus they had a real lifetime. Telecom technology students could get summer jobs refurbing black Northern/ATT desksets and wallphones: shave a few mil off the case, polish, put everything back together and voila! Just like new!

Only ever saw one wallphone broken. Subscriber had a party and reported the phone not working afterwards. Went to the location and found part of the wall missing where the phone had been attached. Phone was in three pieces scattered in the debris on the floor. The phone frame was still attached to a wall stud/gyprock that was stuck through the door of the frigidaire.

We replaced the phone, no charge, but the sub had to deal with the wall and fridge. Gave them a deskset so they would have a cord to swing it with and not have to rip the wall apart.

Re:They have a dream....

[ColdWetDog]

Of course, the older phones didn't explode. So there is a benefit to the newer technologies.

Re:They have a dream....

[NickFortune]

Hey.. Not cherry picking at all! Must be my sense of humour I guess.

Ah, sorry in which case. It's difficult to tell sometimes :) Doubly so given the po-faced delivery of some of the trolls around here. I mean we've had "it's only so VOIP will work" and we've had "it's just to stop bittorrent". Now the emerging theme seems to be "just bend down and grab your ankles; you'll love it, really". I just assumed you were running with that theme. My mistake.

Sigh, I thought I was being funny and creative but obviously not. I have worked in telecoms for too long.

Yeah, I know the feeling :)

Re:They have a dream....

[foniksonik]

So the telcos would agree as well that the contractors who laid the lines should get a cut and the cities that handed over the land? What about the mailing services that handle advertising flyers and bills?

On a similar vein should UPS and FedEx get a cut of profits from everything they ship?

Maybe my underwear manufacturer should get part of my paycheck each month since their product obviously contributes to my productivity.

Essentially anyone can make an argument for a stake in all profits everywhere. Thieves and bandits do the same thing to justify their trade, doesn't make it right fair or acceptable.

Deep packet inspection is not the problem

[tepples]

with DPI in ever router and switch

As Anonymous Coward pointed out, you don't need deep packet inspection to see whether one of your customers is connecting to an IPv4 address in a block that appears to belong to Facebook or to YouTube, a Google company.

Re:Deep packet inspection is not the problem

[Burz]

But they can't tell if you're connected to them through an anonymizing proxy. And with some proxies, the watcher can't even tell you're using an anonymizer.

Re:Deep packet inspection is not the problem

[tepples]

But they can't tell if you're connected to them through an anonymizing proxy.

Then how can Wikimedia tell whether a user is connecting through an open proxy? See "WikiProject on open proxies" on Meta.

Re:Deep packet inspection is not the problem

[SuricouRaven]

Most proxies, unless actually configured for being anonymous, place the incoming IP address in an HTTP header. X-Forwarded-For, IIRC.

Re:Deep packet inspection is not the problem

[Burz]

Maybe you misunderstood me, or I was too vague.

Your ISP cannot tell who you are connecting to if you use an anonymizing proxy. And with some anon networks like I2P, the ISP may not know you are using an anonymizer at all.

Following citations

[tepples]

Read a book.

Then how do I check the works that the book cites?

Re:Following citations

[wierd_w]

Make a list, check it twice, then go home and see who's naughty and nice.

I realize it's a shock to many in the slashdot community, but really, there are these things called "Notebooks"-- No, they do not contain ANY technology whatsoever! They are a bound tablet of lined paper, ready for you to store data on, using an old fashioned ball point pen, or graphite pencil! You can even use encryption if you want!

What you do, is write down the list of sources in your book, write down the page numbers in your book that cite those sources, and continue reading. When you get home to your landline internet, THEN you check the sources, and re-read the content.

[Oh noez! You had to WAIT to check the sources! It's the end of the world!]

Re:Following citations

[betterunixthanunix]

By waiting until you are near a computer with Internet access? Is it absolutely necessary to check citations the very moment you see them?

Re:Following citations

[tepples]

write down the list of sources in your book, write down the page numbers in your book that cite those sources, and continue reading. When you get home to your landline internet, THEN you check the sources, and re-read the content.

A lot of people pay for mobile Internet access because they don't have time to copy fully one-tenth of a book to lined paper and then start reading the book all over again when they get back to the Internet. One might as well wait to read the book in the first place until back at home, when one will actually understand what one reads after having familiarized oneself with the cited material.

Re:Following citations

[tepples]

By waiting until you are near a computer with Internet access?

Then why not wait until one is near a computer with Internet access to start reading the book in the first place?

Is it absolutely necessary to check citations the very moment you see them?

In order to understand the passage containing the citation, yes it is often necessary.

Re:Following citations

[betterunixthanunix]

Then why not wait until one is near a computer with Internet access to start reading the book in the first place?

Because one is traveling and wants to have something to read while traveling?

In order to understand the passage containing the citation, yes it is often necessary.

I do not find this to be the case at all. Frankly, I have wonder, how do you think people managed before there was an Internet, citations could not be instantly located?

Re:Following citations

[hazem]

Then how do I check the works that the book cites?

Above, you asked how you could check your email or surf the web while commuting. Someone else suggests reading a book instead. Now you're shifting the problem to checking sources on the book. And throughout the rest of this thread, you're shifting from one problem to another. You finally write that you have a social disorder, and while I'm sorry about that, you don't seem to be making much effort to mitigate it. You have an excuse for everything.

If you're interested in productively occupying your time while commuting (and to be sure, there was sprawl and > 1 hour commutes LONG before the internet), then choose books that don't require such massive amounts of fact-checking for that part of your day. There must be SOME media you can consume that won't require a live internet connection. If you really must do such deep reading while on a bus, then look in the "works cited" section and bring some of those (if it would have been on the internet, you can save a copy ahead of time). Surely you won't exhaust all of them in a day's commute. But is a bus (or train, or blimp, or whatever, because I'm expecting an, "I don't ride a bus, it's a 4-person bike") really the best place to be reading that requires such attention and concentration? Of if you're doing your emails, then use a client that downloads them and read them while disconnected - even write your responses while disconnected. Or heck, pick a different book or some lighter reading (you're reading and posting here on slashdot, so not all of your reading is high-intensity... heck, why don't you just open a bunch of tabs in your browser before leaving).

In this whole chain of posts, you're arguing against someone who posted, "Checking my email and surfing the web for those rare moments when I'm not near a desktop or laptop are a luxury I can do without. I can think of many other better uses for the ~$150/mo I'm paying now for multiple lines."

If you really MUST have 24/7 internet access everywhere you go, then pony up the money and get it. I guarantee you that there will be times, no matter how much you pay, when you won't have access. Please don't act like you'll cease to function when that happens.

Good grief, after expressing your concern about not having continuous access to email and the web, several people took the time to offer other suggestions for making good use of that time while you're commuting. And you shot them all down with excuse after excuse.

The world is out there and you only get one shot at it. It's up to you to figure out how to occupy your time and energies in a meaningful way. If you ask the world a good way to handle some of that time, then at least be decent enough to acknowledge their attempt to help and not just throw back an excuse about why you can't do it. A, "Thanks, I'll give that a try" is much more mature than a long series of "but.. but... but...".

But in the end, it's you're life. Only you, despite whatever issues you have, can find a way to live it with meaning and happiness.

Re:A pox on both their houses!!!

[DNS-and-BIND]

Wrong! The UN, as an unelected body, can make dispassionate decisions without being subject to the whim of the uneducated masses. Imagine if the entire US Congress was replaced overnight with smart people who didn't listen to faux news sources and who weren't beholden to peasants and farmers from Hicksville, Flyover Territory, USA. It would be a new era of smart government by smart people who know what the right thing to do and who aren't afraid of consequences. I mean, come on! Today, a backhoe operator's opinion matters just as much as a university professor! Good government is better than self-government.

If you have to tell me it's "trusted"

[countertrolling]

I don't trust it. Nothing but hype...

100% virus free!!

Populist Revolt

[ffejie]

I never understood the side of the Net Neutrality argument that most commenters are taking here. Why shouldn't a company that has built out infrastructure (in some cases taking enormous risk) be free to charge what they want to access that infrastructure? I understand that your current contract may allow unlimited use of the internet, but the economics are changing and service providers should be encouraged to think up new business models, or there is no reward for them to ever upgrade their networks.

A small side comment: I remember a few years ago when people were livid that AT&T would consider going to a metered plan on their mobile data access plans. You know what? It worked. The plans they offered were competitive and people used what they bought. The price point for basic data access was lowered, more people got online with their mobile devices and AT&T got more revenue out of it.

Re:Populist Revolt

[Anonymous Coward]

Why shouldn't a company that has built out infrastructure (in some cases taking enormous risk) be free to charge what they want to access that infrastructure?

Because in many/most cases, the company did *not* take any risk whatsoever - or if there was risk, it was still highly mitigated at the taxpayers' expense.

Re:Populist Revolt

[betterunixthanunix]

I'm sorry, but how have the economics changed? Have cell providers suddenly become less profitable, and desperately in need of new sources of revenue? They are just greedy. Why shouldn't the people look out for their own interests, and use their democracy to ensure they get the best service possible, with the least restrictions?

Re:Populist Revolt

[chaboud]

You forget that we granted them easements to *our* land, granted license to *our* frequency ranges, and gave them significant and material subsidies for roll-out. The idea that we should be thankful for what the private sector has given *us* is absolutely preposterous.

Being able to subversively nickel and dime the public monopolistically is a serious problem. Doing it oligopalistically (remember SMS rate hikes in lock step?) leaves us with no recourse but neutrality legislation (hard for people to understand and lambasted by corrupt politicians) and anti-trust litigation (very slow to respond). We've already seen that, left free to roam, ISPs will abuse the public trust and severely damage the openness of the internet (comcast, for example).

Our dough (DARPA) made the friggin internet. Don't let AT&T et al fool you into believing that they had any great skin in the game in either forming or promulgating the internet. They took a gravy train cut that profits *heavily* on *OUR* internet.

Re:Populist Revolt

[Palmsie]

Whats the problem with non-Net Neutrality? Think about this example... You pay Comcast a monthly fee to have internet access. Say, for example, Comcast wanted to invest a lot into the movie rental business (moreso than they do now with their shitty watch instantly now). Without net neutrality, Comcast has the right to throttle or block any competing websites like Netflix, Hulu, or any other legit website that might compete with their new business plan. In many rural areas, they don't have the option to switch providers, they only have one broadband provider and they're lucky to have that. So what do they do? Nothing. Net Neutrality is a modern day civil liberty: freedom of information. Information and information access is just as important as the right to assemble or speak openly, and should be protected as such. Right now, companies are working very hard to dismember this privileged that we've taken for granted and I give some huge kudos to the FCC for standing up to these greedy giants.

Re:Populist Revolt

[chaboud]

Oh, and a side note to your side note. Don't, for one stinking second, conflate data rate caps with service-based packet tolling.

One is content agnostic (read: fair, even if unfairly priced) and the other is essentially abusive from the outset.

Unless you're trolling from an AT&T desk, I think you're missing the point.

Re:Populist Revolt

[zero0ne]

Funny, because Sprint has a unlimited data plan for their phones now, and it is simply amazing. I switched ONLY because of the various snapshots of sprint bills that other customers have posted. Some were showing upwards of 100GB used in a single billing cycle, all for only 69.99 a month (or 79.99 a month if you have a newer evo class phone) Sprint + rooted android phone gets you unlimited data on your PC too, since you now can setup a hotspot free of charge

How many others do you think have switched to Sprint? How many small businesses do you think are ready to make the dive? 5GB monthly allotment or unlimited allotment, tough choice.

 

Re:Populist Revolt

[toriver]

Because the service they provide is access and bandwidth. It should not matter to the operator what "higher-level" services, like Facebook, that the subscriber uses that data bandwidth for. Subscribers pay $x for y GB of data, period. If the provider starts charging extra fees depending on what third party services you access, they are moving into becoming a leech on the services that are the real reason they have customers.

This tech enables something like if you have a toll road, but drivers pay a different toll depending on whether they are driving to a mall or driving to the beach. It does not matter to the people who are financing the road, just like where you surf should not matter to the operator.

Re:Populist Revolt

[Glarimore]

I never understood the side of the Net Neutrality argument that most commenters are taking here. Why shouldn't a company that has built out infrastructure (in some cases taking enormous risk) be free to charge what they want to access that infrastructure?

That infrastructure is built on public land and the cost of construction is subsidized by the government. You tell me why I shouldn't have a say over it.

Re:Populist Revolt

[crontabminusell]

I never understood the side of the Net Neutrality argument that most commenters are taking here. Why shouldn't a company that has built out infrastructure (in some cases taking enormous risk) be free to charge what they want to access that infrastructure?

Because that infrastructure has turned into a required part of daily life for a good chunk of people in the modern world. Like electricity and water, communications networks should be converted to the public sector. They are now too important to leave to the whims of corporations.

Re:Populist Revolt

[cdrguru]

They were in a market share building mode where losses, even system-wide losses were acceptable. They can't operate like that forever and now that the market share has been built it is time to convert over to a revenue generating model.

Remember when Google was free? Oh, it is still free for ordinary users but they get ads and the ads are not at all free. Google went from a bunch of computers operating on charity to a multi-billion dollar operation after they built market share and "presence".

Same thing with the "mobile Internet" now.

Re:Populist Revolt

[jx100]

The problem goes beyond the economic here. The nature of the current internet allows it to be the last bastion of free speech. A single person can say something and with little effort have it be heard by the world. Giving the ISPs carte blanche control over what can and cannot be said over the networks that they legally own is to give them an incredible amount of censorship control, to be wielded at their whims. When you have a network of the size of a Comcast or an AT&T, a small number of companies can effectively squash an idea from being exposed to everyone but the most dedicated.

Re:Populist Revolt

[TaoPhoenix]

Goatse!

Re:Populist Revolt

[Jerry]

Your comment demonstrates an obvious lack of historical knowledge. Read The $200 Billion Rip-Off by Cringely, to get a brief introduction to what you were too young to understand or over looked.

Fifteen years ago my community, after their repeated requests to the cable and telcos to build a Fiber Optic cable system to bring affordable HIGH BANDWIDTH to every citizen were rebuffed, decided to begin building it themselves as a public utility. (Our electricity is owned by city and we pay 6 cents/kwh). I watched as they trenched their way through my yard and buried FO cable. The cable and telcos lobbied Congress whining about "unfair" competition. Congress agreed and passed a low preventing local and state governments from "competing" against the cable and telcos. Cringely explains the rest, but failed to mention that while Congress FUNDED the cable and telcos to complete the FO project, they did NOT put performance clauses in the bill, so the cable and telcos took the money and stuffed it into their greedy pockets. To help the cable and telcos extract even more profits from their ancient Copper wire technology Congress REDEFINED "high" bandwidth to include any connection that was 200Kb/s or faster.

So now, in France, a citizen can pay $30/month and receive a 40Mb/s HIGH bandwidth Internet connection which includes 24/7/365 phone calls to anyone in France (and economical rates to other countries), and 200 channel TV.

I pay $72/mon for a 12Mb/s Internet connection, thankfully uncapped, but no phone nor TV. I do use Skype to talk for free to other VOIP users, and 2 cents/min to any cellphones or land lines in most of the Free World, and I can watch expried TV shows on HULU for $8/mon, but 12Mb/s is no where near 40Mb/s.

Now, the ISPs want to charge extra for Skype and Netflix bytes. IF you think it will end there you have a brick for a brain. Greed knows NO bounds. They'll find ways to justify charging for other types of data streams: VPN connections, encrypted data, cloud database data, etc..., then they'll tier the stream types to ratchet up the profit margins even higher, and all of it on ANCIENT Copper Wire technology. In the background their OWN data pipes are being converted to Fiber Optic, but the stuff streaming out to you will have a Copper segment. They need that bottle-neck to justify their robbery.

You elected your Congressmen to serve you. In the past they formed "watch dog" agencies to keep an eye on the corporations. Now, the corporations bribe the Congressmen to pass laws favorable to their profits, and the FCC, FDA, and DOJ are now instruments of enforcing corporate policy.

Didn't you ever wonder how President Obama, elected by a LARGE majority to fulfill his promise to clean up Health Insurance and the medical industry, was stymied by his OWN Democrat party members, the majority of whom took bribes from the health insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry to maintain the status quo, to say nothing of insuring their own re-election so their own ride on the Federal gravy train wouldn't come to an end.

Welcome to the Corporate State. And you though you were living in a Republic or a Democracy, where your vote counted and the Constituion meant something. Silly you.

 

Re:Populist Revolt

[ffejie]

AT&T announced these probably within the last year. They are the only way you can buy data access from AT&T.

DataConnect 200MB
DataConnect 5GB

If the links don't work, you can navigate to it by looking at their rate plans from their homepage.

Re:Populist Revolt

[ffejie]

I'm not conflating data rate caps with service-based packet tolling, I'm merely comparing them. When it first came out (several years ago) that a company would consider data caps, there was a considerable amount of outrage, specifically from sites like Slashdot. However, during implementation, it turns out that AT&T did a pretty good job with them. For instance, take a look at this chart. You'll see that most users fall below 200MB of data, the cheapest plan offered.

While service-based packet tolling sounds like a really nasty idea (and can be if implemented incorrectly) it can actually make the things better for all the users if implemented correctly. AT&T/Verizon/your telco is not in the business of making things worse for you. They have an incentive (your dollars!) to make things as compelling as possible for you to continue doing business with them.

Re:Populist Revolt

[ffejie]

This is a wonderful point that proves the original point. No matter what one carrier does (AT&T charging more metered, Verizon capping at 5 GB) someone else (Sprint) is going to fill the niche of people that want to use 100GB of data on an unlimited plan. And good for them (and you). By the way, very impressive to use 100GB of data on a mobile device, since that's the equivalent of downloading about 1 Mbps for 8 hours a day all month.

Re:Populist Revolt

[ffejie]

Wireless specifically is not monopolistic. I would estimate that you have the choice to buy service from no fewer than 4 large wireless companies that provide service in your area: AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint, T-Mobile. Each of these providers have similar service offerings, similar phones and you can probably switch from one to the other (and keep your number!) without much more than an hour in a store, or a few minutes online.

Re:Populist Revolt

[ffejie]

You did get a say over it! When your town negotiated with the cable company to grant right of way to dig up the roads and string the coax cable all over the place, your town probably got a public access channel, maybe a few HD cameras and funding for a park or a library.

Now, let's talk about mobility for a minute. When your federal government auctioned off the wireless spectrum in 2008 they earned almost $20B to fund various projects. The rest of the infrastructure, mobile towers and whatnot, are frequently based on private land. Land owners who grant the towers on their property are usually compensated fairly. T-Mobile would love to lease some land from you.

Re:Populist Revolt

[ffejie]

So when 50% of the subscribers have an option to make their monthly rates go down, you call that a slight reaming? This chart shows that more than 50% of the iPhone users can live under 200MB/month on their current data plans. All of them are eligible to go down a rate tier.

Re:Populist Revolt

[ffejie]

I think that spending $4.7B on spectrum, and another $5B (my ballpark guess) building out a 4G network qualifies as risk.

Re:Populist Revolt

[ffejie]

You seem to have forgotten that when you "granted license to *our* frequency ranges" it was a public auction where the Federal Government raised $20B in revenue.

Re:Populist Revolt

[Haeleth]

Imagine if your electricity supplier charged a higher price if you plugged a PS3 in, or if your gas station charged more per gallon to fill up a Toyota.

Electricity is electricity. Gas is gas. Bits are bits. Service providers should provide the service and keep their damn noses out of what I choose to use it for. Charging based on the quantity I use is perfectly reasonable; charging based on the nature of that use is an unjustifiable violation of my privacy.

Re:Populist Revolt

[Xyrus]

Why shouldn't a company that has built out infrastructure (in some cases taking enormous risk) be free to charge what they want to access that infrastructure?

Because they didn't. We did.Taxpayer money either subsidized or outright paid for the infrastructure.

I understand that your current contract may allow unlimited use of the internet, but the economics are changing and service providers should be encouraged to think up new business models, or there is no reward for them to ever upgrade their networks.

I don't think you've been paying attention. They have no incentive to upgrade their networks. They oversubscribe their lines, and have been feverishly trying to come up with new ways to milk every last cent out of their customers before throwing down for new capacity. This is especially true in areas where there is only one or two providers, where last milers are still on modems because no company is every going to bother to get broadband to them out of the kindness of it's heart.

If anything, you're making a great argument for why the internet SHOULD NOT be in the hands of private companies. Companies are not motivated by morals, or national pride, or drive to be the best. They are motivated by profit, and the cheaper they can get and increase profit the better.

Therefore, last milers will still be last milers, lines will still be massively oversubscribed, and we will continue to lag the rest of the world.

You know what? It worked.

Not really. It worked because people didn't have much choice. AT&T got more revenue because overall people were paying more for the exact same service. And, according to your reasoning, they should have taken that revenue and put it into expanding their network which they didn't (AT&T has the shittiest network out there, bar none).

Re:Populist Revolt

[ffejie]

I've seen this Cringely $200B article linked to a lot whenever we discuss telecom. It's an interesting story, and clearly there's a lot of history with regulation and telecom. I won't deny that there was a lot of lobbying and deals cut for the telecoms to be able to tack on fees which ultimately made them profitable. I can't figure out how Cringely makes leap from Tele-TV (which was a technical failure) to the $2,000 tax subsidies that were given to the former monopolies (RBOCs). His words:

"Over the decade from 1994-2004 the major telephone companies profited from higher phone rates paid by all of us, accelerated depreciation on their networks, and direct tax credits an average of $2,000 per subscriber for which the companies delivered precisely nothing in terms of service to customers. That's $200 billion with nothing to be shown for it."

So an industry gets permission to charge higher rates, gets tax subsidies and effectively avoids $200B in taxes. I can't find any reference to those tax credits being tied to a higher level of broadband service. Can someone provide that reference?

Re:Populist Revolt

[perryizgr8]

but then no company can claim to have an 'internet' or 'data' plan. they can name it something like 'skype plan' or 'youtube video plan'. you simply can't call it data, if you're not treating all data the same.
what's sad is that now it has become acceptable to have an unlimited mobile internet plan 'upto 5gb'. wtf??!!

Re:Populist Revolt

[Roger Wilcox]

What if the carriers decide to limit upgrading their infrastructure in order to create competition for bandwidth on their network, thereby lowering the cost of upgrading the network and creating additional revenue by charging a shitload for access to the (relatively) limited bandwidth? Is that situation equitable to you? It certainly isn't efficient economically. What's even better: our "representatives" in Washington are helping them to set it up! This is the very definition of fascism. We now have rampant collusion and corruption, destroying the free marketplace and tilting it to the advantage of the gatekeepers.

AT&T is playing this like a drug dealer: selling cocaine to the clueless for pennies, then cutting production and quadrupling the price. Our society can no longer function without the tubes that they own, so they can charge whatever they want.

We are Fucked with a capital F into the forseeable future unless we step up and take the government back from the corporations. I read an article yesterday about how "brainwashed" the North Korean populace was to believe their Beloved Father was such a hero. The average American or European is no less brainwashed.

Re:Populist Revolt

[chaboud]

You are correct. Wireless is oligopalistic.

See: SMS and data plan rate increases over the last ten years.

Re:Populist Revolt

[cheekyjohnson]

it can actually make the things better for all the users if implemented correctly.

How?

They have an incentive (your dollars!) to make things as compelling as possible for you to continue doing business with them.

Due to there being only one high-speed ISP almost everywhere (at least in the US, and more specifically where I live), and due to the fact that in quite a few cases people use the internet for business related reasons (and therefore can't simply cancel without hurting themselves), they can pretty much screw people over quite a bit and not have to worry about them canceling. The internet has become far too mainstream and important (in regards to a form of communication) to let these idiots ruin it with things such as this when they're already rich.

Re:Populist Revolt

[evel aka matt]

You're wrong about all of this.

AT&T did not offer people competitive or advantageous pricing for going to tiered service. They dropped the price $5 and added a cap. Hardly significant or a fair trade. Then they eliminated the unlimited plan, so of course people are signing up for the metered service. Grandfathered AT&T accounts are OK, of course. But I haven't met anyone who was happy with the way AT&T handled all of that. And trust me, before long, that price is going to go back up $5. That's why this kind of thing is always a net loss.

The economics of the internet, re: my ISP, are the same as they've ever been. I pay them $60 a month, and they deliver mediocre "broadband." It doesn't matter what the fuck I do with my internet connection. In the past, my bits maybe came from Geocities instead of Facebook, but none of that means shit re: an ISP. What has changed is that other people have started making a lot of money from their websites, and the ISPs want a cut.

Re:Populist Revolt

[ffejie]

You're right. I'd much prefer if the government ran the show rather than profit seeking companies. How does that work out for innovation in the long run?

Re:Populist Revolt

[foniksonik]

Seems highly unlikely. I have a coworker who went through his 200MB in 4 days. Apps, music, video - all adds up pretty quick.

Re:Populist Revolt

[cheekyjohnson]

There's more solutions than "let the corrupt government take complete control" and "let corrupt, greedy corporations take complete control," you know. It could be balanced, such as merely disallowing this one thing. If the government tries to take more control, then it is the responsibility of the people to stop them, and if the don't, then the people have far more of a problem on their hands than merely the internet.

Re:Populist Revolt

[ffejie]

The economics of the internet, re: my ISP, are the same as they've ever been. I pay them $60 a month, and they deliver mediocre "broadband." It doesn't matter what the fuck I do with my internet connection. In the past, my bits maybe came from Geocities instead of Facebook, but none of that means shit re: an ISP. What has changed is that other people have started making a lot of money from their websites, and the ISPs want a cut.

This is not true. Depending on where the packet is sourced and destined, the cost can change for your service provider. Additionally, depending on the type of content you are requesting, it matters how the packets arrive. For instance, if your provider has an agreement to cache Facebook content in their network, it may be easier for them to provide Facebook packets to you, resulting in a lower cost (and price) than going to some random website. For something like Netflix, your packets need to be delivered in order and consistently, rather than in bursts (which would be acceptable for most web traffic). This causes additional stress on the network, and your provider might want to guarantee quality for Netflix, at a specific cost to you or to Netflix.

Re:Populist Revolt

[evel aka matt]

Of course there are ways for ISPs to make more money. Caching FB content, guaranteed service for Netflix, or whatever...all that stuff does is make the ISP money. It's not doing me any favors. As it stands, I have no problems with my connection to FB, Netflix, or anywhere else. And my ISP has no problem paying their rent. Now, once they can start monetizing my QoS...it all goes out the window.

Like I said, contrary to your claim, the economics haven't changed. My internets are moving through the tubes just the same, and that's not going to change significantly in the future. ISPs' reward for upgrading their networks is that they don't get run over by the competition. There is no true gain to be had for users from any of this. If Cox cuts a deal with Facebook so that they get preferred service, I'm not going to see a discount on my bill. Know what I will see? A slow-down when I visit Myspace, or whatever other website that didn't pay the protection racket.

And to answer your question about why shouldn't ISPs be free to monetize their products however they'd like? Because they're monopolies. In many instances in America, government protected monopolies at that.

Not to get all ad hominem, but your OP falls flat. (My unqualified analysis? You get off on being contrarian for its own sake.) ISPs being free to do as you'd like will benefit nobody but the ISPs...and of course the Facebooks of the world who would have it that much easier to keep new competition at bay.

Not just a faceless corporation

[moortak]

Jonathon Gordon and Jonathan Downey are terrible people.

Stupidity

[symes]

They'll just drive people away from the net. It would be like opening a shop and charging people to walk down the street it's in. People will just start going elsewhere for their recreation and maybe even back to real world shops.

Re:Stupidity

[drinkypoo]

If they drive people away from the internet then there will be another net. It will be a mesh network. Why? People need networks, networks which carry their packets more or less indiscriminately, based only on their source and destination addresses... and hopefully on whether your traffic is obviously harmful, but that's really just gravy.

Re:The days of the Nation State are ending...

[FooAtWFU]

Hey you two. It turns out that both corporations and labor unions are capable of shameless rent-seeking, and both Republicans and Democrats are capable of abandoning half-decent principles to let them have their way. So try to keep your parties in line, wouldya? Especially the Republicans; I kinda like them when they're not trying to protect monopolies with free-market rhetoric and the like.

Lawsuits to stop municipal Internet

[tepples]

Then communities should build their own local ISPs and revoke the monopolies they granted

The incumbent ISPs have sued to stop communities' efforts to provide Internet service and have succeeded in getting the courts to shut down many of these efforts with a preliminary injunction.

Re:Lawsuits to stop municipal Internet

[Simon80]

That shouldn't be a reason to stop trying. As awareness is raised, this behaviour will become unacceptable. Alternatively, if communities stop trying, nothing will change.

Shaking in my boots...

[bradbury]

OMG, I'm scared to death that they are going to start charging me for this stuff. But, but, but, wait a minute, I only look at my Facebook page once every couple of weeks, certainly don't use it as a twitter substitute (which I also don't use). I only rarely look at a YouTube Video and am unlikely to download NetFlix videos over the net until they support Linux. And then there is the fact that I've only got a Net10/LG NTLG300GB cell phone without one of those fancy displays that is on an expired usage contract [1].

So as far as I can tell, the only "newsworthy" aspect of this is that the evil phone companies are attempting to tax (cough extort) money from those wealthy enough to own (or have a contract) that supports a "fancy phone" habit and/or those who have nothing better to do than waste time updating their Facebook pages or watching NetFlix on their phone [2].

God, I hope that some liberal congressperson gets wind of this and arm twists the FCC to stop this evil corporate activity which would apparently discriminate against those in the 10-20 y.o age group.

My net. This appears to be a "lottery"-like tax on those who don't have better things to do with their time/money. YMMV.

1. Means I have to go down to Walmart or BestBuy and buy some minutes to reactivate it.
2. Because surveys have found that most "engineers" (aka those who have better things to do with the time like actually build something) view Facebook as a complete waste of time and the only Netflix videos they are interested in watching would be the new update to Tron to see if it lives up all the money being spent advertising it.

Re:Shaking in my boots...

[molnarcs]

That's the bitterest post I've read in months! Cool..

OMG, I'm scared to death that they are going to start charging me for this stuff. But, but, but, wait a minute, I only look at my Facebook page once every couple of weeks, certainly don't use it as a twitter substitute (which I also don't use). I only rarely look at a YouTube Video and am unlikely to download NetFlix videos over the net until they support Linux. And then there is the fact that I've only got a Net10/LG NTLG300GB cell phone without one of those fancy displays that is on an expired usage contract [1].

So as far as I can tell, the only "newsworthy" aspect of this is that the evil phone companies are attempting to tax (cough extort) money from those wealthy enough to own (or have a contract) that supports a "fancy phone" habit and/or those who have nothing better to do than waste time updating their Facebook pages or watching NetFlix on their phone [2].

God, I hope that some liberal congressperson gets wind of this and arm twists the FCC to stop this evil corporate activity which would apparently discriminate against those in the 10-20 y.o age group.

My net. This appears to be a "lottery"-like tax on those who don't have better things to do with their time/money. YMMV.

1. Means I have to go down to Walmart or BestBuy and buy some minutes to reactivate it. 2. Because surveys have found that most "engineers" (aka those who have better things to do with the time like actually build something) view Facebook as a complete waste of time and the only Netflix videos they are interested in watching would be the new update to Tron to see if it lives up all the money being spent advertising it.

Re:Shaking in my boots...

[webdog314]

Perhaps I am misinterpreting your sarcasm, but... It really doesn't matter what *you* do with your cell phone connection to the internet. If someone pays for access (usually up to a given Gb amount - unlimited is a whole different animal here) they should be able to use that allotment however the hell they want and not get charged yet again because they like Netflix. I'm not about to waste my allocation on a freaking video on my phone, but if someone wants to *pay* for that bandwidth then they should be able to. And your access provider should be able to charge whatever amount they feel they can justify for that bandwidth allocation, *but NOT twice*.

Re:Shaking in my boots...

[MoonBuggy]

You seem to be letting a personal dislike of certain technologies cloud your view. Firstly, net-capable phones are by no means limited to iPhone price territory - a perfectly capable smartphone can easily be found for about £100 unlocked or less than £20/month on a contract. You call Facebook a waste of time, I call it a useful supplement to my other choices of mobile communication (i.e. calls and texts), especially for group conversations or 'broadcast' messaging (think "We're in the pub, feel free to join us", or some such. Not life-or-death, obviously, but a damn useful tool nonetheless). Just because you judge something to be worthless doesn't make it so - plenty of people would consider posting on slashdot to be a waste of time, yet you still do so.

What's much more important, though is that many of us are of the opinion that (aside from edge cases regarding certain peering arrangements or QOS) a MB is a MB, and thus any distinction places artificial restrictions on net access, almost inevitably leading to carriers coercing content providers to pay more for the use of their network despite the fact that upstream was paid at the datacenter and downstream was paid by the consumer. The fact that the first moves in this direction happen to be on mobile connections rather than fixed lines, and that the services mentioned happen not to be ones that you personally use, surely shouldn't be enough to prevent you from seeing that any kind of restriction will lay the groundwork for you, the consumer, being screwed over.

Re:Shaking in my boots...

[Junta]

The problem is not the specific examples given per se, the problem is advocating carriers using pricing as a punitive measure against specific arbitrary data they don't like due to anti-competitive desire rather than direct reasons.

If I check facebook 10 times a day or slashdot 10 times a day, the carriers costs are the same. There is no sane reason for them to change extra for facebook, and in fact makes it more expensive for them (tracking details like that is more work than ignoring) and complicated for the consumer. It gets a lot of coverage and at a glance sounds neat to gouge the buzz of the day, but when you sit down there really is no solid reason to single out facebook rather than just pricing the throughput the way you want across the board.

Now, on to a more likely scenario. Let's presume I get internet through Comcast. Comcast institutes a premium on Netflix, Hulu, and youtube traffic. The motivation is clear, to offset losses/preserve their margins on cable TV by making 'free' services less attractive. As a dumb pipe, they don't pay any of that up to the content providers, just pocket it, with no good reason for the price penalty.

Now one thing that kept this in check was that telco companies didn't have this conflict of interest (they were mere carriers, not content providers/brokers). However, more and more mobile and residential internet carriers are also getting in on the content provider game causing an uncomfortable convergence on a model with inherent conflicts of interest with regards to net neutrality. Verizon has their vCast stuff (As Verizon relented into the real smartphone era with fewer locked features, I thought this would die off, but they are still chasing it), Sprint has SprintTV, and AT&T U-Verse includes cable tv content, to name a few.

Re:Shaking in my boots...

[ctrimm]

I'm a Facebook user (gasp, I know). I use it mainly to post interesting tech and science articles for my friends to read. I also post a lot about general security issues and how they can be avoided. What I don't use it for is updating every little thing going on in my life. Why do I do this? Because I have friends and family that I don't get to see on a regular basis who enjoy reading these sorts of things. It's also a great platform to discuss current events with people I know. It's intellectually stimulating and helps inform more people about what's going on in the science and tech fields as well as help keep them protected from threats. You consider sitting in your mom's basement hacking away on your linux box productive, well, I consider informing my friends and family and discussing what's going on in the world productive.

I also use netflix and hulu. I know you're probably not familiar with this situation, but my girlfriend and I like to sit and watch a movie or our favorite shows and have a drink at night to wind down after work.

But I get it, you enjoy working on computers and spending all your time doing so. That's awesome, I encourage it. But not everyone is an overachieving engineer/programmer/scientist without a life, Some people like to enjoy the entertainment the open web can provide at low to no cost.

The point I'm trying to make is that just because you don't use these services, you shouldn't take this precedent lightly. What happens when an ISP/Cell Carriers decides it really doesn't like slashdotters? What happens when they have a bad disagreement with your bank?

Online services set their price according to their business model. Facebook and Hulu are free and generate revenue through ads. Netflix is a paid service and allows you to stream movies and shows. In one way or another the service you use is somehow being benefited by giving users access. Now we're having service providers add on their own premiums and throttling speeds based on the content you want to view. Users aren't the only ones that are going to be affected by this. Websites will start to see less visitors and generate less revenue and will have to pay providers to increase those speeds or remove user access fees. This kind of thing is going to throw the whole web as we know it out of whack.

Even though you might not use the web for entertainment or social networking purposes, there's the potential for a whole lot more to be affected here and you shouldn't take it so lightly.

Re:Shaking in my boots...

[thegarbz]

The newsworthy part here is that companies are ready to actively try technologies that undermine net neutrality. Sure they start off with a phone and services you don't care about, but all companies will eventually stop there right? No one would be greedy to apply this outside the phone would they?

The reality is that after a year of this people start getting used to paying different fees for different content. So the system expands to cover more users. Another year or two, expect to be paying more to surf on Slashdot than you would The Christian Science Monitor, because fuck it's more popular and we can milk more money out of customers that way.

The real question is, are you going to standup for freedom despite not liking facebook now? Or are you going to bitch and moan how unfair things are in a few years after doing nothing when you had the chance?

Re:Shaking in my boots...

[bradbury]

Your argument is for data quantity neutrality. It skirts around the peak-time usage problems that drive up the cost of the network. If everyone wants to watch Netflix from 8-9 AM on the subway going to work and from 5-6 PM coming home from work then the provider has to build in excess capacity to support those time periods and provide "reliable" service.

The problem is that GB's *are* not all equal depending on what time they are used or whether one wants 1GB / hour or 1GB every 2 minutes. There are precedents for peak vs. off-peak pricing in both the electric power and telphone (e.g. late night calls), though many living in the modern cell phone era may not recall that.

The real problem lies in the fact that the user thinks all GB are equal while the provider does not. One way to coerce the public back into a "awareness" of data use model [1] is to charge users for access to those sources which require "real time" performance even during peak periods. Otherwise such users are shifting the costs of the network from what they have paid onto my checkbook which could care less about peak period bandwidth performance [2].

1. Rather than the current "I want my data and I want it now" perception which seems to prevail.
2. I will fairly frequently download GB of Linux distributions and/or Genome information. It takes hours over a DSL connection and even many minutes over a Cable connection. And the ftp logs will show me how the rate varies from time to time. As long as I get the data within a day or so I'm a happy camper.

Re:Shaking in my boots...

[bradbury]

Briefly, a MB is not a MB when it is a MB delivered at 2AM vs. 8-9AM or 5-6PM. When you make that argument you are requesting that people who could generally care less about rate of delivery (e.g. myself) should subsidize the cost of building a network to allow metro riders to watch Netflix on their way to/from work. The problem is that the providers did not expect the apps that can eat bandwidth to develop as quickly as they did, nor that there would be the demand for them that there is. We are still in an adjustment period while they adjust pricing to match demand.

See my other comments for further perspective.

Re:Shaking in my boots...

[bradbury]

Reasonable points. But I'm old enough to remember those 20 or so years I lived before the WWW became popular or the 15 or so I've survived only using a cell phone for very brief periods. And guess what -- I still managed to do a lot of communicating using personal email and mailing lists and kept myself entertained using videocassettes and/or cable subscriptions.

You aren't doing that much different from what I have done over the years -- you are just using different tools. I too was once a fan of a GB is a GB but that ignores the peak demand issues that tend to impact users of certain applications such as Netflix, Youtube, etc. An executive at AT&T said something to the effect of "We keep adding bandwidth but they (the users) keep consuming it all." [1] And that is the core of the problem. Providers built in capacity using old models of data demands and the users (you, not me) have changed your demands. And I have a problem with why I should be expected to pay for the needs of some who argue "I want my data and I want it now" when I do not have that need.

To coin an old phrase, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one." And the "few" in this case are mostly in the 10-30 y.o. age group and aren't going to become the "many" for quite a number of years (or ever if we solve the problem of aging so older adults can live indefinitely).

Still searching for a cell phone plan where the minutes I buy (or the GB I purchase with minimal QOS guarantees) last forever with no contract (and I *own* the phone and can use it anywhere).

1. This was around the time that iPhone apps started taking off.

Re:Shaking in my boots...

[bradbury]

Creating "rights" on the fly are we?

Back in the days when one purchased a physical wire, e.g. T1 or ISDN connection one paid for the wire and the electronics required to support it. Then you got a ISP to interface the connect the wire to the NET. Then you took up hardware problems with the hardware provider and bandwidth problems with the ISP. Now it seems that *some* people are starting to view a cell phone as an extension of the NET and network neutrality guidelines should apply.

The "I've purchased the right to communicate data at a certain speed" was incorporated into the decision to purchase a T1 or ISDN connection. The "network neutrality" aspect applied to whether the ISP filtered or prioritized the data in some way.

Lets ignore the "filtering" aspect, since at least Verizon was doing this for years (though they may have discontinued it given recent rulings). The prioritizing of packets is a bandwidth/QOS problem which is a little more critical when talking about cell phone service vs. ISP data centers. When the bandwidth requirements go up with cell phones you have to add equipment to existing cells and/or make the cell phone "cells" smaller (add more equipment) so there are costs associated with this (more than just adding a few racks in an ISP data center). Now why should I as a non-/occasional cell phone user be forced to subsidize those who want reliable Netflix "on-demand" during peak metro travel times?

The *old* cell phone system (delivering voice) worked fine for me. People who want to use cell phone technology for network access (at rates beyond what old analog modems would provide) should be paying for it -- and shouldn't be screaming "network neutrality" when providers start coming up with ways to pay for the increased capacity required. Or would you prefer to scream about the "no service" situation that would arise when the airwaves become saturated with Netflix and YouTube videos on demand -- if the providers simply maintained the status quo?

Re:Shaking in my boots...

[MoonBuggy]

Unlike a lot of slashdotters, I actually have nothing against usage based billing in principle (although I'm sure that ISPs will see it as an excuse to jack up per-GB prices far higher than even the low-usage users are paying now). I hadn't considered 'peak time' as an issue, but if they were talking about charging more for 1MB at 8-9AM than at 2AM then I'd be willing to hear them out; that's still a content-neutral billing method based on real allocation of a limited resource.

Problem is, that's not what they're proposing here; what this article suggests is that they charge you more for 1MB at 2AM from Netflix and less for an identical 1MB of data at 2AM from, say, Google. It is an entirely artificial pricing scheme, nothing to do with network management, and it creates an extremely strong market imbalance, not to mention a severe conflict of interest where bandwidth providers are owned by the same companies as content providers. It genuinely risks fundamentally fragmenting the internet into a collection of AOL-style walled gardens.

If you just insert "...at a given time [a MB is a MB]" into my original post, the point still stands. Your posts do seem quite reasonable, but they all appear to conflate the issues of time-based and content-based billing; don't you think you're addressing a different issue to the one put in question by the article? Selling "a 9AM MB" is still neutral, selling "a Netflix MB" is not.

Re:Shaking in my boots...

[thegarbz]

Now it seems that *some* people are starting to view a cell phone as an extension of the NET and network neutrality guidelines should apply.

Wake up and come out of your cave. Why should a mobile broadband plan not be subject to the same rules as any other broadband. Also net neutrality and quality of service are two completely distinct things. I don't have anything against an ISP (which is what cell phone companies effectively are these days) prioritising phone traffic. I don't even have anything against them charging more for data than for voice because frankly I'm used to it.

This is and has always been about not paying more for some magically bigger bits than some other magically smaller bits. Justify to me why you think using 0.1MB of data should be charged at a cheaper rate from Facebook rather than Netflix, ... if you can. Think about it.

This isn't about making up rights. It's about fighting for rights. The workers had no rights in the 50s either till massive union moves swept through much of the western world. Sucked for some countries but in others we won the right to a 3 weeks of holiday and one week of sick leave.

Rights are something that get created once enough people band together and fight for them. If you want to be boned by your carrier simply because you like reading npr.org rather than news.com then so be it, but if enough people flat out reject the idea now when it's new then it won't be introduced, and you don't even need a magical president or fancy legislation to do it.

Re:Shaking in my boots...

[webdog314]

I understand what you're saying, but I have two problems with your analysis.

The first is that unlike the electrical grid, telephone and internet are *unlimited* resources, or more accurately, they are only limited by the infrastructure in place, and even then, it's usually only the last hop that limits the connection, not the backbone. So while my local cable company may indeed have trouble between 5-6 PM, that trouble is entirely within their infrastructure - it's not that "the net" is "busy".

That being said, it leads me to the second problem I have, which is that by allowing the access provider to define the last hop total bandwidth, and then partition it according to a tiered pricing plan, you are basically allowing them to set the scarcity of a 'resource' to fit whatever price they want to charge for it. It gives them absolutely no incentive to improve upon their infrastructure, just the opposite in fact. Why would they increase their overall bandwidth and reduce the scarcity that they charge a premium for?

Cluetrain for you...

[Burz]

Its one thing to charge per MB, quite another to be a company like AT&T and add surcharges specifically for using Skype or other competing services like video downloads.

I wonder what kind of reaction they'd get if they proposed a surcharge for using the iTunes store.

If all the ads are Flash and I'm not using Flash

[tepples]

The internet might be free to you and me after a flat monthly charge, but it hasn't been free for a long time. There are billions of dollars flowing into online advertising that are supporting nearly every site you go on. Aside from Wikipedia and state run sites (think *.gov) I can't name a site that I go to that doesn't have ads or a monthly subscription. Can you?

Slashdot. Once you create an account and regularly post comments that get modded up, you'll eventually get a checkbox on the front page to disable advertisements. And I've seen a lot of sites all of whose advertisements are SWF, and all I see are boxes with a button to click to start Flash Player. Can't they at least detect that I'm not using Flash Player and put up text ads or still image ads or something?

Market forces would kill this

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm in favor of net neutrality regulation, but it isn't needed to stop something like this.

[quote]
For instance, in the seventh slide of the above PowerPoint, a Vodafone user would be charged two cents per MB for using Facebook,
[/quote]

1. Vodafone starts charging per MB for Facebook use.
2. Facebook shuts off all access to Vodafone users.
3. Vodafone backs down very, very quickly.

The Sky is Falling

[giltwist]

And that is how the TOR for Android app was born. Seriously, I'm not worried about this at all. For every attempt to monetize tracking, an obfuscation method will be developed to negate the tracking. Unlike, say, developing for Ubuntu, there is a significant financial incentive for people to code simple workarounds. I mean, how fast did the Google TV for streaming video services workaround happen?

Three Laws of Robotics

[Cytlid]

If this comes true, just like the three laws of robotics, this can only come to one conclusion. All the best technology will reside outside of the United States. Move and prosper.

Totally missed it

[mattr]

These guys are stark raving lunatics and they're not too smart either.

They or their customers have a billing relationship with just about everyone.

About that greedy slide 6. It also could be read as showing that they are not part of the economy engendered by their lines. Of course phone companies didn't used to make a margin on contracts that were discussed over their phone lines, or products that were purchased over their phone lines.

But they are in a position to make it easier for people to buy things online without requiring a credit card. In other words, enabling impulse buys to the long tail (maybe it's a short tail but still huge). By adding purchases to the end of your monthly bill they can become part of the economy engendered by the Internet and they should make the lines free to enable more use not less.

There's no reason why a shifty company like PayPal should mop up the street, shifty companies like these guys whose addresses we can find out are also welcome to join the game. Just imagine the windfall they could make if they ask people to "charge up" their account like Skype. They could make millions a day easily, who needs VISA?

Instead? Monetizing YouTube by traffic sniffing. Feh! Amateurs.

Re:A pox on both their houses!!!

[JWW]

Screw that!!! The Boshevicks thought threy were "smart" leaders, and I'd venture to say they created the worst government the world has ever seen.

Even smart people handed unlimited power would end up severely corrupted over time.

You're a fool to even think that your idea has a chance of working, it doesn't.

Everyone should demand full encryption at minimum

[Burz]

...for all sites, for reasons that are obvious in this discussion. Using anonymizing networks would be even better for some applications.

Re:Plans

[toriver]

Well, there is a solution to that.

- "Hi, we recently implemented service-based fees, but as far as we can see you never use those metered services but always just connect via VPN to some server..."

- "Yes, how strange that is."

You forget two things

[aepervius]

1) in some area only *ONE* corporation offers a service. So yeah. Once they decide to fuck you in the ass, better get K gel or completely abandon the service offered, or move away 2) once the 2 or 3 megacorp decide that, yes they want a part of the cake, and if they ALL do it , then none of them will have a disadvantage, then pffft. Sure , under the table agreement are forbidden, but the fine for them are ridiculously small comapred to potential benefit.

Your view of capitalism free market is a near fantasy one.

Re:You forget two things

[clarkkent09]

In which areas only one company offers Internet access? Initially I believed that there is no real competition which people always bring up when talking about Net Neutrality but the more I look at it the more competition I see. In any city you have several options, cable, competing DSL providers, direct fibre, cellular networks etc. Perhaps some rural areas only have one option but would companies really change their nationwide policies in a way that caused them to lose their city customers in order to screw rural customers who don't have any choices?

Re:You forget two things

[bucky0]

My previous house was in Nashville, TN, a town of 600k-1.5mil (depending on whether you count just the city proper or the surrounding areas). I was ~2 miles from downtown, ~1 mile from Vanderbilt University. Definitely "in the city" and not out in the boonies.

My option was Comcast or Comcast.

Now, the plural of anecdote isn't data, but I recently moved to Chicago (a bit outside of the loop, within 3 blocks of a subway stop), and my only option was also just the cable company. They have Clearwire coverage there, but it was, frankly, terrible. And "two choices" isn't really competition.

Re:You forget two things

[KermodeBear]

The options in my area are:
Road Runner and dial-up.

Perhaps some rural areas only have one option

Most of America has only one option when it comes to high speed internet access and it comes from the cable provider.

Works in reverse

[Thad Zurich]

This concept can be turned inside-out to provide "Per-Service, Per-Page" discounts to what would otherwise be hefty fees. So the carrier can jack up the base rate and discount specific sites.

I can't understand this

[cvtan]

Is being mobile SO valuable that I would want to watch a movie on a postcard sized screen? And pay a ridiculous amount for the privilege? People, there are really big TVs now. I'm already paying for internet service at home. Why do I want to pay for it again for my phone? So I can look up things on Google for perfect strangers and show what a nifty phone I have. Sorry, no sale here.

Re:I can't understand this

[TaoPhoenix]

Sorry, you fell for it as well.
Consider the pattern:
(Packet ID tech) "which we say we will use for ___"
Once the tech is in place, they can use it for anything. "You must visit facebook 12 times a day (through your portal page, so you can see our ads) to keep your "net user discount", or else you'll lose your discounted rate."
Or other stuff. Just think evil for a while and see what ones you come up with.

VPN

[dargaud]

People will get around this by (1) switching carriers, there are now some rather unknown carriers that charge by the Mb, be it voice or data. And (2) use VPN like IPredator so as to avoid being spied upon by the carriers and also to avoid having to pay extra taxes like those suggested here. All it takes is an IPredator (or similar) cell phone app and they are powerless.

Re:VPN

[TaoPhoenix]

They already are, depending on your line. However they'll try to deny it. We ran into this at work on Verizon a few years back.

Re:VPN

[TaoPhoenix]

All the carriers will do it in sequence, and VPN traffic itself is "advanced level" and merits an upcharge.

Re:VPN

[Cougar Town]

OpenVPN uses standard UDP (or TCP) on any port you want, so it's very difficult for anyone to block. Android (using CyanogenMod firmware) supports this through the standard VPN GUI, and it could probably be set up on the Nokia N900 and maybe WebOS with some command line work. My carrier does block IPsec and PPTP for VPN unless you pay extra, but I have successfully used OpenVPN with no trouble.

Yeah, it sucks for your average user who has no idea where to even start setting any of that up. But it's still what I'll be doing if my carrier ever starts this crap.

Re:The days of the Nation State are ending...

[TheRaven64]

Unions in the USA tend to be monopolies - you are required to join the union to work there and there is only one union. They have a lot more in common with corporations than they do with unions elsewhere.

Re:If all the ads are Flash and I'm not using Flas

[Thad Zurich]

Or they can hide value content behind the Flash, so that if you don't use Flash you'll never get there. That implies value content...

Republicans won

[tepples]

customers scream to their lawmakers and the government steps in

Not under the Republican-controlled U.S. House that'll be sworn in in a couple weeks. Republicans are fans of less regulation of business, instead tending to operate on the principle of freedom of contract and giving end users the choice to patronize the industry or not.

Re:Republicans won

[Maxo-Texas]

Huh.

Funny that I can't by products from overseas where they are 20% to 95% cheaper and bring them back to the US.
Oh... the freedom of contract only applies to the corporations, not to the customer.

Exhaustion of land under libertarianism

[tepples]

You are free to disconnect from the internet and build your own internet.

Not when the FCC has sold exclusive rights in all usable spectrum to the incumbents. If spectrum is to be treated like land, then how does libertarianism deal with exhaustion of land?

Re:Exhaustion of land under libertarianism

[SuricouRaven]

"how does libertarianism deal with exhaustion of land?"
By the magic power of the market, of course.

Re:Exhaustion of land under libertarianism

[yuriyg]

oh yeah, leave it to government to ensure free speech online. Oops, the link doesn't work. I wonder why...

Re:Exhaustion of land under libertarianism

[Wordplay]

There's more than one type of libertarianism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism posits that unrenewable resources like land or spectrum should not be owned, and rent for occupying such should be paid back to the people. I personally favor an exponential scale such that the more you use, the vastly more rent you pay.

Re:Exhaustion of land under libertarianism

[Antisyzygy]

That sounds like communism.

Re:Exhaustion of land under libertarianism

[sourcerror]

It works for me. You just live in the wrong country.

Re:Exhaustion of land under libertarianism

[AliasMarlowe]

It works for me.

For me, it gets transparently redirected to mirror.wikileaks.info, which Spamhaus has warned against (apparently hosted by a suspect entity). http://it.slashdot.org/story/10/12/18/1738207/Spamhaus-Under-DDoS-Over-Wikileaksinfo.
That site appears quite different to wikileaks.ch which is the new official site, and is not included on the list of mirrors of wikileaks at http://wikileaks.ch/Mirrors.html.

Re:Exhaustion of land under libertarianism

[sourcerror]

Well, I didn't know about that, I was redirected too. Thanks for pointing out.

Conflict of interest

[HalAtWork]

Right, right. Like cel phone users aren't being nickled and dimed to death enough as it is. This is the type of thing that keeps me from getting more than just a basic no-frills phone with a minimal plan.

Besides that, there's a clear conflict of interest here. Don't like a competitor? Charge to serve up their content. Enter into a deal with one content provider, and start charging for their competitors. There's too much ground for escalation here and mobile phone bills can only skyrocket even higher.

If I really need to browse the web, there are plenty of wifi spots. But I don't care how desperate I am (although how would I get to that point?), I'm staying the hell away from bullshit like this.

Sprawl and expected pace

[tepples]

how do you think people managed before there was an Internet, citations could not be instantly located?

For one thing, urban sprawl had not yet increased commute times to an hour or more. For another, serious study was conducted in a library, and the expected pace of such study was slower because people didn't have to compete with other people who had the Internet.

Re:Sprawl and expected pace

[betterunixthanunix]

For one thing, urban sprawl had not yet increased commute times to an hour or more

Perhaps where you are from. The people of New York City have managed to deal with hour long commutes in a subway system that lacks Internet access for a long time now, and I have even seen people reading technical documents and books. It is not as impossible as you seem to think.

For another, serious study was conducted in a library, and the expected pace of such study was slower because people didn't have to compete with other people who had the Internet.

And serious study still happens in libraries, because so many books are not available online. Just this past week, I had to go to my university's library to pick up two books that were cited by a book I was reading, and I only required Internet access once to locate where in the library the books were located. I rarely find it necessary to look up a citation immediately, while I am reading; Internet access is certainly helpful and convenient, but I would not say that it is really necessary to have it everywhere that I study.

Anonymizers get blocked

[tepples]

That's the best way to push full encryption for all internet communications

If you don't use an anonymizing proxy, you can't encrypt the IP address itself, and the ISP can perform traffic analysis. If you do use an anonymizing proxy, you'll get blocked from sites you're visiting for using a proxy that has been abused in the past.

Brochureware

[tepples]

Or they can hide value content behind the Flash, so that if you don't use Flash you'll never get there.

Among sites that intentionally ignore users on iPod touch, iPhone, iPad, and pre-2.2 Android phones and tablets, most are advertisements themselves, the SWF counterpart of brochureware.

Monitor

[HomelessInLaJolla]

Make it possible for your wireless provider to monitor everything you do online

They already do. They already have for years. They have been since the first telephone networks requiring middleman operators were created. They have been for thousands of years.

Recall the movie "The Last Emperor". In that movie the young emperor is given a picture album of girls from which he chooses his soon-to-be wife. There is a reference to the real world there. Make note of the financial distribution of the world--greater than ninety percent of the financial capital of the world is controlled by somewhere between three to eight percent of the population. The ratio is somewhat similar to classroom ratios in American public schools--twenty-five or thirty-five to one. Make note of the American institution of yearly class photos.

Your financial controllers, having a ratio of twenty or thirty to one over the rest of you financially indebted servants, are like that young emperor in the movie "The Last Emperor". At a very early age they are shown your pictures, yearly, and instructed that these twenty or thirty people are their personal life long servants. Their financial regime, their monetary empire, is comprised of those twenty or thirty pictures which they are shown, yearly, compiled from the yearly school photographs.

Since the days of thousands of years ago the financial controllers have pursued methods to make the administration of their personal group of financial servants easier and less time-consuming because, obviously, they wish to have more time to themselves to enjoy the financial glut which they siphon from you via taxes, investments, insurance, the stock market, and carefully manipulating the prices you pay for every product you buy. With the introduction of telephone networks they had the ability to monitor and process and compile and infiltrate your vocal communications; monitor your social friends, determine where you were going and what you were doing. Not that they would take minute-by-minute interest in all of you but, should one or three of their twenty or thirty financial underlings happen to come up with an astounding idea, or step out of line, or perhaps make moves that might threaten their financial superiority and supreme reign, they would have the inside track to ensure that nothing would happen without their being able to control, exploit, possess, use, dominate, or direct it.

So, back to the summary, "Make it possible for your wireless provider to monitor everything you do online"... heck, folks, don't be so naive. Since the very first days of networking their is not a bit passed over the wire which hasn't been monitored.

Reality 101.

planned obsolescence

[mutherhacker]

This is similar to the planned obsolescence strategy of many electronics manufacturers. The idea is that even if the carrier fucks you in the ass, you'll switch to one of the few competitors. The competitors also fuck their customers in the ass and they, in turn, will switch to you. It's a win-win.

what about stuff like Directv VOD? that uses your

[Joe The Dragon]

what about stuff like Directv VOD? that uses your ISP for the data?

Will AT&T and Verizon bill you for that data or will it get a free pass as they have deals with Directv and directv needs them to keep up with cable VOD and I like the queuing and the lack of the cable VOD lag.

Re:Unlikely

[tepples]

if there is a choice they will simply switch to another ISP.

How, with 23 months left on one's contract?

Re:A pox on both their houses!!!

[Simon80]

You would be right, except that it's more like what would happen if congress were replaced by a group where Russia and China have veto power. Definitely not the lesser of two evils.

Re:A pox on both their houses!!!

[SuricouRaven]

The US also has veto power. This is why the UN security council never does anything, ever. They are just incapable of finding anything that all members with veto power agree on. The other UN bodies can be more effective.

something like this?

[kicks-ass]

http://www.tatadocomo.com/pps-tariff-plans.aspx

If they're so fond of DPI, let's give it to them

[Magic5Ball]

If the telecoms want to use a model in which prices are based on content, and if cable companies want to continue their role as content license managers, we should help them out with it.

If the eyeball networks have the technical capacity to inspect the contents of their customers' packets and deciding how to bill based on what they find and are able to back that up for billing disputes, then they should have no problems using that same kit to make other business decisions based on their total knowledge as gleaned from inspecting their customers' packets.

Content creators should attach individual licenses to creative works with respect to distribution, as already occurs for television and film distribution rights. Such licenses should contain randomly generated variation in their terms (with respect to geography, time of day, caching, end user plans, etc.) that differ each time the content is accessed in machine and human-readable formats. Since the content industry is adamant that copyright infringement occurs even if the infringer access accessed or distributed content against license terms unknowingly or unintentionally, they should have no issues with following the same standards in their own actions.

If it happens that the machine-readable version requires a particularly computationally intensive and time-consuming algorithm to obtain "Verizon may distribute on the next two Sundays between 9:43 and 11:12 a.m. to customers within 100 miles of [legal land description] whose plans cost more than $16.48 including state but not federal surcharges", I wouldn't blame a judge who categorically threw out such capricious and overly complicated content and distribution licensing schemes on the grounds of being against the public interest.

Yeah when pigs fly!

[Ozlanthos]

Hey extortionist assholes out there who think this is a whizbang good idea! FUCK YOU!!!! I'll just set up a dummy account, use it to copy your data, and post it on my free site! Actually, I'd either visit non-extortionist sites only or just go back to life before the web and do things like read books and such. I am so sick of these assholes who think that the only reason I draw breath is for them to force me to pay them money! If I had a half decent job, where I made enough money that I could waste it online, it wouldn't be so bad, but these assholes are also the type of asshole who think it's a good idea to ship the jobs I can do to China.

-Oz

Encrypted proxy

[hawguy]

Unless they plan on doing the inspection at the browser level *and* lock down the app store like Apple does, the easy way around this problem is to use an encrypted web proxy to visit facebook.

If the browser does URL and/or content inspection to find out if you're using Facebook (either in the browser, or by intercepting SSL traffic with a decrypting proxy with a certificate trusted by your browser) , then the next best thing is for someone to come up with a FreeFacebook app that uses an encrypted connection to a proxy server to serve up your Facebook content.

Unless Facebook cooperates, I'm not sure how the carriers can expect this to work on any smartphone with a way to install apps outside of the official app store.

Unless, of course, they charge more to access any random website than they do to access Facebook.

Re:If they're so fond of DPI, let's give it to the

[postbigbang]

No, we should not help them out with that.

We should demand common carrier status for the wires we use, service neutral. Pay by pipe size per period. The telcos provide wires, not content. I should not be held captive to their content dreams (are you listening, Comcast?) and if I want content, it's abstracted from the rest of the neutral services I provide.

There's a job waiting for you in PR at Verizon. You're good.

viruses?

[fishingmachine]

what happens when a virus or even simple script breaks out that automatically opens thousands of autopay sites on unsuspecting peoples computers?

Ka-ching!

[NicknamesAreStupid]

Yes! I hope they implement all of this AND MORE! They are a monopoly and deserve the right to bleed their market dry, sucking the life completely out of it. Let the greed flow through their veins like a river of lust, thumbing their noses at everyone -- impunity slathered in arrogance. If they succeed, then they will go away faster. The real horror is they play in the margins and nickle&dime everybody to death.

Ah ah ah, right.

[Balinares]

Funny. I've got another scenario for you.

1. Vodafone starts charging per MB for Facebook use.
2. Facebook threatens to shut off all access to Vodafone users.
3. Vodafone splits profits with Facebook.
4. Vodafone and Facebook BFF again.

Which do you think is likeliest?

Re:Everyone should demand full encryption at minim

[TaoPhoenix]

You're obviously a nice guy and not evil enough. Encryption will soon be Gov only, because the FBI can't crack it!

(Burlesque)
Hey, you have nothing to hide right?
Why not let the nice telcos grope your data?
(/Burlesque)

Re:A pox on both their houses!!!

[Mashiki]

The fact that it's an unelected body means it's not beholden to the people it's "supposed to represent" in otherwords, it operates in the land of despotic decree. Imagine that, people who aren't elected, believing that because they're not elected, and therefore don't have to be subject to the whims of the peasants, will in turn make all the choices based on what they want to do. And there's not a damn thing you can do about it. I believe that Venezuela just switched to this(Chavez can now run the country by decree, effectively he's no longer an elected leader).

Man I can see it now. We have Iran on the human rights council along with several other countries that believe human rights are what you're told, not what they are. Hey, cut off the fuckers hands, he stole a loaf of bread. That believe that women are chattel, well I suppose if you're into that it's all cool. Hey, get back in the house! And believe mass oppression is the opiate of relief.

Good government is the representation of the people, by whom they're elected by. Self-government is representation by appointee(read czars, and other unelected officials).

I'll ask a question

[koan]

Does VPN defeat DPI? Does encryption beat it? If they want to look at everything I do so they can parcel that up and sell it to someone else as well as charge me for using services over their (to me) a dumb pipe, then I should get to use their pipe for free or they should pay me for my info that generates income for them.

They are doing the same thing they did to TV, how many of you actually watch a TV anymore? Not TV shows, an actually TV.

There must be a peak point (or a trough point)

[serutan]

Since the American prosperity boom ended sometime in the mid-to-late 60s business in the U.S. has been mostly about cutting corners. Outside of the digital industry, innovation has been overwhelmingly about making things cheaper to produce rather than inventing new or better things. For a trivial example, in my lifetime store-bought pies have gotten smaller and flatter and the bases have been flared inward so far that a 9-inch pie you buy today contains as much actual pie as maybe a 7-inch pie 30 years ago.

Competition can improve things, but there's a Moore's Law type of limit on this when competition is based almost entirely on improving efficiency. When costs have been trimmed as low as they can be, businesses are making the least profit they can operate on, and customers are paying the highest tolerable price for the lowest tolerable value, where do things go from there? I have no idea, but the Internet is accelerating us toward that point, as free flowing information gives everybody access to everybody else's best deal.

Re:There must be a peak point (or a trough point)

[Antisyzygy]

Simple fix. Tax the shit out of the wealthy, make it free to bring money to the United States and tax the shit out of any money leaving the United States. Then spend the money on upgrading our infrastructure, giving millions of people jobs and thus the ability to buy things. Wealthy people make too damn much money. Im not saying that some people don't deserve 250k+ a year, but many of them do not.

Re:There must be a peak point (or a trough point)

[Ogi_UnixNut]

Tax the shit out the wealthy and they'll just move themselves (or just their money) to places with low tax rates. Thereby depriving the state of what money they get out of them as is.

In fact, you've just given them a massive hole in your own idea. So say I am $richguy. You want to tax the shit out of me, but will happily allow money into the country for free? Then I will just move all my money to $low_tax_haven, and only bring the money in (for free) to spend on what I want.

In fact, as a rich guy, that would be a better system to live under than the current one, where they make it difficult to bring money in without it being taxed.

Re:There must be a peak point (or a trough point)

[Antisyzygy]

If they move their money out of the states it would be taxed heavily. Im not saying its a perfect solution, its just that the disparity in wealth in this country is absolutely ridiculous. Its hasnt been this bad since 1920.

Re:There must be a peak point (or a trough point)

[Ogi_UnixNut]

They would move their money out before the new rules take effect, this is generally referred to as "capital flight". After all, you have to release your new tax rules in advance of them taking effect, so that everyone has time to make adjustments to their accounting.

How to tax the rich is a very tricky problem. As they usually have the money to buy influence, or just pack up and move to somewhere where they are more welcome. As a general rule these rich people also invest their money in the economy, so if you make their life difficult they can just move those investments elsewhere, with a net result of loss in the economy.

But yes, I agree with you. Just that rich people are hard to tax. After all, they didn't get rich by giving money to others. They are rather good at hoarding it.

They can keep their overpriced shit

[kheldan]

Knowing how overpriced internet access is over wireless providers, I don't use it at all. I don't own or need a smartphone, so I don't need a dataplan anyway. If they're going to start playing games like this with it, then I have no incentive to ever change that. I suggest everyone else follow suit, if shenanigans like this get implemented. You don't need a smartphone to live and conduct your lives, you got along fine without it before there were such things. You just need to be reminded of that.

Re:Drive away from the net

[TaoPhoenix]

Sorry, no - this is exactly coinciding with the rise of "move to the cloud"! So all the stuff you used to do locally with a software package will now be streamed to you one click at a time! "Want to use online apps, that's work, that's more."

Sure

[nlawalker]

Sure. Lower the price on your service to compensate, since it's now worth less, and I'll consider.

What's that? You're going to keep the same prices and institute restrictions? No thanks.

Re:A pox on both their houses!!!

[RogueWarrior65]

Dennis: Oh, King, eh? Oh, very nice... And how'd you get that, eh? By exploiting the workers! By hanging on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society! If there's ever gonna be any progress in our society...
Woman: Denny, there's some lovely filth down here!
[Noticing Arthur] Oh! How d'you do?
Arthur: How do you do, good lady. I am Arthur, King of the Britons. Whose castle is that?
Woman: King of the who?
Arthur: The Britons.
Woman: Who are the Britons?
Arthur: Well we all are... We are all Britons... And I am your king.
Woman: I didn't know we had a king... I thought we were an autonomous collective.
Dennis: You're foolin' yourself. We're livin' in a dictatorship! A self-perpetuating autocracy in which the working classes...
Woman: (interrupting) Oh there you go, bringing class into it again...
Dennis: That's what it's all about! If only people would...
Arthur: Please, please, good people, I am in haste. Who lives in that castle?
Woman: No one lives there.
Arthur: Then who is your lord?
Woman: We don't have a lord.
Arthur: What?
Dennis: I told you. We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to sort of act as a sort of executive officer for the week.
Arthur: Yes.
Dennis: But all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting...
Arthur: Yes I see.
Dennis: ...by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs...
Arthur: Be quiet!
Dennis: But by a two-thirds majority in the case of more major...
Arthur: Be quiet! I order you to be quiet!
Woman: Order, eh? Who does he think he is?
Arthur: I am your king!
Woman: Well I didn't vote for you!
Arthur: You don't vote for kings.
Woman: Well how'd you become king then?
[Angelic music plays...]
Arthur: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. THAT is why I am your king!
Dennis: (interrupting) Listen, strange women lyin' in ponds distributin' swords is no basis for a system of government! Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcicial aquatic ceremony!
Arthur: Be quiet!
Dennis: Oh but you can't expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you!
Arthur: SHUT UP!
Dennis: Oh but if I went 'round sayin' I was Emperor, just because some moistened bink lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!
Arthur: SHUT UP! WILL YOU SHUT UP! [Grabs Dennis]
Dennis: Ah! Now we see the violence inherent in the system!
Arthur: SHUT UP!
Dennis: Oh, come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help! Help! I'm being repressed!
Arthur: (muttering) Bloody peasant!
Dennis: Oh, what a giveaway! Did you hear that? Did you hear that, eh? That's what I'm on about! Did you see him repressin' me? You saw it, didn't you?

Re:Unlikely

[ffejie]

Well, you did give up your right to choose when you signed a 2 year contract. The benefit you took was probably a phone subsidy. However, I would expect that any change would require a reworking of your existing contract (which probably allows 2GB-5GB-unlimited access to the internet). At the point where your contract needs to be reworked, you will most likely be able to opt out.

Nothing to do with net neutrality

[SuperKendall]

Like so many others, you don't seem to understand what Net Neutrality is actually doing. The regulation as I understand it is about controlling the speed and access to various hosts - as in, they al need to be able to be accessed at exactly the same speed (no traffic shaping for VOIP for example) and you will not be blocked from any host (well, except possibly the ones the government doesn't like - that would come later though).

Net Neutrality doesn't say anything about the ISP's altering what you are charged based on the host you are accessing. You see, that's the problem with creating a tool or regulation to solve a problem that doesn't exist, is that when the real problem comes along you have nothing to stop it.

Re:Nothing to do with net neutrality

[zm]

If you look at 3GPP standards for policy enforcement, per host traffic shaping is definitely a part of the story. That said, the carriers normally don't care to segregate different content providers, but different content types.
Disclaimer: I work on this stuff.

Re:Nothing to do with net neutrality

[GameboyRMH]

You misunderstand, net neutrality and traffic shaping are issues that only partially overlap - network neutrality would not allow traffic shaping by service or source/destination, for example giving Skype higher priority than Google Voice or SIP traffic, or giving all VoIP traffic to and from mobile devices/another ISP lower priority. Traffic shaping by type isn't really covered by net neutrality - so giving Skype, Google Voice, SIP/FaceTime and IAX (all VoIP traffic) higher priority than other traffic would be allowed.

Net neutrality also means no altering what you're charged based on what you're accessing by service or traffic type - this is one of the main points of net neutrality, so you had that part totally wrong.

And it's only solving a problem that doesn't exist in the same sense that blocking an incoming punch is - the fist hasn't hit your face yet, but you can see it's about to happen and you're preventing that from happening. You want to maintain the current state of not having a fist in your face.

Re:Encryption, end-to-end, now

[Haeleth]

HTTPS would make these shenanigans significantly harder, because with HTTPS the data stream itself no longer contains the resource name in plain-text form.

And what's to stop them just charging extra for HTTPS packets? (Except maybe those going to major banks, who might pay the provider not to charge their customers.)

Yeah, there's no technical excuse for it, but the majority of Americans wouldn't know that.

Besides, you'd also have to go through a proxy to hide your true destination. That degrades your performance. They could also add something to the ToS banning the use of proxies. (Again, no technical excuse; again, they don't need one because they could easily convince the majority of their customers it made sense.)

Re:If they're so fond of DPI, let's give it to the

[Antisyzygy]

Telecom industry owes us for running their lines on public properties and also their access to public locations.

Before you get your panties too much in a ruff

[FredMenace]

While they may still try to apply deep packet inspection to regular net connections (ie, web usage), I suspect that most of these ideas will, in fact, apply to *Apps* on mobile devices, rather than to web usage.

So they could do various kinds of novel charges for using a YouTube App, etc., but possibly leave alone use of YouTube through a browser (other than overall bandwidth limitations). Now whether they would try to marginalize web browsing generally in favor of (favored) app access, I don't know...

Re:Before you get your panties too much in a ruff

[Homburg]

Why would they only apply it to apps? In fact, how would they only apply it to apps? How does the operator know whether it is an app or a browser that is making a connection to one of YouTube's IP addresses?

Re:A pox on both their houses!!!

[russotto]

Imagine if the entire US Congress was replaced overnight with smart people who didn't listen to faux news sources and who weren't beholden to peasants and farmers from Hicksville, Flyover Territory, USA. It would be a new era of smart government by smart people who know what the right thing to do and who aren't afraid of consequences.

Tyranny, untempered by incompetence? No thank you.

mobile world

[Presto Vivace]

this post shows how business models for mobile community are a threat to the neutral net.

As long as they are fair in advertising

[davidwr]

If the wired or wireless carrier doesn't advertise "internet" but instead advertises" access to our key partner web sites for free, Facebook for $100.00/min" or whatever, I don't see a problem.

It's a free country, but false advertising should not be allowed.

By the way, blocking outgoing port 25 and other commonly-abused ports while advertising "Internet" is false advertising and should be prohibited as well. Companies that block port 25 should be encouraged to advertise "The full web experience plus our special protection to keep you from being a spam-zombie!" and if they don't do that at least prohibit them from advertising "Internet access" if that's not what they are selling.

Every major player should be required to offer "Internet access" - that is, without restrictions - at fair and reasonable prices, where "fair and reasonable" are reasonably close to what they charge for "not quite internet" services.

greed

[perryizgr8]

no cure for good old greed.

There Will Be Sufficient Consumer Revolt

[zentec]

It's real simple; if the consumer doesn't want it, the consumer won't pay for it. As the previous posts have indicated, if this appears on any of the internet services for which I pay, they're gone. Period.

If it comes down to an internet that is tiered like cable TV channels, it's no longer the product I want to buy. And these companies that sell this stuff to telcos and MCOs can explain why the insertion of their very expensive equipment resulted in customer defections.

We're still in charge here; it may not be fun to have to give up the iPhone and the internet access at home, but if it proves a necessary point, I can certainly spend the money just as easy on something else.

Re:T-Mobile already does.

[makomk]

It's "optional" in the sense that you can opt to disable it... if you go through a baroque and broken process that requires giving them your credit card info and personal details first. It's meant to be on by default, though.

Maintaining their 20% profit margin

[Beliskner]

If we take a look at an ADSL provider like Comcast you can see they operate with a profit margin of 20%, to maintain this amount of greed they must get us consumers to use the service as little as possible whilst charging us the highest rates.

Re:The days of the Nation State are ending...

[RightSaidFred99]

I get it.. sarcasm. Any other deeply biting, trenchant insights you can offer us in such a cool manner? If only I could see you, I can imagine the jaunty way you wear your cool hat partially sideways, and those cool ironically large glasses you wear. And the exclamation mark really helped sell your insightful sarcasm!

See, now I'm being simultaneously sarcastic and ironic!

Or they could do everyone a favor - $1 a page

[tomhudson]

At a buck a page for facebook, productivity will return to business offices, and those "Like" buttons that track you from site to site (facebook's behavioral tracking) even when you're not logged in, will disappear.

Gatekeepers

[Eth1csGrad1ent]

Its about the gatekeepers. It always has been. It always will be. Anytime someone can put a gate between you and your goal and charge you for the privilege of going through it, they will.

not in Europe

[t2t10]

It's unlikely that this is going to catch on in Europe; wireless Internet is so cheap and widely available, any carrier that tried would just bleed customers.

Calm down, nothing to see here.

[tengwar]

I've worked for a large mobile telco for more than ten years. "Content based charging" has been discussed for all of that time, usually by new people coming in to the business. I don't think it's ever going to happen in the way described here. What we do have is zero-rated "on-net" content - that means that if you go to our internal web sites, it doesn't come out of your bundle (monthly allocation of data). That's reasonable, because you don't want to be charged for going to your account management page.

In general we just want to sell you a bundle of data, and we aren't too worried about what you do with it. There are some exceptions - for instance for VoIP traffic, if possible (and it usually isn't) we try to give a low-latency traffic profile. Video streaming is sometimes throttled for the very good reason that there is only so much bandwidth on the air side, and we need to be able to give other customers on the same cell reasonable service. Sorry guys, but this is more the laws of physics than The Man trying to screw you.

Yes, there are ways that we want to take advantage of our position as a phone company, but this isn't a zero sum game. We have things like micro-charging and secure identification that we are trying to build products on (or more commonly get third parties to build products on) - but this isn't going to work unless we can persuade you that you want to buy those products.

Re:T-Mobile already does.

[tepples]

It's "optional" in the sense that you can opt to disable it... if you go through a baroque and broken process that requires giving them your credit card info and personal details first.

How else do you expect to prove that you are an adult?

Pay for itself with interest?

[tepples]

If I pay $15K to get solar panels, and I'm paying $200/mo for an electric bill, and the former eliminates the need for the latter, I break even in 6.25 years.

I'm pretty sure $200/mo won't even make the minimum payment on a $15,000 loan, especially at the interest rates that banks are charging for credit cards and other unsecured loans nowadays.

I don't have that much in my checking account currently

That's the problem right there. A lot of people don't have more than a month's salary in checking.

Georgism

[tepples]

That sounds like communism.

As I understand it, Georgism and other geolibertarian ideologies are like communism with respect to land, but with respect to labor, capital goods not tied to land, and financial capital, they're closer to classical libertarianism.

Re:Georgism

[Antisyzygy]

Im a social-libertarian communist so I was just saying...

A Flashblock-aware ad server

[tepples]

Your flash blocker identifies as having Flash-playing abilities but then blocks the SWFs it tries to load.

Ideally, a Flashblock-aware ad server would detect that the SWFs don't actually load, and then 1. use JavaScript to replace them with their fallback text ads and 2. set a cookie to serve text ads on subsequent page views.

Virgin Mobile already does this

[slyborg]

This is old news in pre-paid. On my VM phone, you have to pay 10 cents to use Gmail if you're stupid enough to do that. Navigation is pay per day, etc.

Re:If they're so fond of DPI, let's give it to the

[bwayne314]

If only I hadn't just used my last mod point on the dont ask dont tell thread ...

Re:If they're so fond of DPI, let's give it to the

[postbigbang]

No. Once you lay the data communications grid, you don't have the same analogy as the electrical grid. RESIST the urge to cave into the telco mentality.

Your use of invectives leaves much to be desired, as well.

regulate

[choko]

This is why net neutrality is a good thing, even though I hear a lot of complaining about "increased government regulation" on a regular basis whenever net neutrality is discussed. If major carriers are colluding with each other, then they need to be regulated to ensure that the "rules" of capitalism are being followed. Regulation isn't always a bad thing, even though some people seem to think that it is.

It could go another way

[mostlyDigital]

Looking at recent stories in the news about Comcast I'd be more concerned if I were a content provider. It looks like the trend may be for network providers to look for a way to charge content providers. Of course all this double billing is going to raise profits, not infrastructure investment.

Where is section on price?

[SuperKendall]

Net neutrality also means no altering what you're charged based on what you're accessing by service or traffic type - this is one of the main points of net neutrality, so you had that part totally wrong.

I would be very happy if I did. Yet I have not seen anything like that clause in anything I've read on potential regulations. Where have you seen this mentioned?

Also, what specifies by type?

[SuperKendall]

Given that we Cannot even see the regualtions proposed, what have you read that indicates traffic shaping by type is allowed at all? There again I've seen nothing that indicates that to be the case. It also seems to point to an ISP being able to charge more by type of traffic as well...

Basically I just really need to see links that provide some indication that any of what you are saying is potentially what will happen - as I stated there are a lot of people who think the regulations do one thing where indications are they do something wholly different.

Re:Also, what specifies by type?

[GameboyRMH]

I was talking about the concept of net neutrality, not the bills - but I agree, if the regulation doesn't follow the concept of net neutrality, then it's net neutrality in name only.

VPNs? Port forwarding, ssh tunneling, proxies...

[OgGreeb]

The article says these companies have the ability to decrypted encrypted packets on the fly, and use heuristic algorithms to detect packet
delivery patterns that can identify traffic types and vendors. Interesting. What do the VPN vendors say about this? If they are metering based
on port numbers, what about port forwarding, ssh tunneling, proxy servers and anonymous port forwarding services -- couldn't these make
effective work arounds?

I've also wondered about situations where packets flow through two different companies' pipes on their way to you, and company A charges
a surcharge for Google search packets, and company B charges a surcharge for Microsoft Bing search packets.... what happens then?