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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."
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?
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.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
...where corporations are free to fuck you in the ass.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
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.
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.
That's the best way to push full encryption for all internet communications, something that all governments want to avoid at all cost.
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...
Read a book. It can wait, barring business emergencies and your workplace should be paying for it if you're in the car.
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.
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.
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.
Disagreeing with me does not mean you get to mod me troll.
Jonathon Gordon and Jonathan Downey are terrible people.
Xavier Rabourdin for president 2012
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.
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.
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.
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.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
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.
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?
http://www.tatadocomo.com/pps-tariff-plans.aspx
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.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
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.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
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.
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.
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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.