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To Save Net Neutrality, We Must Build Our Own Internet (vice.com)
In light of reports that FCC plans to announce a full repeal of net neutrality protections later this week, Jason Koebler, editor-in-chief of Motherboard, suggests that it is time we cut our reliance on big telecom monopolies. He writes: Net neutrality as a principle of the federal government will soon be dead, but the protections are wildly popular among the American people and are integral to the internet as we know it. Rather than putting such a core tenet of the internet in the hands of politicians, whose whims and interests change with their donors, net neutrality must be protected by a populist revolution in the ownership of internet infrastructure and networks. In short, we must end our reliance on big telecom monopolies and build decentralized, affordable, locally owned internet infrastructure. The great news is this is currently possible in most parts of the United States. There has never been a better time to start your own internet service provider, leverage the publicly available fiber backbone, or build political support for new, local-government owned networks. For the last several months, Motherboard has been chronicling the myriad ways communities passed over by big telecom have built their own internet networks or have partnered with small ISPs who have committed to protecting net neutrality to bring affordable high speed internet to towns and cities across the country. Update: FCC has announced a plan to repeal net neutrality.
The issue with this mentality is the last mile problem. Communities have monopoly agreements with ISPs (comcast/att/etc) that restrict the ability to get a new ISP to the home. Radio based internet is still a possibility perhaps since it avoids much physical infrastructure. I think another good option is community provided (aka utility) internet service. Comcast/Centurylink caused a law to be passed in Colorado that disallows municipal internet unless a community votes to allow it again. In Colorado alone, it has happened MANY times.
FCC: Enjoy your corporate owned internet!
Bender: Yeah, well... I'm gonna go build my own internet infrastructure, with blackjack and hookers.
In fact, forget the internet thing!
I'd be interested to see how these "communities" manage to afford to lay their own billion dollar T1 backbone infrastructure. Good luck rattling the tin for the funds for that! You might as well say people who are fed up with traffic laws should built their own highways - a dose of realism is needed here people. Infrastructure is NOT cheap.
we must end our reliance on big telecom monopolies and build decentralized, affordable, locally owned internet infrastructure. The great news is this is currently possible in most parts of the United States
If you want me to join this effort, there are some conditions. First, no Google, Facebook, or the like. Second, no government involvement in setting policy or in enforcement.
You know what? Forget it. I think what I am actually looking for is FidoNet.
however, the big issue is the connection to our old friend, The Connected Internet. if you don't live next to a peering point, you are going to have to backhaul to it, or hook to another Tier 1 or 2 provider who is. money, money, money. lighting the glass is not free, either.
pipe dream.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Also, unless there are massive advances in satellite internet (which there very well could be), the reliance upon massive corporations who own backbones will always be there holding us back.
We need advanced technology to free us but the problem is that R&D projects are always going to be hamstrung by lobbyists and big corps.
The other big issue here is student debt, tbh. Take any PHD and unless they sell their soul to big corps, they are penniless. It reminds me of guys like Tesla, who despite all of his advancements for human technology, died alone and completely depressed and broke.
If we could eradicate reliance upon educational institutions for furthering human knowledge, we could then start seeing more and more open source solutions to big problems.
AI is going to somewhat solve this problem. The AI arms race will be all about computing power. As quantum computers advance and become more accessible, an average person will eventually be able to do way more than they could today, including research and also personal protection, on the same level as large corporations or governments. But even then, we have the problem that everything we use for computing is sourced by massive corporations. Sure, eventually 3d printing will make home computer construction a possibility, but that's a long ways away.
If the world starts embracing a fair universal income standard, we could also see huge advancements happening from basements and garages at a much higher rate than today but still these efforts will face roadblocks designed by massive companies like MSFT and Apple who prefer to keep us in the dark about most of their design and getting worse every day for selfishness.
Today? Students are caught within the politics of old boys networks. That also is a huge obstacle. That said, most of these kinds of problems could potentially change dramatically as we further deplete our natural resources and our governments continue to be terrible examples of human beings.
But if you look at Health Care, for example, in many countries where a proper health care standard exists where people aren't bankrupted by hospital bills, that is always a public service and never is there a case supporting 3rd party health care where citizens are better off short term or long term.
I guess if there was a state security element to health care, we might see worse results with a public health care system, but overall the private healthcare systems are just terribly corrupt.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
What makes this guy or anyone else think that we, The People, will be 'allowed' to build our own Internet replacement? Think about this: if the government is taking the leash off ISPs, what's to stop them from eventually buying out backbone providers, or otherwise using leverage to prevent them from providing backbone connectivity to this upstart Internet 3.0? For that matter, what if ISPs use pages out of the Starbucks playbook, and saturate any given market with their services, even if they're taking a loss overall, just to squeeze small startup Internet 3.0 providers out of the market? Then buy them up, absorb or liquidate them. The phrase 'uphill battle' doesn't even really begin to describe the situation. Now consider this: Ajit Pai is clearly in the pocket of the telecom industry. To my mind that makes him corrupt as hell. What's stopping him from putting any roadblocks he can in the way of Internet 3.0 companies, to either stop them from happening at all, or hamstring them so much that they're not viable? There apparently isn't going to be any 'fair play' anymore, so anything is going to be possible. Add to all this, that the general public, who don't even know what 'net neutrality' is in the first place, is completely oblivious to all this. They just pay their money because they think they have to, and so long as they can see Facebook on their phones, and watch movies and play games on the Internet, they really don't give a damn. It's only when things aren't working that they care; they aren't going to be sold on 'Internet 3.0' because why should they change?
The whole situation sucks. ISPs, greedy companies, and oppressive governments are destroying the Internet for everyone, everywhere, not just here in the U.S.. It may not be possible to save it, and it may never be possible to create a viable alternative to it.
This reminds me a lot about what we're currently seeing happening with the Rust programming language. It's following a very similar path, and I think the outcome could be the same in the end.
So there's the incumbent. In the case of Rust, the incumbent is C++. It has been entrenched for decades, and has become very successful.
Then we have these Rust upstarts come along, who want to do things their own way. It's not necessarily the case that they can do any better; they're more interested in just being different.
So a huge amount of time and effort and money is invested in creating Rust. Lots of infrastructure, such as compilers and standard libraries, are built. Meanwhile, the incumbent, C++, continues to evolve.
Now it's several years later, and after much turmoil, Rust finally hits its 1.0 release. It's widely hyped as being able to compete with the incumbent, C++.
Yet by this time the incumbent, C++, has also undergone some significant changes. C++14 is bringing some huge benefits, and there's even more great stuff in progress with C++17.
Despite being different, it turns out that Rust isn't so great after all. In a lot of ways it has far more flaws and warts than the incumbent, C++, has. It turns out that it isn't "better" in any meaningful way, and is actually a lot worse in many respects.
You're right when you say "infrastructure is not cheap". This doesn't just apply to networking technology, either. It applies just as well to programming languages, and the Rust versus C++ debacle is a perfect example of how such a situation almost always turns out in favor of the incumbent, and not the upstart.
C++ beat Rust at its own game. I don't see why the same couldn't happen with the Internet versus any other upstart.
Building your own Internet is difficult, but VPNs and onion routers are already pretty well established. The technological solution is to move to protocols where the network has no visibility into the traffic and little visibility regarding the endpoints.
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Because what you are now motivated to do, was the only robust solution anyway. Market pain beats political bootlicking. Don't beg for what you want, build it.
The average person today has way more computing power in their cell phone than any government or corporation several decades ago - it hasn't changed the balance of power because governments and corporations *also* have radically increased their computing power, so it still dwarfs that controlled by individuals. AI capable of solving endemic social problems is unlikely to help much, because the people profiting from those problems will have their own, far more powerful AIs dedicated to improving their profits. The result being that not only would the profiteers be more powerful than the disordered masses, as they are today, they'd also have radically more powerful intelligence at their disposal than the masses.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It's electing people who are committed to CITIZEN'S INTERESTS to Congress. They can actively appoint qualified, and public-interest-minded heads of departments, like the FCC.
During Obama's presidency, we had Tom Wheeler, who ruled (almost universally) in favor of citizens' interests...and, in fact, established the "Net Neutrality" rules in 2015...against the wishes of one of his Commission members, Ajit Pai. When Wheeler retired, Ajit Pai (who is a legal shill who worked at Verizon, who benefits from his decisions) ascended to the Chairman post, and started dismantling the good work done by Mr. Wheeler...mostly (I posit) because he wants that job back at Verizon, when he is replaced in the future.
The Republicans are notoriously favorable to providing more advantages to large corporations (e.g., Verizon) and couldn't care less about you and me. With the Buffoon in the White House, and a Republican dominated Congress, we can expect virtually every government-sponsored benefit to citizens to be abolished or diminished.
So, to my mind the ONLY ONE SOLUTION is to restore our government to attending to benefits for citizens...it's not going to be done by a party that passes legislation to give Fat Cats tax breaks, and make you and I pay MORE taxes to cover the giveaway. Have YOU figured out the solution yet? It's a plain as the nose on your face! Make sure that we elect people who CARE about the citizens' interests, not just lining their own pockets. They will do the work of replacing the people who are engaged in wholesale destruction of every potential good for citizens. I reason that there is NO REASON our country should be favoring large businesses over individual citizens. Others' may believe differently.
It is still around, and doing what it was meant to do.
Here is the NOC: https://noc.net.internet2.edu/
Remember that the main reason that Internet 2 exists is that educational institions needed shelter from the Eternal September, along with all of the other crap that came when AOL joined the Internet that they and ARPA built.
This time, they kept it on-mission, and it has worked out just fine.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
I've said this multiple times on slashdot, but in my experience, the best option is to resolve this issue at the County/PUD level. My favourite example is what is available in Chelan and Douglas counties, in Eastern Washington state. In both of these counties, the PUDs have built out nearly ubiquitous FTTH networks.
The trick is that the PUDs only provide the last mile service, they don't provide the content (in the case of TV) or Internet service. When a local resident wants to sign up, they have the choice of some 8 or 9 ISPs, and 6+ TV providers, all of whom in turn transport that service over the County network. Businesses can also buy transport from Zayo, Cogent, and some other peering provider. For the resident, it's easy... Their bill for TV or Internet (or both), has something like a $6/mo line access charge which covers the fiber connection, and the rest is for service. On the flip side, the service provider doesn't need to maintain the last mile.
The PUDs themselves are responsible to their residents through elections, and from my observation are very responsive to faults in their systems. I was involved in the summer of 2015 when a wildfire burned through and knocked out a significant chunk of their infrastructure, both power and fiber. They had the fiber truck rolling right behind the power trucks, and had the system back up and running as soon as they could source and plant 50+ replacement power poles.
This kind of thing really does work.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
Passion is not a replacement for logic.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Trump voters did this. And worse.
Please, rethink your politics. This is just the beginning of the train wreck.
maybe you support abortion, maybe you don't. Maybe you want to take my guns away. Maybe you'd like an end to mass shootings. Maybe you'll raise my taxes and I'm barely making it as is. Maybe I need my schools federally funded because my property values tanked when the jobs went overseas and there's not enough tax base left.
The working class is fighting among itself for scraps while the elites take everything from us. But I have no idea how to stop that fighting. In the 30s, 40s and 50s churches were used to organize the working class. The right wing picked up on that in the 70s and 80s and took them over with wedge issues and mega-pastors. We need to get people to stop clawing at each other's throats, but I'll be damned if I know how to do that around stuff like gun control and abortion.
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If there is, and its use starts to cut into corporate profits, look for the federal government to privatize it and sell it at a bargain-basement price to a huge company in the name of "smaller government". And people who cry "state's rights!" and "local control" and "That government is best which governs least" will shamelessly support this tragedy of the digital commons.