ISPs claim they need to end Net Neutrality because third-party websites (and pirate networks) are abusing their bandwidth. Don't let them fool us.
Conversely, some people have tried to use the free speech angle in order to defeat ISPs. I believe it is a mistake. Politicians read a letter about ISPs harming free speech, think "raging liberal", and promptly ignore it. That's counter-productive.
The ISPs' assault on Net Neutrality is not about costs. It is not about free speech. It is all about anti-competitive practices. ISPs don't want to let you download videos from iTunes or YouTube, because they have their own VOD services to prop up.
To save Net Neutrality, please focus on the anti-competitive angle in your letters to your Congressperson and Senators.
Digital delivery is a non-starter, because it assumes that phone / cable companies will let pure Internet players compete on equal footing with their own VoD offerings. It's the same issue as with third-party VOIP providers.
ISPs' attempts to end "Net neutrality" are not about bandwidth costs, but all about unfair competition.
The cost of something is determined by the lowest retail price. For music that is zero today. Most people are unwilling to assign a much higher value to it either.
This means any commercial enterprise which revolves around selling music is doomed. People will redistribute it and remove any possible value from your product.
Spot on. And it's actually a good thing, because it means money will flow to more productive purposes.
On the other hand, the music store is not necessarily doomed. Music is free, and there's actually too much of it. There is a lot of money to be made in narrowing down the choice offered to each individual customer.
The first online music store to display no more than five songs will win.
I'm not so sure about that. Of course, over time speeds keep going up, and cost per GB keeps going down. The problem with video is that file sizes keep growing as fast as speeds do. As a consequence, download times and hosting costs remain at a permanently high plateau.
If you look back at the history of pirate movie downloads, you'll notice that movie file sizes crept up from single CDR to double CDR to single-layer DVD-R to dual-layer DVD-R. With the switch to HD, there is still a lot of growth potential. HDTV rips are already available on the Pirate Bay, and will become mainstream as fast as connections allow it.
700 MB DivX movies suck on a regular TV. Can you imagine watching that on a 1080p TV? Heck, even a regular DVD looks barely acceptable when you've become used to HD. So, file sizes will have to grow A LOT before movie downloads are quality-competitive with movies stored on physical media.
It is going to take a long time before we can stream a 30 GB movie. And by then, maybe the next-next-generation DVD format will be around. It's a moving target. Maybe movie downloads will never catch up.
It's quite ironic that content owners force legal download services to use strong DRM. Strong DRM is incompatible with P2P. As a result, legal movie download services can't be profitable.
I have no problems at all with not for profit entities using some of my bandwidth to distribute their files.
I have serious problems with a for profit entity like Microsoft or Redhat doing the same.
The first one I call "charity" or "support". The second one I call "leaching", and its not far from "stealing".
That's a major stumbling block. Commercial P2P companies seem to assume that consumers will actually let them use their connections 24/7. The problem is that upload bandwidth is scarce, and that those companies are competing with each other for it (not to mention with pirate downloads).
Because of that competition, P2P networks cannot take peers' upload bandwidth for granted. In fact, they will have to provide incentives for peers to actively allocate their bandwidth to them, instead of to competitors.
I agree with you. There is a lot of hype about P2P. Many view P2P as free bandwidth. Many consider it as a game-changing revolution, as a magic cure against the curse of the "speed/quality/cost: pick two" triangle.
P2P is no such thing. There is no such thing as a free lunch. As long as broadband connections are asymmetrical, somehow, someone will have to sacrifice one leg of the triangle. If legal download services want a decent quality of service, they will have to pay enough to attract enough uploaders.
Of course, once download services start paying for uploads, they'll require tamperproof solutions. They need to make sure that only legitimate downloaders get in - and that only legitimate uploaders get paid.
I happen to be working on an open-source, traceable P2P solution that does just that. We're looking for developers and beta-testers, so drop me an email at developers@snowballnetworks.com, or have a look at our developer center.
There was a rumor a week ago about a leaked ad for the German launch. Does anyone know if it was confirmed or (convincingly) debunked? By the way, the ad claimed November 12 launch AND 3G!
As much as I hate replying to myself, I think I need to clarify how our work differs from Tribler (which appears to have gone very similar routes, technically). We started developing that extension because we thought that while BitTorrent could help lower hosting costs, it needed an overhaul before it could be considered seriously by a commercial web site. So we went and fixed that.
Snowball (as our extension is called) is designed around a web site, since we considered that a commercial web site would want to remain in control of who accessed its files, would want fresh, tamper-proof statistics, and would aim for the right balance between its own bandwidth bill and each user's quality of service. As a consequence, the Snowball universe is an array of centralized networks.
Tribler, on the other hand, is designed around its users, which would share homemade - or pirate - content. Its decentralized design makes much more sense in that case. Different tools for different jobs.
Video download services (legal or illegal) have been looking at P2P to reduce costs. The problem is that most consumers' broadband connections are highly asymmetrical. In my country, 20 Mb/s down connections are common, but upload speeds are only 1 Mb/s.
So a commercial P2P-based video download service has only four options: a. do nothing and let speeds suffer - which is not accceptable to consumers; b. reduce the picture quality - which would not be competitive with YouTube (low quality but free) and next-generation DVDs (much better quality and not that expensive); c. provide the missing 19 Mb/s at their own expense - which is not financially acceptable to the company; d. find a way to force consumers to upload for 20 times as long as they download.
Since the consumer's upstream bandwidth is such a hot commodity (everyone wants to use it, but it's limited), the video download service cannot assume that it'll be able to make use of theoretical full upload speeds. Too bad, since its very profitability depends on consumers' share ratios.
So the only possible way to get decent quality and decent speeds at a decent cost is to pay uploaders for connections. That way, they will actively choose to allocate their upstream bandwidth to the company, instead of to a competitor. Of course, this implies that the protocol is robust enough to withstand the fraud attempts that are obviously going to happen.
Such a system also has the benefit of solving the ISP / net neutrality threat. If such a system allows ISPs to set up proxies for profit, they'll make sure consumers' get maximal speeds, instead of killing the quality of service and turning the store's customers away. (This would be option c) outlined above, except the ISP is doing it.)
Warning, shameless plug ahead:
Coincidentally, my brother and I have developed a BitTorrent extension that does just that. We originally intended to go live in a few days, but hell, here goes: http://developer.snowballnetworks.com
Developers are welcome. And paid. Anonymous posting has been disabled, so drop us an email at developers TA snowballnetworks.com to get an account.;)
Statistics work as follow:
0. All peers must acquire credentials from the tracker T. Credentials are user-specific and single-use.
1. Downloader U testifies it has downloaded piece P of file F from uploader U, signs, and sends that to U;
2. U verifies the statement, signs it, and sends it to T;
3. T verifies the upload statistics that were provided by U, and credits U's account accordingly.
Statistics are signed both by the downloader and the uploader. This ensures non-repudiability of statistics. As a result, we can be absolutely 100% positive that any fraud will be caught by the tracker.
The best you could do with two corrupt clients is to claim to have downloaded a file or part of a file which you actually have not. But in order to do so, you need to purchase download rights in the first place. So yes, you can cheat, but why would you?
Interesting. My brother and I have been developing exactly what you're describing in our spare time. I believe no online distribution system can be successful if ISPs aren't aboard: if they don't get their cut, they'll just kill the quality of service.
So we've written a BitTorrent extension that uses cryptographic signatures to provide infalsifiable upload statistics. Those upload statistics can then be used to reward uploaders. ISPs can set up the caching servers you're mentioning, and get paid just like any uploader. (It is also possible to pay the writers of compatible clients as well, using the same statistics.)
The code is released under the LGPL. Drop me an email if you're interested! (hgs at killbill.org - please mention/. in the subject);)
The movie The Great Global Warming Swindle is a fraud. The filmmaker has been convicted in the past of "creative editing". And sure enough, Professor Carl Wunsch from MIT, who is shown in key moments of the movie, is crying foul.
Another funny fact: many of the "scientists" shown in the movie are introduced as members of renowned academic institutions... which they left long ago. In other words, the movie is misrepresenting lobbyists as scientists. That should speak volumes about the integrity of the filmmakers.
As for the science in the movie, I'll let Real Climate debunk it.
That's correct, but they aren't used as much as they could (should). They apparently aren't cost-effective enough to ISPs in their current form. To begin with, they are a legal risk, despite "common carrier" provisions - which is why most ISPs cap Bit Torrent use instead of caching the most popular files linked on the pirate bay.
It's pretty obvious the whole purpose of the article is to drum up support for ending the net neutrality rule.
From the article: Backed by several consumer groups as well as large Internet enterprises such as Google, network neutrality legislation forbids phone companies from managing the network to favor one Internet user's content over another's.
Notice how the article ends on the tired "it'll be good to the consumer" strawman: underinvestment by some operators may "drive quality traffic to quality networks."
... is not to make the material support last forever, but to make as many copies as possible, and replace them often.
If the goal is to keep valuable information for future generations, a regularly upgraded, Internet-based distributed storage system would be a better bet.
I suspect they expected the PlayForSure side to prevail. PlayForSure meant an atomized online music market. It meant no single company dominated it. It meant labels still controlled access to the market.
But Apple prevailed. FairPlay prevents current iTMS customers from switching to another online music store. It ensures current iTMS customers remain future iTMS customers. FairPlay is the cornerstone of Apple's total domination on the (legal) online music market. It means Apple controls the access to the market, and no longer the music labels.
Every time a customer downloads a song that is infested with DRM at the request of the RIAA, record labels are putting an additional nail into their own coffin. If they want to break free from Apple's de facto monopoly, they have to drop the DRM requirement. Looks like they finally got it.
I disagree. I believe the only way to kill spam is to find something that pays more per hijacked computer than sending spam.
Moreover, spam is profitable because hijacked computers are cheap. If half of the zombies out there were used for another purpose, not only would this half not be sending spam, but they'd make the other half more expensive to hire (i.e. they'd reduce the ROI of spamming).
I recall someone claiming that they had *made money* based on stock spam. The strategy was really simple: they shorted whatever stock that was being pushed by spam
Good luck finding a broker willing to let you short pink sheets...;)
If you can't beat the game, change the rules of the game.
Nintendo was unwilling to follow Sony's and Microsoft's path where "innovation" just means "more raw power" - and higher costs. The decision to change the input method was a masterstroke.
Even though the Wii is the least powerful of this generation, its novel input method makes its more powerful rivals look obsolete, shortly after their launch. The PS3 or the 360 are merely the same old, now in HD. The Wii is truly next-generation.
After reading your post, I've decided to buy Alcoa shares (AA). So should you. THIS IS GOING TO EXPLODE!
</sarcasm>
I don't own an Ameritrade account, don't publish most of my addresses, and I'm still getting a barrage of penny stock spams. So, I don't believe the Ameritrade break-in is behind this.
However, I'm about to ask my lawyer if it's legal to short them.;p
Nonsense. The density argument is worthless. Yes, the average density is lower. But it's only because there's much more empty land between cities. Now, please explain why broadband sucks so much in NYC or Chicago, when I can get 24 Mb/s + TV + VOIP for 25 EUR a month in the boonies in France.
The truth is that there is no real competition in the US, whereas all it took in France was a very aggressive competitor that forced all the old national carriers to compete, or die. And before you ask, yes, it built its own network on its own dime.
Whenever I hear both Microsoft and Sony advising consumers to buy a Wii as a second console, I hardly see that as an endorsement. Instead, I can see fear in their eyes. Fear that consumers are going to buy a Wii first.
The huge splash Nintendo made at E3 has spin masters frantically running for cover. They're trying to downplay the Wii as good enough only as a secondary console. But even they feel the former Revolution is going to be a coup.
As for third-party developers, I'm planning to buy a Wii on launch day and at least 4 games (Metroid, Mario, Zelda and Red Steel, maybe Wii Sports). That's enough quality gaming right here to prevent me from actually seeing the light of day for the next few months, and I'm not even counting the countless classics on the Virtual Console.
The Wii is not suffering from a lack of titles. Actually, it already has too many strong launch titles to even let me try an unknown third-party game. Out of my 4/5 launch titles, only one is from a third party. The publishers that missed the boat have only themselves to blame.
Slashdot Mirror
ISPs claim they need to end Net Neutrality because third-party websites (and pirate networks) are abusing their bandwidth. Don't let them fool us.
Conversely, some people have tried to use the free speech angle in order to defeat ISPs. I believe it is a mistake. Politicians read a letter about ISPs harming free speech, think "raging liberal", and promptly ignore it. That's counter-productive.
The ISPs' assault on Net Neutrality is not about costs. It is not about free speech. It is all about anti-competitive practices. ISPs don't want to let you download videos from iTunes or YouTube, because they have their own VOD services to prop up.
To save Net Neutrality, please focus on the anti-competitive angle in your letters to your Congressperson and Senators.
Digital delivery is a non-starter, because it assumes that phone / cable companies will let pure Internet players compete on equal footing with their own VoD offerings. It's the same issue as with third-party VOIP providers.
ISPs' attempts to end "Net neutrality" are not about bandwidth costs, but all about unfair competition.
Spot on. And it's actually a good thing, because it means money will flow to more productive purposes.
On the other hand, the music store is not necessarily doomed. Music is free, and there's actually too much of it. There is a lot of money to be made in narrowing down the choice offered to each individual customer.
The first online music store to display no more than five songs will win.
I'm not so sure about that. Of course, over time speeds keep going up, and cost per GB keeps going down. The problem with video is that file sizes keep growing as fast as speeds do. As a consequence, download times and hosting costs remain at a permanently high plateau.
If you look back at the history of pirate movie downloads, you'll notice that movie file sizes crept up from single CDR to double CDR to single-layer DVD-R to dual-layer DVD-R. With the switch to HD, there is still a lot of growth potential. HDTV rips are already available on the Pirate Bay, and will become mainstream as fast as connections allow it.
700 MB DivX movies suck on a regular TV. Can you imagine watching that on a 1080p TV? Heck, even a regular DVD looks barely acceptable when you've become used to HD. So, file sizes will have to grow A LOT before movie downloads are quality-competitive with movies stored on physical media.
It is going to take a long time before we can stream a 30 GB movie. And by then, maybe the next-next-generation DVD format will be around. It's a moving target. Maybe movie downloads will never catch up.
It's quite ironic that content owners force legal download services to use strong DRM. Strong DRM is incompatible with P2P. As a result, legal movie download services can't be profitable.
That's a major stumbling block. Commercial P2P companies seem to assume that consumers will actually let them use their connections 24/7. The problem is that upload bandwidth is scarce, and that those companies are competing with each other for it (not to mention with pirate downloads).
Because of that competition, P2P networks cannot take peers' upload bandwidth for granted. In fact, they will have to provide incentives for peers to actively allocate their bandwidth to them, instead of to competitors.
I agree with you. There is a lot of hype about P2P. Many view P2P as free bandwidth. Many consider it as a game-changing revolution, as a magic cure against the curse of the "speed/quality/cost: pick two" triangle.
P2P is no such thing. There is no such thing as a free lunch. As long as broadband connections are asymmetrical, somehow, someone will have to sacrifice one leg of the triangle. If legal download services want a decent quality of service, they will have to pay enough to attract enough uploaders.
Of course, once download services start paying for uploads, they'll require tamperproof solutions. They need to make sure that only legitimate downloaders get in - and that only legitimate uploaders get paid.
I happen to be working on an open-source, traceable P2P solution that does just that. We're looking for developers and beta-testers, so drop me an email at developers@snowballnetworks.com, or have a look at our developer center.
There was a rumor a week ago about a leaked ad for the German launch. Does anyone know if it was confirmed or (convincingly) debunked? By the way, the ad claimed November 12 launch AND 3G!
http://files.macbidouille.com/news/200709/iphone_release_ger1.jpg
As much as I hate replying to myself, I think I need to clarify how our work differs from Tribler (which appears to have gone very similar routes, technically). We started developing that extension because we thought that while BitTorrent could help lower hosting costs, it needed an overhaul before it could be considered seriously by a commercial web site. So we went and fixed that.
Snowball (as our extension is called) is designed around a web site, since we considered that a commercial web site would want to remain in control of who accessed its files, would want fresh, tamper-proof statistics, and would aim for the right balance between its own bandwidth bill and each user's quality of service. As a consequence, the Snowball universe is an array of centralized networks.
Tribler, on the other hand, is designed around its users, which would share homemade - or pirate - content. Its decentralized design makes much more sense in that case. Different tools for different jobs.
Video download services (legal or illegal) have been looking at P2P to reduce costs. The problem is that most consumers' broadband connections are highly asymmetrical. In my country, 20 Mb/s down connections are common, but upload speeds are only 1 Mb/s.
;)
So a commercial P2P-based video download service has only four options:
a. do nothing and let speeds suffer - which is not accceptable to consumers;
b. reduce the picture quality - which would not be competitive with YouTube (low quality but free) and next-generation DVDs (much better quality and not that expensive);
c. provide the missing 19 Mb/s at their own expense - which is not financially acceptable to the company;
d. find a way to force consumers to upload for 20 times as long as they download.
Since the consumer's upstream bandwidth is such a hot commodity (everyone wants to use it, but it's limited), the video download service cannot assume that it'll be able to make use of theoretical full upload speeds. Too bad, since its very profitability depends on consumers' share ratios.
So the only possible way to get decent quality and decent speeds at a decent cost is to pay uploaders for connections. That way, they will actively choose to allocate their upstream bandwidth to the company, instead of to a competitor. Of course, this implies that the protocol is robust enough to withstand the fraud attempts that are obviously going to happen.
Such a system also has the benefit of solving the ISP / net neutrality threat. If such a system allows ISPs to set up proxies for profit, they'll make sure consumers' get maximal speeds, instead of killing the quality of service and turning the store's customers away.
(This would be option c) outlined above, except the ISP is doing it.)
Warning, shameless plug ahead:
Coincidentally, my brother and I have developed a BitTorrent extension that does just that. We originally intended to go live in a few days, but hell, here goes:
http://developer.snowballnetworks.com
Developers are welcome. And paid. Anonymous posting has been disabled, so drop us an email at developers TA snowballnetworks.com to get an account.
Statistics work as follow:
0. All peers must acquire credentials from the tracker T. Credentials are user-specific and single-use.
1. Downloader U testifies it has downloaded piece P of file F from uploader U, signs, and sends that to U;
2. U verifies the statement, signs it, and sends it to T;
3. T verifies the upload statistics that were provided by U, and credits U's account accordingly.
Statistics are signed both by the downloader and the uploader. This ensures non-repudiability of statistics. As a result, we can be absolutely 100% positive that any fraud will be caught by the tracker.
The best you could do with two corrupt clients is to claim to have downloaded a file or part of a file which you actually have not. But in order to do so, you need to purchase download rights in the first place. So yes, you can cheat, but why would you?
Interesting. My brother and I have been developing exactly what you're describing in our spare time. I believe no online distribution system can be successful if ISPs aren't aboard: if they don't get their cut, they'll just kill the quality of service.
/. in the subject) ;)
So we've written a BitTorrent extension that uses cryptographic signatures to provide infalsifiable upload statistics. Those upload statistics can then be used to reward uploaders. ISPs can set up the caching servers you're mentioning, and get paid just like any uploader.
(It is also possible to pay the writers of compatible clients as well, using the same statistics.)
The code is released under the LGPL. Drop me an email if you're interested! (hgs at killbill.org - please mention
The movie The Great Global Warming Swindle is a fraud. The filmmaker has been convicted in the past of "creative editing". And sure enough, Professor Carl Wunsch from MIT, who is shown in key moments of the movie, is crying foul.
Another funny fact: many of the "scientists" shown in the movie are introduced as members of renowned academic institutions... which they left long ago. In other words, the movie is misrepresenting lobbyists as scientists. That should speak volumes about the integrity of the filmmakers.
As for the science in the movie, I'll let Real Climate debunk it.
That's correct, but they aren't used as much as they could (should). They apparently aren't cost-effective enough to ISPs in their current form. To begin with, they are a legal risk, despite "common carrier" provisions - which is why most ISPs cap Bit Torrent use instead of caching the most popular files linked on the pirate bay.
It's pretty obvious the whole purpose of the article is to drum up support for ending the net neutrality rule.
From the article:
Backed by several consumer groups as well as large Internet enterprises such as Google, network neutrality legislation forbids phone companies from managing the network to favor one Internet user's content over another's.
Notice how the article ends on the tired "it'll be good to the consumer" strawman:
underinvestment by some operators may "drive quality traffic to quality networks."
Easy fix: systematic caching of bandwidth-intensive content at ISP level.
;)
Disclaimer: I'm currently working on such a project.
... is not to make the material support last forever, but to make as many copies as possible, and replace them often.
If the goal is to keep valuable information for future generations, a regularly upgraded, Internet-based distributed storage system would be a better bet.
I suspect they expected the PlayForSure side to prevail. PlayForSure meant an atomized online music market. It meant no single company dominated it. It meant labels still controlled access to the market.
But Apple prevailed. FairPlay prevents current iTMS customers from switching to another online music store. It ensures current iTMS customers remain future iTMS customers. FairPlay is the cornerstone of Apple's total domination on the (legal) online music market. It means Apple controls the access to the market, and no longer the music labels.
Every time a customer downloads a song that is infested with DRM at the request of the RIAA, record labels are putting an additional nail into their own coffin. If they want to break free from Apple's de facto monopoly, they have to drop the DRM requirement. Looks like they finally got it.
I disagree. I believe the only way to kill spam is to find something that pays more per hijacked computer than sending spam.
Moreover, spam is profitable because hijacked computers are cheap. If half of the zombies out there were used for another purpose, not only would this half not be sending spam, but they'd make the other half more expensive to hire (i.e. they'd reduce the ROI of spamming).
Good luck finding a broker willing to let you short pink sheets...
If you can't beat the game, change the rules of the game.
Nintendo was unwilling to follow Sony's and Microsoft's path where "innovation" just means "more raw power" - and higher costs. The decision to change the input method was a masterstroke.
Even though the Wii is the least powerful of this generation, its novel input method makes its more powerful rivals look obsolete, shortly after their launch. The PS3 or the 360 are merely the same old, now in HD. The Wii is truly next-generation.
We can't stop idiot customers from buying. We can't stop spammers from spamming. There is a massive demand, and there is an infinite supply.
The only working solution to spam is to give botnet operators a revenue stream that pays more per GB than what spammers can afford.
After reading your post, I've decided to buy Alcoa shares (AA). So should you. THIS IS GOING TO EXPLODE!
;p
</sarcasm>
I don't own an Ameritrade account, don't publish most of my addresses, and I'm still getting a barrage of penny stock spams. So, I don't believe the Ameritrade break-in is behind this.
However, I'm about to ask my lawyer if it's legal to short them.
Nonsense. The density argument is worthless. Yes, the average density is lower. But it's only because there's much more empty land between cities. Now, please explain why broadband sucks so much in NYC or Chicago, when I can get 24 Mb/s + TV + VOIP for 25 EUR a month in the boonies in France.
The truth is that there is no real competition in the US, whereas all it took in France was a very aggressive competitor that forced all the old national carriers to compete, or die. And before you ask, yes, it built its own network on its own dime.
Whenever I hear both Microsoft and Sony advising consumers to buy a Wii as a second console, I hardly see that as an endorsement. Instead, I can see fear in their eyes. Fear that consumers are going to buy a Wii first.
The huge splash Nintendo made at E3 has spin masters frantically running for cover. They're trying to downplay the Wii as good enough only as a secondary console. But even they feel the former Revolution is going to be a coup.
As for third-party developers, I'm planning to buy a Wii on launch day and at least 4 games (Metroid, Mario, Zelda and Red Steel, maybe Wii Sports). That's enough quality gaming right here to prevent me from actually seeing the light of day for the next few months, and I'm not even counting the countless classics on the Virtual Console.
The Wii is not suffering from a lack of titles. Actually, it already has too many strong launch titles to even let me try an unknown third-party game. Out of my 4/5 launch titles, only one is from a third party. The publishers that missed the boat have only themselves to blame.