In general, the population density is far too low in North America to make it financially feasible for ISPs to lay out improved infrastructure as they become available. In the US of A, the average population density is 31 per square km. In Canada, it's a paltry 3.2 per square km. South Korea, on the other hand, has a population density of 480!!! per square km. Over 15 times that of the U.S., and over 150 times that of Canada. This makes it a lot easier for ISPs to roll out improved infrastructure for the country.
It's not just average density, but also the skew. Those 31 per square km are fairly spread out. If all 300 million Americans lived in one state, the average density for the nation would be the same, but the skew would not and it would be much easier to deliver service.
You're a fucking shill. Now, I'm ordinarily a little more civil than that, but I think it's warranted here. Why would any ordinary person so consistently defend the huge corporate conglomerate and its anti-consumer practices? What does the ordinary user gain from what TW is doing?
The ordinary user sees an increase in interactivity and lower latency.
Time Warner has a legal, natural monopoly on internet access in many areas. In exchange for that privilege, it needs to serve the public interest.
I guess "the public interest" really just means your interest, right?
The 10% of the public that create P2P traffic, torrents, etc, crowd out all kinds of other traffic and ruin the online experience for the other 90% of the people that just want simple web browsing. Aren't they "the public", too?
In any case, Google should only be paying Google's ISP, and you should only be paying your ISP. AT&T shouldn't be collecting money from Google in exchange for giving its own customers reasonably quick access to Google. You say Google will complain to their ISP? What's Google's ISP going to do to AT&T? Cry and beg?
No. They'll just buy a local pipe directly from AT&T and make AT&T one of their providers.
The people that will cry and complain are Google's competitors that can't afford to have servers on every network. They'll be stuck having their traffic forced through overloaded peering points. And net neutrality law will make it illegal for them to use packet prioritization as an option.
The religions and philosophies they promote are merely justifications for it, pretenses that will be dropped the moment they threaten the continued accumulation of wealth. They'll sing the praises of the free market up until the point it tries to bite them, then they will club it to death with their diamond-tipped canes.
And what makes you think Net Neutrality won't be used as AT&T's club against the competition?
The only hope smaller carriers have in competing against AT&T is to use techniques like traffic prioritization. That's the only way to get their smaller networks to perform like the giant network AT&T is growing.
AT&T will make money with or without Net Neutrality. If NN comes, AT&T will simply let links with other providers become overloaded. That way they can sell big, fat, local pipes to content providers that want excellent performance and that can afford it. Google already buys big, local access from most big ISPs.
But what happens to smaller content providers? Will they be able to afford a fat pipe on every network? Nope. Now packet prioritization could make it possible to create low lantency fat virtual pipes. Smaller networks could sell eachother these pipes without having to duplicate AT&T's network. Google's competitors might even be able to have a servers on one network and still get good performance.
But you can bet NN law will be used to stop all that. We'll have peering points where performance is shit. And the only way to get good performance is to give money to AT&T for a big pipe.
You want access to public easements to run your fiber? You play by common carrier rules. The public owns that land and are granting you temporary, paid rights to use it and reserve the right to revoke it at any time, including seizing ownership of anything on that land. You lose temporary rights when you start serving yourself instead of serving the public.
It's more owned by the government than the public, though, right? I mean, if it were really publicly owned, then everyone would be able to used it and we wouldn't have local monopolies.
Instead, the government decides who can and who cannot use it. Control of use is the essence of ownership. If the government controls access, then the government owns it.
The same thing happens with use of the radio spectrum. Are they really public airwaves or do they belong to the political party in charge?
Hugo Chavez has made it obvious just who it is owns the airwaves in Venezuela.
I mean look at how well "deregulation" worked in the airline industry? More people can fly, flights are cheaper, to more destinations... crammed into tiny airplanes with more people... lousier food... more delays... bad customer service... bankruptcies... never mind.
What a bunch of crap.
Airline deregulation worked out very well. Flying today is available to millions more people because of deregulation.
If you want first class service, then you can pay for it. But don't use regulation to force everyone to pay for it, too. They can't.
That's what used to happen. Only those with a good income could afford to fly. Deregulation opened up flight to people that otherwise could never have afforded it.
What did it take to make them start producing "manufactured celebrities"? As far as I can tell, they were the norm before file sharing became widespread, so it must be something other than file sharing that induces this manufacturing.
In the past 40 years kids and the generally stupid have seen a big increase in disposable income (though maybe not total income).
The music industry are simply going after all that money.
Of your examples, 3 of the 4 would be LAUGHED AT if labeled as "broadband" in any other G8 country.
That's bullshit. You mean the people of Italy and Russia (two members of the G8) would really dismiss a 700kbps wireless connection or a 1.5Mbps DSL connection as too slow and therefor not broadband? I doubt it.
Ignoring any cash subsidies, how much do you think that it would have cost them if they had had to pay fair market price for all the easements that they use to run their wires rather than setting up privileged deals with local governments?
The DO PAY for many of those easements -- mostly to farmers and railroad companies!
A big portion of the internet's backbone is probably within 30 feet of railroad tracks.
Since the taxpayers of this country have been saddled with tens of millions (billions?) of subsidies to those who we have to go through for our net connection,
I've seen this claim before, but where is the proof? Can anyone actually quantify the amount of money and how big a percentage of the whole it represents?
Yeah, the market will indeed decide. I can only get one high-speed provider in my house, and I'm sure that provider will make excellent decisions on my behalf.
You can get just one high speed provider? I doubt it, unless you live in the middle of no-where. Most people have at least satellite broadband available to them.
Even in a small city like Tuscaloosa, Alabama (population about 80,000), you can get cable, DSL, satellite, and now wireless broadband from Verizon. That's four providers right there.
The usefulness of the internet goes down if you start doing packet prioritization. Who should decide what packets get the fast lane, while the others have to wait? The inevitable result is the largest companies will have the fastest packets and my ssh session, webpage, or online gaming will lag.
I think you're wrong. I think that the inevitable result is that you would buy a connection that gave low latency/low bandwidth connections and "big companies" would buy the cheapest, bulk, high latency services to save money.
What prioritization gives then, is more efficient use of a shared link because people pay only for the services they need, rather than forcing everyone to buy the same "best effort" service.
Consider an ssh session on a link shared with bulk downloads. How much bandwidth would you need to buy to guarantee a low lantency connection?
You can't answer that because bulk downloads have the potential to saturate most reasonably priced links. If your ssh packets are queued behind big chuncks of video and stuck in a router, tough luck.
However, if you could get a low latency, guaranteed link that with an average bandwidth of just 3KBps, ssh would be just fine. Many games would be the same way. I used to play netrek all the time. The bandwidth per client was about 1.5KBps. That's with 10 FPS and 16 players shooting torps at each other.
But without prioritization, busy links make things like netrek impossible to play -- even though they consume a relatively small amount of bandwidth.
It's pretty much a telephone system, except that it's computers calling other computers. Most people have a basic understanding of the workings -- if not the mechanics -- of a phone system.
It's not at all like the telephone system. The telephone system relies on the idea of circuits -- physical and virtual, while the internet relies on the idea of packets.
Stevens' metaphor is the one of the best ever used, especially in the context of quality of service. As soon as I heard him call the internet a series of tubes, I recalled the queues used to hold packets in nearly all routers.
A FIFO queue in a router works just like a tube. Packets go in one end, lined up behind other earlier arriving packets, and then are dequeued and sent to the next router. In many cases packets actually spend most of their time in these tubes rather than traveling down fiber or wire.
Now these tubes can be a problem for low latency traffic. For example a tiny voice packet might have to sit in this tube behind a number of large packets containing a gif of grandma's dog. Before the VoIP packet gets sent to the next link, the tube has to emit all that bulk data. The latency introduced in this waiting can ruin a VoIP call.
Now if we add QoS and packet prioritization, we can change the order of the data in the tube and now the VoIP call is possible AND grandma still gets to send her picture of fluffy. We could, for example, charge one person a rate for a low latency link used for VoIP, and give grandma a cheap, bulk data connection.
The great thing about packet prioritization in general is that the usefulness of the link goes up since both bulk traffic and low latency traffic can coexist.
This all connects back to the net neutrality debate, which was what Stevens was talking about in the first place.
Now most net neutrality legislation would end up preventing useful prioritization for the simple reason that users can tunnel their traffic through the most favored protocols. The only realistic way to handle prioritizatoin is by IP address -- and that's specifically outlawed by most NN proposals.
Internet is fair enough, differentiation of services will become the future social discrimination.
Yeah, one big, every connection is equal utopia, right?
And we should all eat at McDonalds and outlaw Outback Steakhouse since allowing some people to eat at better restaurants is social discrimination. And everyone should drive Yugos. And we all should have 90 MHz pentiums because it's just too unfair that other might be able to pay for better.
What a bunch of crap. Bland, gray, "let's all be equally miserable" societies suck.
Net neutrality doesn't prevent any ISP from prioritizing by packet type or port number; it only prevents shaping the bandwidth based on the destination or source of the packet. Any ISP can legally give gaming packets priority over HTTP traffic. I don't play games online, but I do know that while gaming packets aren't limited by bandwidth on a broadband connection, they are affected by lag.
The trouble is that everything winds up getting tunneled through the most QoS favored protocol. If VoIP suddenly get great QoS,for example, then every P2P filesharing network is going to add a feature make all traffic look like VoIP. Tunneling has been used to get around firewall port blocks for ages, and there's no doubt that it would be abused to get to get the best handling by a QoS aware router.
The only thing left is source/destination IP address. By using IP addresses, you can give grandma bulk, surplus bandwidth for cheap, while WoW players get higher QoS.
And what about admission control? How do you decide who gets a virtual circuit for their phone call, or live video feed, or WoW session? A link can only support a finite number of connections at a given QoS. How do you decide who gets what unless you use price? Admission control is prohibited by some net neutrality legislation.
Fact is people are willing to pay different prices for different levels of service -- just like they're willing to pay different prices for different grades of gas, or food, or seats at a concert. Why should the quality of an internet connection be any different?
QoS is ok, it's encouraged so long as every packet of the same type gets treated the same way. The problem comes when your VoIP packet gets preferential treatment over my VoIP packet.
But there are situations where such prioritization might be exactly what you want.
Maybe you WANT to buy cheap, surplus bandwidth for VoIP. Perhaps you have a teenager that's on the phone all day and are unwilling to pay for 27/7 guaranteed service. Instead you pay $5/month for surplus bandwidth for VoIP. What's wrong with that?
And what about avoiding congestive collapse? If bandwidth available will support only 100 VoIP calls then what do you do with the packets from the 101st call? Adding just 1 or 2 more calls can make the entire 100+ current calls unusable. Such a thing has already happened on the internet, except instead of VoIP connections, the problem was with TCP.
To avoid congetion collapse you may want to allow your connection to be (temporarily) refused now so that later when you try again, you will be able to get a usable connection when others' connections are refused.
Allowing some to connet while refusing others is called admission control and it's a technique that's been used for years to handle POTS calls. And it's necessary to make the system usable.
Some net neutrality legislation specifically outlaws admission control.
Only if their family & friends are wealthy, their banker is into lending money to small business startups (9 out of 10 fail, remember), or they are stupid enough to want to take a big chance on losing their house. MOST people don't have those advantages in a free market- most people barely make enough to live on in a free market.
The sucess of relatively poor immigrants is proof that you're wrong. The difference between them and those born in America is that many Americans are not willing to give up easy living now for easier living later. Many immigrants are.
"And your idea for a central AI is terrible. "
Tell it to Wal*Mart- who has effectively been using a central AI to make stocking decisions for it's stores for the past 5 years, based on a huge amount of sales data. It's possible, it's happening even in the "free market".
First, it isn't AI. Second, their system works because it responds to the market. You're idea is just the opposite. You want a system that will dictate how resources will be allocated. That's not the same thing at all.
And you completely ignore the role of prices in determining allocation. Prices don't disappear just because Walmart has an advanced system for stocking their stores. Prices ultimately control allocation from suppliers to consumers. Walmart is just the middleman. A very efficient middleman, but a middleman just the same.
Damn, this is the fscking 21st century! Anyone that is still a communist or economic central planner might as well be a creationist, global warming denier, or a believer that evil spirits cause disease, i.e. ignorant of the sciences.
In any case in my opinion nowadays the biggest issues that prevent innovation are Wall Street and Litigation:
Fuck Wall Street.
They WANT you to believe you need big finance to suceed. You don't.
We live in a (sort of) free market. There's no official state party representative or central allocating "AI" that you have to go through to get funding. There are plenty of people out there with money that will help you get started if you really have a good idea.
I don't consider their form of communism to be very different than a free market.
That's because you're a complete and utter moron.
In a free market, people don't have to go to some venture capitalist or some state party chairman. They are free to go to family, friends, a private bank, or take a mortgage out on their house for funding.
Under communism they have no option but to go through the state for funding. If the state says "no", then tough shit. Private enterprise is illegal.
And your idea for a central AI is terrible. There is no way a central anything can effectivly allocate resources since there is no way for it to measure the subject value judgements of a society's participants. It has no way to objectively compute the utility of any allocation decision.
I actually think it's one of the more inefficient consequences of a free market- where money and brains are very rarely matched together enough to bring products to market fast enough.
You've got to be kidding.
Here we have a story about a gifted scientist with a useful device languishing under an anti-free-market, totalitarian state and you turn it into some argument against the free-market.
Incredible.
The problem for the scientist is that he lived in planned economy. Whatever dreams he had for his device, they didn't match the state's plan and so he was legally prevented from really doing anything with his device.
Under a free market, if you really have some brilliant idea, there's plenty of money out there willing to help you get it to market.
Won't someone please think of the multinational corporations? The government should never place its own people's interests over those of foreign companies.
Yet somehow "its own people" think it's in their interest to purchase IPods.
I guess you're one of those people that thinks big brother knows best.
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It is important to realize that these rule changes aren't just for schools - they apply to every company in the U.S.
Yep. And you can include local municipalities, unions, consumer groups, the AARP etc. -- All are corporations.
It's not just average density, but also the skew. Those 31 per square km are fairly spread out. If all 300 million Americans lived in one state, the average density for the nation would be the same, but the skew would not and it would be much easier to deliver service.
Alternatively, the broadband provider could actually improve its infrastructure so it supports advertised speeds for all users.
No they couldn't. Not without charging customers much more.
A T1 with a guaranteed 1.5Mbps, for example, is about $300/month. You really think the public are going to pay that much?
You're a fucking shill. Now, I'm ordinarily a little more civil than that, but I think it's warranted here. Why would any ordinary person so consistently defend the huge corporate conglomerate and its anti-consumer practices? What does the ordinary user gain from what TW is doing?
The ordinary user sees an increase in interactivity and lower latency.
Time Warner has a legal, natural monopoly on internet access in many areas. In exchange for that privilege, it needs to serve the public interest.
I guess "the public interest" really just means your interest, right?
The 10% of the public that create P2P traffic, torrents, etc, crowd out all kinds of other traffic and ruin the online experience for the other 90% of the people that just want simple web browsing. Aren't they "the public", too?
In any case, Google should only be paying Google's ISP, and you should only be paying your ISP. AT&T shouldn't be collecting money from Google in exchange for giving its own customers reasonably quick access to Google. You say Google will complain to their ISP? What's Google's ISP going to do to AT&T? Cry and beg?
No. They'll just buy a local pipe directly from AT&T and make AT&T one of their providers.
The people that will cry and complain are Google's competitors that can't afford to have servers on every network. They'll be stuck having their traffic forced through overloaded peering points. And net neutrality law will make it illegal for them to use packet prioritization as an option.
The religions and philosophies they promote are merely justifications for it, pretenses that will be dropped the moment they threaten the continued accumulation of wealth. They'll sing the praises of the free market up until the point it tries to bite them, then they will club it to death with their diamond-tipped canes.
And what makes you think Net Neutrality won't be used as AT&T's club against the competition?
The only hope smaller carriers have in competing against AT&T is to use techniques like traffic prioritization. That's the only way to get their smaller networks to perform like the giant network AT&T is growing.
AT&T will make money with or without Net Neutrality. If NN comes, AT&T will simply let links with other providers become overloaded. That way they can sell big, fat, local pipes to content providers that want excellent performance and that can afford it. Google already buys big, local access from most big ISPs.
But what happens to smaller content providers? Will they be able to afford a fat pipe on every network? Nope. Now packet prioritization could make it possible to create low lantency fat virtual pipes. Smaller networks could sell eachother these pipes without having to duplicate AT&T's network. Google's competitors might even be able to have a servers on one network and still get good performance.
But you can bet NN law will be used to stop all that. We'll have peering points where performance is shit. And the only way to get good performance is to give money to AT&T for a big pipe.
You want access to public easements to run your fiber? You play by common carrier rules. The public owns that land and are granting you temporary, paid rights to use it and reserve the right to revoke it at any time, including seizing ownership of anything on that land. You lose temporary rights when you start serving yourself instead of serving the public.
It's more owned by the government than the public, though, right? I mean, if it were really publicly owned, then everyone would be able to used it and we wouldn't have local monopolies.
Instead, the government decides who can and who cannot use it. Control of use is the essence of ownership. If the government controls access, then the government owns it.
The same thing happens with use of the radio spectrum. Are they really public airwaves or do they belong to the political party in charge?
Hugo Chavez has made it obvious just who it is owns the airwaves in Venezuela.
I mean look at how well "deregulation" worked in the airline industry? More people can fly, flights are cheaper, to more destinations... crammed into tiny airplanes with more people... lousier food... more delays... bad customer service... bankruptcies... never mind.
What a bunch of crap.
Airline deregulation worked out very well. Flying today is available to millions more people because of deregulation.
If you want first class service, then you can pay for it. But don't use regulation to force everyone to pay for it, too. They can't.
That's what used to happen. Only those with a good income could afford to fly. Deregulation opened up flight to people that otherwise could never have afforded it.
What did it take to make them start producing "manufactured celebrities"? As far as I can tell, they were the norm before file sharing became widespread, so it must be something other than file sharing that induces this manufacturing.
In the past 40 years kids and the generally stupid have seen a big increase in disposable income (though maybe not total income).
The music industry are simply going after all that money.
Of your examples, 3 of the 4 would be LAUGHED AT if labeled as "broadband" in any other G8 country.
That's bullshit. You mean the people of Italy and Russia (two members of the G8) would really dismiss a 700kbps wireless connection or a 1.5Mbps DSL connection as too slow and therefor not broadband? I doubt it.
Ignoring any cash subsidies, how much do you think that it would have cost them if they had had to pay fair market price for all the easements that they use to run their wires rather than setting up privileged deals with local governments?
The DO PAY for many of those easements -- mostly to farmers and railroad companies!
A big portion of the internet's backbone is probably within 30 feet of railroad tracks.
You consider satellite to be high speed? I used satellite internet at a friend's house last weekend. It was slow and unreliable.
I use satellite all the time at my father-in-laws house. Never had a problem except during a thunderstorm. Even google maps worked great.
Still, I'm sure if your friend had problems all the time, he'd pick another provider, wouldn't he?
Since the taxpayers of this country have been saddled with tens of millions (billions?) of subsidies to those who we have to go through for our net connection,
I've seen this claim before, but where is the proof? Can anyone actually quantify the amount of money and how big a percentage of the whole it represents?
Yeah, the market will indeed decide. I can only get one high-speed provider in my house, and I'm sure that provider will make excellent decisions on my behalf.
You can get just one high speed provider? I doubt it, unless you live in the middle of no-where. Most people have at least satellite broadband available to them.
Even in a small city like Tuscaloosa, Alabama (population about 80,000), you can get cable, DSL, satellite, and now wireless broadband from Verizon. That's four providers right there.
The usefulness of the internet goes down if you start doing packet prioritization. Who should decide what packets get the fast lane, while the others have to wait? The inevitable result is the largest companies will have the fastest packets and my ssh session, webpage, or online gaming will lag.
I think you're wrong. I think that the inevitable result is that you would buy a connection that gave low latency/low bandwidth connections and "big companies" would buy the cheapest, bulk, high latency services to save money.
What prioritization gives then, is more efficient use of a shared link because people pay only for the services they need, rather than forcing everyone to buy the same "best effort" service.
Consider an ssh session on a link shared with bulk downloads. How much bandwidth would you need to buy to guarantee a low lantency connection?
You can't answer that because bulk downloads have the potential to saturate most reasonably priced links. If your ssh packets are queued behind big chuncks of video and stuck in a router, tough luck.
However, if you could get a low latency, guaranteed link that with an average bandwidth of just 3KBps, ssh would be just fine. Many games would be the same way. I used to play netrek all the time. The bandwidth per client was about 1.5KBps. That's with 10 FPS and 16 players shooting torps at each other.
But without prioritization, busy links make things like netrek impossible to play -- even though they consume a relatively small amount of bandwidth.
That makes the internet less useful.
It's not at all like the telephone system. The telephone system relies on the idea of circuits -- physical and virtual, while the internet relies on the idea of packets.
Stevens' metaphor is the one of the best ever used, especially in the context of quality of service. As soon as I heard him call the internet a series of tubes, I recalled the queues used to hold packets in nearly all routers.
A FIFO queue in a router works just like a tube. Packets go in one end, lined up behind other earlier arriving packets, and then are dequeued and sent to the next router. In many cases packets actually spend most of their time in these tubes rather than traveling down fiber or wire.
Now these tubes can be a problem for low latency traffic. For example a tiny voice packet might have to sit in this tube behind a number of large packets containing a gif of grandma's dog. Before the VoIP packet gets sent to the next link, the tube has to emit all that bulk data. The latency introduced in this waiting can ruin a VoIP call.
Now if we add QoS and packet prioritization, we can change the order of the data in the tube and now the VoIP call is possible AND grandma still gets to send her picture of fluffy. We could, for example, charge one person a rate for a low latency link used for VoIP, and give grandma a cheap, bulk data connection.
The great thing about packet prioritization in general is that the usefulness of the link goes up since both bulk traffic and low latency traffic can coexist.
This all connects back to the net neutrality debate, which was what Stevens was talking about in the first place.
Now most net neutrality legislation would end up preventing useful prioritization for the simple reason that users can tunnel their traffic through the most favored protocols. The only realistic way to handle prioritizatoin is by IP address -- and that's specifically outlawed by most NN proposals.
Internet is fair enough, differentiation of services will become the future social discrimination.
Yeah, one big, every connection is equal utopia, right?
And we should all eat at McDonalds and outlaw Outback Steakhouse since allowing some people to eat at better restaurants is social discrimination. And everyone should drive Yugos. And we all should have 90 MHz pentiums because it's just too unfair that other might be able to pay for better.
What a bunch of crap. Bland, gray, "let's all be equally miserable" societies suck.
Net neutrality doesn't prevent any ISP from prioritizing by packet type or port number; it only prevents shaping the bandwidth based on the destination or source of the packet. Any ISP can legally give gaming packets priority over HTTP traffic. I don't play games online, but I do know that while gaming packets aren't limited by bandwidth on a broadband connection, they are affected by lag.
The trouble is that everything winds up getting tunneled through the most QoS favored protocol. If VoIP suddenly get great QoS,for example, then every P2P filesharing network is going to add a feature make all traffic look like VoIP. Tunneling has been used to get around firewall port blocks for ages, and there's no doubt that it would be abused to get to get the best handling by a QoS aware router.
The only thing left is source/destination IP address. By using IP addresses, you can give grandma bulk, surplus bandwidth for cheap, while WoW players get higher QoS.
And what about admission control? How do you decide who gets a virtual circuit for their phone call, or live video feed, or WoW session? A link can only support a finite number of connections at a given QoS. How do you decide who gets what unless you use price? Admission control is prohibited by some net neutrality legislation.
Fact is people are willing to pay different prices for different levels of service -- just like they're willing to pay different prices for different grades of gas, or food, or seats at a concert. Why should the quality of an internet connection be any different?
I, for one, would be extremely pissed off if my WoW packets suddenly started taking a back seat to Grandma's dancing Jesus GIF
They already do. You just don't notice because because there's plenty of bandwidth available.
But if grandma starts sending 300 dpi 8.5"x11" scans of her dog you probably will notice.
And with network neutrality laws in place, there's nothing you or your ISP can do about it.
QoS is ok, it's encouraged so long as every packet of the same type gets treated the same way. The problem comes when your VoIP packet gets preferential treatment over my VoIP packet.
But there are situations where such prioritization might be exactly what you want.
Maybe you WANT to buy cheap, surplus bandwidth for VoIP. Perhaps you have a teenager that's on the phone all day and are unwilling to pay for 27/7 guaranteed service. Instead you pay $5/month for surplus bandwidth for VoIP. What's wrong with that?
And what about avoiding congestive collapse? If bandwidth available will support only 100 VoIP calls then what do you do with the packets from the 101st call? Adding just 1 or 2 more calls can make the entire 100+ current calls unusable. Such a thing has already happened on the internet, except instead of VoIP connections, the problem was with TCP.
To avoid congetion collapse you may want to allow your connection to be (temporarily) refused now so that later when you try again, you will be able to get a usable connection when others' connections are refused.
Allowing some to connet while refusing others is called admission control and it's a technique that's been used for years to handle POTS calls. And it's necessary to make the system usable.
Some net neutrality legislation specifically outlaws admission control.
Only if their family & friends are wealthy, their banker is into lending money to small business startups (9 out of 10 fail, remember), or they are stupid enough to want to take a big chance on losing their house. MOST people don't have those advantages in a free market- most people barely make enough to live on in a free market.
The sucess of relatively poor immigrants is proof that you're wrong. The difference between them and those born in America is that many Americans are not willing to give up easy living now for easier living later. Many immigrants are.
"And your idea for a central AI is terrible. "
Tell it to Wal*Mart- who has effectively been using a central AI to make stocking decisions for it's stores for the past 5 years, based on a huge amount of sales data. It's possible, it's happening even in the "free market".
First, it isn't AI. Second, their system works because it responds to the market. You're idea is just the opposite. You want a system that will dictate how resources will be allocated. That's not the same thing at all.
And you completely ignore the role of prices in determining allocation. Prices don't disappear just because Walmart has an advanced system for stocking their stores. Prices ultimately control allocation from suppliers to consumers. Walmart is just the middleman. A very efficient middleman, but a middleman just the same.
Damn, this is the fscking 21st century! Anyone that is still a communist or economic central planner might as well be a creationist, global warming denier, or a believer that evil spirits cause disease, i.e. ignorant of the sciences.
In any case in my opinion nowadays the biggest issues that prevent innovation are Wall Street and Litigation:
Fuck Wall Street.
They WANT you to believe you need big finance to suceed. You don't.
We live in a (sort of) free market. There's no official state party representative or central allocating "AI" that you have to go through to get funding. There are plenty of people out there with money that will help you get started if you really have a good idea.
I don't consider their form of communism to be very different than a free market.
That's because you're a complete and utter moron.
In a free market, people don't have to go to some venture capitalist or some state party chairman. They are free to go to family, friends, a private bank, or take a mortgage out on their house for funding.
Under communism they have no option but to go through the state for funding. If the state says "no", then tough shit. Private enterprise is illegal.
And your idea for a central AI is terrible. There is no way a central anything can effectivly allocate resources since there is no way for it to measure the subject value judgements of a society's participants. It has no way to objectively compute the utility of any allocation decision.
You've got to be kidding.
Here we have a story about a gifted scientist with a useful device languishing under an anti-free-market, totalitarian state and you turn it into some argument against the free-market.
Incredible.
The problem for the scientist is that he lived in planned economy. Whatever dreams he had for his device, they didn't match the state's plan and so he was legally prevented from really doing anything with his device.
Under a free market, if you really have some brilliant idea, there's plenty of money out there willing to help you get it to market.
Yet somehow "its own people" think it's in their interest to purchase IPods.
I guess you're one of those people that thinks big brother knows best.