There should absolutely be no congestion of traffic at peak usage times. If there is you either designed a shit network or you way over sold your bandwidth. I ran an ISP and I never ever had that problem and I was able to easily turn a profit. It is something the telcos and cable companies try to get people to believe so they can move to tiered services and payment by the gig or whatever. They want to squeeze as much as possible out of the consumer and don't give a damn if it good for the consumer or not. Their only interest is how much can I squeeze out of the public before they scream for the government to do something or before they just stop buying.
You can thank your local cities for not properly opening up the last mile. You can thank the government for playing games with the unlicensed spectrum. You can also thank the government and states for not reigning in these historic monopolies to keep them from trouncing all over anyone who tried to compete with them, by using their historic monopoly status to give their Internet side an unfair advantage. Just look at how many ISPs there are these days and how many independent ISPs have been driven out of business, and it wasn't because of poor management. It's because of how they got treated in the market place by the monopolies.
There are lots of providers who don't clearly disclose this. I have talked with many different sales people for ISPs. They tell me it is unlimited I can use as much as I want. Then I ask them why the fine print says limit 50gig a month or whatever. They always go "ummm.....oh I didn't know that." There are a lot of companies that don't say unlimited in their ads they just make claims that you assume means unlimited until you look at the fine print and see serious limits for some of them.
Do you? Do you have any idea how much dark fiber is still out there? Do you realize how cheap fiber is these days? The biggest cost isn't the fiber its the right of ways. The problem isn't the Internet at large, the problem is the lack of competition at the last mile.
There is very little problem with the Internet. This is a solution looking for a problem. All this is going to do is legalize companies discriminating against other sites online. They are going to say it is legal for me to make sure my network runs well, since I can't control the big bad Internet out there. So they will QoS the local traffic to give everything local better traffic rates. Then they will basically lackmail companies like Yahoo, Netflix, and other CDNs (Content Distribution Networks) like Akamai, one of the first. You want great web performance to your web site you should put your content servers in our network for huge monthly fee. Thus those sites will work great because they are part of the local network. Backbone providers will do the same thing by offering large websites direct connections, now they are part of the network, so they can QoS that traffic. The entire time every company will be saying, Hey you said we could manage traffic to make our networks run the best possible, it's not my fault that I don't/can't control traffic out there on the big bad Internet. This is how these companies will grab as much money off the table as they possibly can. Then they will say heavy bandwidth users are a problem for making our network run like crap. So we are going to go to a measured service since we can manage traffic to make sure our network runs fine. Then consumers will still pay $40-$60 a month for Internet but have limits like 30gig and each extra gig is $5. All this does is legalize what they have wanted to do for years, but haven't because they were afraid of market forces in response to this type of plan.
All this has done is screw the consumer, and screw innovation.
You want real Internet competition. Stop letting the telcos and the cable companies have monopolies on the last mile. Stop letting them use their historic monopoly status to trample and destroy anyone who tries to compete at the local last mile level. Telcos and cable companies have had monopolies on the last mile for 40-100 years. The cities and the states are then bought off by these companies to make it impossible to even run your own lines to compete against them. These companies have used their monopoly status to run all the other ISPs out of business. They have propped up the Internet side using the other side of the house (phone & TV) to drop prices so low that others can't compete, and attacked other ISPs by lying about them, then once they are gone they start jacking up prices. All you have to do is look at how many independent ISPs there were 15 years versus now. Now about 90% of the US uses one of 10 ISPs. That isn't free market competition, that is monopoly leveraging and market collusion. I have seen telcos and cable companies tell the state and cities that independent ISPs have no business trying to compete with them for the Internet. That it is their domain, they know best and if you don't want huge problems you shouldn't allow these guys to exist. The telcos and cable companies were very pissed that the independent ISPs existed years ago. They saw them as taking food out of their mouths, they were an affront, and should not be allowed to exist. They waged a campaign against independent ISPs and were very successful, using lobbying and fake grassroots groups.
All of this just allowed the consumer to get screwed again. Only the state forcing cities to open up is going to help. I doubt the feds have the authority to do anything about the local level.
Profit will only keep market forces in check if there is actually a free market with all risks associated with a product are disclosed by the company. The and only then can consumers decide how much risk they are willing to take and the price at which they are willing to purchase that product with known risks. You also need to make sure that monopolies aren't leveraging their monopoly in one market to monopolize new markets. This is exactly what has happened with telcos and cable companies who got in to the Internet business.
The problem isn't to regulate ISPs to make more ISPs. The main problem is the last mile. They have basically allowed a monopoly at the last mile and then didn't force either the telcos or cable companies to share the last mile that they have had as a monopoly for the last 40-100 years. If you won't open up the last mile to competition, and you won't make them share, then you aren't going to ever have real competition. To see this all you have to do is look at how many locally owned ISPs there were 15 years and look at how many there are now. If you setup a form to ask users which ISP they use, you could list 10 of them and you would get 90-95% of the population with those 10. That is because of the last mile and the way the telcos and cable companies have been able to illegally leverage their monopolies to keep competition out of the marketplace.
The cable monopolies are because cable companies back in the 1960's and 1970's told cities look if you want cable TV then you can only let my company come in and service the city otherwise forget it, it's too expensive. Cities have continued to renew those contracts for years even up until today. The cities could allow more competition at the last mile but choose not to.
The simplest thing would be to build out their own network and sell connectivity on it to everyone, internet, phone, cable all of them. Then you would have a whole lot more last mile competition and running fiber for a city these day isn't nearly as expensive as it once was. The laying of fiber isn't the cost issue, the right of way costs are the biggest issues. Cities already have right of ways, so adding fiber to those areas wouldn't be a major deal. They would just want to bury it rather than hang it on poles, since it would be safer, and less susceptible to weather issues. Hell you could put a 25-50 fiber cable everywhere and still have plenty of fiber to give any company their own fiber, let alone if they shared. It would create the dream that people have talked about of fiber to the home. This could then become another revenue generator for the cities as well. It would also be a good selling point for businesses that they can easily network their offices to each other. The local government could be totally interconnected as well to each other, which might introduce additional cost savings for them.
"Our current phone system is an antiquated relic " That is simply not the case. They have upgraded many of their switches and most everything but the last mile is now fiber. The networks of the telcos is pretty much state of the art. The converting to TCP/IP has helped them reduce a lot of costs and improve their networks. Is that a bit more specific for you. The only thing that might be considered antiquated is the last mile. That is the most expensive part and will always lag behind the rest of the network. Even the term last mile is a bit misleading since most telco switches are less than a mile from most homes in the US and they run fiber between switch offices.
If you want an idea of how little R&D spending is, you only need to look at medicine where you would think that R&D costs would be huge and they would want to protect their work fearsly. You might be surprised to know that R&D is about 10% of the amount made on the sale of drugs. The marketing of drugs can be upwards of 50% sometimes more of the sales of drugs. It is urban legend that medicine companies spend huge portions of their budgets on R&D, they simply don't. You should also realize that the government gives out a lot of grants to these companies for medicine research as well, and they get to keep anything they can patent and they get to sell the end results. Then to really piss you off, all that R&D is 100% tax deductible. So the public is double paying the drug companies to develop medicine.
Now I seriously doubt that the technology industry is any different. I would bet that R&D is a very very small percentage of the total budget of most tech companies. Very few companies due pure research rather than developing something to fix the problem at hand. When you are only fixing the problem at hand, there is no way you will come up with something so unique that no one else will think of it. Sorry, but if your trying to solve a problem I can guarantee you someone else out there is trying to solve the same problem and is going to come up with basically the same thing as you do. Software patents are a terrible idea as anything you can think of to do in software someone else will think of doing the same exact thing. You see it over and over again people coming up with the exact same solutions to programming problems. Software patents don't advance the level of computer science, they hinder the advancement of computer science.
Currently in the tech industry, the bio industry and the medical industry if patents were totally abolished not one thing would change in the market place. Companies would still figure out new products to sell to consumers, and companies would continue to do their minimal levels of R&D to develop new products.
All R&D is tax deductible in every field, so the public is very much paying for all these patents twice. Once in taxes and supposedly again in the price of the product. I personally think if you take government money in the form of grants or loans, and/or you take a tax write off of your R&D that you should not be able to apply for patents on those items. The public paid for it so the public should have free access to them. All of this is just another form of corporate welfare and I seriously doubt it will ever change in the near future.
Oh you haven't seen anything yet. Wait until they start to blackmail the big websites in coughing up money to get "good service" from the ISP/Backbone providers network. "You know your website would be so much better if you just put a few servers here and paid us a huge monthly fee for that." Just look at what Comcast did to Level3/Netflix. Expect to see a lot more of that.
Yes then add in that more and more ISPs are dropping their bandwidth caps lower and lower secretly. If you read the fine print you see it, but they advertise it as a 8Meg connection, but you can only use like 50gigs of traffic or whatever per month. They make it sound like unlimited and even some sales people will tell you it is, until you ask about the fine print..."oh I didn't know that." Some of them are just you hit your limit that's it, no more until next month other than maybe getting your email.
I don't care what anyone says if you read the thing carefully I see huge gaping holes that they will use to create tiered service levels. You are right they have been wanted to go to metered Internet levels for a long time. They complain a few people use more bandwidth than others and that causes problems for everyone else. Nope that's a lie. They just want to squeeze out as much money from customers as they can. I used to run an ISP. Yes there are high users out there, but they don't drag the whole network down, if they do you either have a crap network, are big time overselling your bandwidth or you are doing something seriously wrong.
All this is going to do is cost the American public a whole lot more for Internet access and won't do one bit to stimulate competition. It won't cause anyone to spend more on the infrastructure to make the last mile, and/or the Internet in general better. It probably will even consolidate the ISPs even more, which means more lost jobs.
If you look at the infrastructure of the Internet is really hasn't gotten any better or really changed much in the last 5-10 years. Things are pretty much the same. The reason is the big guys drove the locally owned ISPs out of business and seriously hard core reduced the amount of competition they have. The fact that you can make a form to ask people what ISP they use and put in 10 default answers and 1 other, and cover 90%-95% of the population is a clue that something is seriously wrong compared to 15 years ago.
Telephone service for the telcos isn't unprofitable. I don't know where you heard that but you need to look at their annual reports. They are ranking in profits hand over fist and it isn't coming from their Internet side. Now you will hear those companies whine about phone service, but that is because they aren't able to rape the public anymore they have to compete a bit with VOIP, cell phones and other things. Most telcos have already switched or are switching to TCP/IP based networks. There is no chance in hell any of the established companies are going to switch to SIP and will fight like hell against it. They make huge profits off phone lines and their network, no way they are upsetting that apple cart. The telcos and cable companies already went round and round over the Internet VOIP companies and tried to get regulations and models of doing business passed that would have put the VOIP companies out of business and/or paid huge sums of money to the last mile guys. No the telcos are not hurting at all, and the definitely aren't your friend.
Sounds like a great plan. I have said for years the last mile needs to be owned by the city allowing anyone and everyone to use it to reach that last mile that companies protect like a dog with a bone. It would make revenue for the cities and provide tons of competition since anyone could play.
You can thank you city and state governments...and oh heck throw in the national government, for setting up monopolies for the last 40-100 years, both telcos and cable companies. Then using regulations to restrict competition at the last mile. Good job government you have effectively killed or allow to be killed Internet competition.
Because we don't have true free markets when it comes to last mile. Instead we have companies (telcos & cablecoms) who have been given monopolies for 40-100 years and aren't about to give those up easily. The very serious very real problem is a lack of competition and a lack of ability to compete at the last mile due to city and state government regulations.
The problem in this whole mess for competition is that the cable companies and telcos (who were just divided up AT&T and the remerged over time) have had an unfair advantage against every other company that tries to compete with them. They have had government and city approved monopolies for 40-100 years. When they are that entrenched and existed that long with no competition, they clearly have an unfair advantage to anyone competing with them. Also using their monopoly advantage to drive everyone else out of the Internet market because they can use their monopoly position on the last mile and the other side of the house (phone, TV) to prop up the Internet side while they drop prices and give unfair advantages.
At this point you can't just turn them loose in an open market. They will cream everyone else as they clearly have done. How many locally owned ISPs exist anymore? It isn't because of mismanagement either. You have to regulate these historically long monopolies different from everyone else in the market to even hope to have a level playing field for everyone. That didn't happen and the public is paying the price.
Wow I can tell you have never had to compete directly against the telcos or cable companies. I can tell you have never gone to your state capital to get the telcos and cable companies to play fair and stop lying to your customers. Only to be told that the telcos and cable companies are big contributors and that State congressmen were told that isn't how it would work or what happened, so little guy get out. I can tell you have never had to fight local city hall and the state over the right to lay your own cables. Big corporations would never do anything to strangle competition or give themselves an unfair advantage or lie to your state congressmen. They would never use their profits from one side of the house to prop up their Internet side so they could lower prices to drive everyone else out of business. Big corporations would never give special deals to their Internet side that no one else can get even though they were court ordered to keep the Internet side at arms length.
Nope Corporations would never do those things, they always play nice with others, and never abuse their monopoly positions.
If you believe any of that, which I have seen first hand is false, then I have a bridge to sell you.
The ISP doesn't have to know what the payload is of the TCP/IP traffic of Skype. There is plenty of other information that is generated that they can use to traffic shape, reroute do what ever they want to do with that TCP/IP packet including dropping it on the floor if they wanted. How do you think school block BitTorrent? They break open the TCP/IP packets and look to see what is in there and what application created the packet then apply their rules to that packet. This isn't rocket science for ISPs and they have been doing it for years.
Absolutely. There are dozens of products already on the market that do this exact thing. They crack open every connection, look to see where it is going, who it is from, what application created the packet, and what kind of content it is then route & traffic shape on it based on the ISPs rules. How do you think ISPs have throttled BitTorrent and schools who have been doing the same thing for years? It is very easy and very simple and very cheap for ISPs to set up the servers/appliances to do this, and I would be very surprised if there is an ISP left in America that isn't already doing this. Oh you think there is too much traffic to look at/crack open every packet? Wrong, just load balance the traffic across multiple servers/appliances and you won't have a problem at all. If you can think of a rule it can be done.
You can route based on if it is an image in the web request and transparently redirect it to a different server. You can redirect based on geographic location aka global load balancing. You can redirect if it is an web input response to the web database servers. You can dig deep into the packet payload and do all kinds of things based on what you find there including session redirections. For example you are streaming a video, the streaming server you are on fails. No problem transparently redirect the user to another server, set up the session, and the user is none the wiser. You can even do all kind of sneaky things if you wanted. The ISP could if they wanted transparently cache every streaming audio and video coming in to their network then insert their own commercials into the stream every 5 minutes,. ISPs used to do this exact thing with web pages. They would throw up ads while you surfed that didn't come from the website you are on. They have even used this to make network announcements, and could in theory use this idea for weather alerts, national emergency announcements, and amber alerts. Corporations have blocked java scripts on web pages, and all kinds of other things. If you can think of a way to alter or mess with TCP/IP traffic it can be done and probably already has been done.
They may not be able to shake down websites but they can for sure do what they are already doing and now sweeten it up with making the local traffic preferred. They can sell local rack space to CDN (content distribution networks) so the traffic is local and give it priority since they just want to make their own network run well, and they can't control what happens out on the big bad Internet. Yahoo, Netflix, and many many other 3rd party CDNs who sell service to CNN, ABC, etc are already doing this. Akamai was one of the early companies who did this. They paid to put their servers in ISPs to make their clients traffic come up faster for the public. Now how do you address this issue?
You forgetting that most of the time these are bot nets that are doing the DoS. So if hundreds to thousands of machines all hit 1 IP address or network at the same time it can and does flood out connections so that nothing else gets in or out. At that point the ISP can do nothing since his incoming pipe is completely slammed and no amount of blocking or traffic shaping will do any good since the pipe coming in before it gets to his first router is completely saturated. That is when you have to go to upstream providers and providers closer to the attackers and get them to shut things down.
Who defines reasonable and what are the technical specs for reasonable network management. If an ISP wants all their local traffic to run perfectly then isn't it reasonable for them to have a higher QoS for their traffic than others? Netflix, Yahoo, and other CDNs pay to put servers in the ISPs racks and suddenly those are local services that get priority routing as well. They are only making the local network run better for their customers. They will tell you "How in the world is it bad that I make my own network run well? I can't control the Internet at large but at least I can make my own network run really well." Add in to the mix private connections sold to large web sites by backbone providers, and suddenly those lines are part of the network and they get priority routing as well.
That is exactly how ISPs and backbone providers are going to use this to make all the money that they can grab off the table. This whole thing is worse than if the FCC had done nothing.
What exactly does the ability to shape traffic on their networks to improve network performance mean to you? It means to me that they can favor any traffic they want without actually blocking traffic. If I traffic shape you down to 2k/sec, hey I didn't block you and I made my network better. Oh your stuff is unusable now? Too bad, deal with it. Every ISP and backbone provider will start doing this. You want your traffic to be preferred above all others? Well that is going to cost you, how much do you have? No I can't tell you a price, until you tell me how much you have. That is exactly what is going to happen. The software and the hardware to do this exact thing is already out there and is very cheap to buy and easy to setup and very powerful at controlling traffic.
Or he can write Executive Orders and by pass Congress for most things. Executive Orders have become a serious problem in that they get around the whole checks and balances system originally setup.
If you think you can get around your ISP actively controlling all your traffic you don't understand how the Internet or ISPs works. ISPs already do have machines that look inside every TCP/IP packet and figure out what kind of traffic they are and then route or bandwidth shape based on their rules. You think BitTorrent, SIP, Skype, etc. couldn't be shut down in a heartbeat by an ISP, think again. If you know about an application the ISPs know about the same applications. They just install load balancers, spread the load across multiple servers/appliances and then crack open every packet to see what is going on and where it is going and what exactly it is. This is child's play now. I can name at least 5 different products off the top of my head that do this already and I am sure there are loads more out there. An ISP can block or traffic shape anything they want these days without any problems at all. People need to give up this idea that what they do online is a secret or private. Wrong! Any ISP along the way to the destination site can see everything you are doing anytime they want to. It isn't a question of if they can see, it's a question of if they want to bother to do it. SSL and other encryptions don't hide who you are communicating to and what application your using, it just hides the specifics of what you are doing in the application. So even encrypted traffic can by blocked or shaped.
What the FCC has done is just make all of this more legal, rather than issue of just contracts with the customer.
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There should absolutely be no congestion of traffic at peak usage times. If there is you either designed a shit network or you way over sold your bandwidth. I ran an ISP and I never ever had that problem and I was able to easily turn a profit. It is something the telcos and cable companies try to get people to believe so they can move to tiered services and payment by the gig or whatever. They want to squeeze as much as possible out of the consumer and don't give a damn if it good for the consumer or not. Their only interest is how much can I squeeze out of the public before they scream for the government to do something or before they just stop buying.
You can thank your local cities for not properly opening up the last mile. You can thank the government for playing games with the unlicensed spectrum. You can also thank the government and states for not reigning in these historic monopolies to keep them from trouncing all over anyone who tried to compete with them, by using their historic monopoly status to give their Internet side an unfair advantage. Just look at how many ISPs there are these days and how many independent ISPs have been driven out of business, and it wasn't because of poor management. It's because of how they got treated in the market place by the monopolies.
There are lots of providers who don't clearly disclose this. I have talked with many different sales people for ISPs. They tell me it is unlimited I can use as much as I want. Then I ask them why the fine print says limit 50gig a month or whatever. They always go "ummm.....oh I didn't know that." There are a lot of companies that don't say unlimited in their ads they just make claims that you assume means unlimited until you look at the fine print and see serious limits for some of them.
Do you? Do you have any idea how much dark fiber is still out there? Do you realize how cheap fiber is these days? The biggest cost isn't the fiber its the right of ways. The problem isn't the Internet at large, the problem is the lack of competition at the last mile.
There is very little problem with the Internet. This is a solution looking for a problem. All this is going to do is legalize companies discriminating against other sites online. They are going to say it is legal for me to make sure my network runs well, since I can't control the big bad Internet out there. So they will QoS the local traffic to give everything local better traffic rates. Then they will basically lackmail companies like Yahoo, Netflix, and other CDNs (Content Distribution Networks) like Akamai, one of the first. You want great web performance to your web site you should put your content servers in our network for huge monthly fee. Thus those sites will work great because they are part of the local network. Backbone providers will do the same thing by offering large websites direct connections, now they are part of the network, so they can QoS that traffic. The entire time every company will be saying, Hey you said we could manage traffic to make our networks run the best possible, it's not my fault that I don't/can't control traffic out there on the big bad Internet. This is how these companies will grab as much money off the table as they possibly can. Then they will say heavy bandwidth users are a problem for making our network run like crap. So we are going to go to a measured service since we can manage traffic to make sure our network runs fine. Then consumers will still pay $40-$60 a month for Internet but have limits like 30gig and each extra gig is $5. All this does is legalize what they have wanted to do for years, but haven't because they were afraid of market forces in response to this type of plan.
All this has done is screw the consumer, and screw innovation.
You want real Internet competition. Stop letting the telcos and the cable companies have monopolies on the last mile. Stop letting them use their historic monopoly status to trample and destroy anyone who tries to compete at the local last mile level. Telcos and cable companies have had monopolies on the last mile for 40-100 years. The cities and the states are then bought off by these companies to make it impossible to even run your own lines to compete against them. These companies have used their monopoly status to run all the other ISPs out of business. They have propped up the Internet side using the other side of the house (phone & TV) to drop prices so low that others can't compete, and attacked other ISPs by lying about them, then once they are gone they start jacking up prices. All you have to do is look at how many independent ISPs there were 15 years versus now. Now about 90% of the US uses one of 10 ISPs. That isn't free market competition, that is monopoly leveraging and market collusion. I have seen telcos and cable companies tell the state and cities that independent ISPs have no business trying to compete with them for the Internet. That it is their domain, they know best and if you don't want huge problems you shouldn't allow these guys to exist. The telcos and cable companies were very pissed that the independent ISPs existed years ago. They saw them as taking food out of their mouths, they were an affront, and should not be allowed to exist. They waged a campaign against independent ISPs and were very successful, using lobbying and fake grassroots groups.
All of this just allowed the consumer to get screwed again. Only the state forcing cities to open up is going to help. I doubt the feds have the authority to do anything about the local level.
Profit will only keep market forces in check if there is actually a free market with all risks associated with a product are disclosed by the company. The and only then can consumers decide how much risk they are willing to take and the price at which they are willing to purchase that product with known risks. You also need to make sure that monopolies aren't leveraging their monopoly in one market to monopolize new markets. This is exactly what has happened with telcos and cable companies who got in to the Internet business.
The problem isn't to regulate ISPs to make more ISPs. The main problem is the last mile. They have basically allowed a monopoly at the last mile and then didn't force either the telcos or cable companies to share the last mile that they have had as a monopoly for the last 40-100 years. If you won't open up the last mile to competition, and you won't make them share, then you aren't going to ever have real competition. To see this all you have to do is look at how many locally owned ISPs there were 15 years and look at how many there are now. If you setup a form to ask users which ISP they use, you could list 10 of them and you would get 90-95% of the population with those 10. That is because of the last mile and the way the telcos and cable companies have been able to illegally leverage their monopolies to keep competition out of the marketplace.
The cable monopolies are because cable companies back in the 1960's and 1970's told cities look if you want cable TV then you can only let my company come in and service the city otherwise forget it, it's too expensive. Cities have continued to renew those contracts for years even up until today. The cities could allow more competition at the last mile but choose not to.
The simplest thing would be to build out their own network and sell connectivity on it to everyone, internet, phone, cable all of them. Then you would have a whole lot more last mile competition and running fiber for a city these day isn't nearly as expensive as it once was. The laying of fiber isn't the cost issue, the right of way costs are the biggest issues. Cities already have right of ways, so adding fiber to those areas wouldn't be a major deal. They would just want to bury it rather than hang it on poles, since it would be safer, and less susceptible to weather issues. Hell you could put a 25-50 fiber cable everywhere and still have plenty of fiber to give any company their own fiber, let alone if they shared. It would create the dream that people have talked about of fiber to the home. This could then become another revenue generator for the cities as well. It would also be a good selling point for businesses that they can easily network their offices to each other. The local government could be totally interconnected as well to each other, which might introduce additional cost savings for them.
"Our current phone system is an antiquated relic " That is simply not the case. They have upgraded many of their switches and most everything but the last mile is now fiber. The networks of the telcos is pretty much state of the art. The converting to TCP/IP has helped them reduce a lot of costs and improve their networks. Is that a bit more specific for you. The only thing that might be considered antiquated is the last mile. That is the most expensive part and will always lag behind the rest of the network. Even the term last mile is a bit misleading since most telco switches are less than a mile from most homes in the US and they run fiber between switch offices.
If you want an idea of how little R&D spending is, you only need to look at medicine where you would think that R&D costs would be huge and they would want to protect their work fearsly. You might be surprised to know that R&D is about 10% of the amount made on the sale of drugs. The marketing of drugs can be upwards of 50% sometimes more of the sales of drugs. It is urban legend that medicine companies spend huge portions of their budgets on R&D, they simply don't. You should also realize that the government gives out a lot of grants to these companies for medicine research as well, and they get to keep anything they can patent and they get to sell the end results. Then to really piss you off, all that R&D is 100% tax deductible. So the public is double paying the drug companies to develop medicine.
Now I seriously doubt that the technology industry is any different. I would bet that R&D is a very very small percentage of the total budget of most tech companies. Very few companies due pure research rather than developing something to fix the problem at hand. When you are only fixing the problem at hand, there is no way you will come up with something so unique that no one else will think of it. Sorry, but if your trying to solve a problem I can guarantee you someone else out there is trying to solve the same problem and is going to come up with basically the same thing as you do. Software patents are a terrible idea as anything you can think of to do in software someone else will think of doing the same exact thing. You see it over and over again people coming up with the exact same solutions to programming problems. Software patents don't advance the level of computer science, they hinder the advancement of computer science.
Currently in the tech industry, the bio industry and the medical industry if patents were totally abolished not one thing would change in the market place. Companies would still figure out new products to sell to consumers, and companies would continue to do their minimal levels of R&D to develop new products.
All R&D is tax deductible in every field, so the public is very much paying for all these patents twice. Once in taxes and supposedly again in the price of the product. I personally think if you take government money in the form of grants or loans, and/or you take a tax write off of your R&D that you should not be able to apply for patents on those items. The public paid for it so the public should have free access to them. All of this is just another form of corporate welfare and I seriously doubt it will ever change in the near future.
Oh you haven't seen anything yet. Wait until they start to blackmail the big websites in coughing up money to get "good service" from the ISP/Backbone providers network. "You know your website would be so much better if you just put a few servers here and paid us a huge monthly fee for that." Just look at what Comcast did to Level3/Netflix. Expect to see a lot more of that.
Yes then add in that more and more ISPs are dropping their bandwidth caps lower and lower secretly. If you read the fine print you see it, but they advertise it as a 8Meg connection, but you can only use like 50gigs of traffic or whatever per month. They make it sound like unlimited and even some sales people will tell you it is, until you ask about the fine print..."oh I didn't know that." Some of them are just you hit your limit that's it, no more until next month other than maybe getting your email.
I don't care what anyone says if you read the thing carefully I see huge gaping holes that they will use to create tiered service levels. You are right they have been wanted to go to metered Internet levels for a long time. They complain a few people use more bandwidth than others and that causes problems for everyone else. Nope that's a lie. They just want to squeeze out as much money from customers as they can. I used to run an ISP. Yes there are high users out there, but they don't drag the whole network down, if they do you either have a crap network, are big time overselling your bandwidth or you are doing something seriously wrong.
All this is going to do is cost the American public a whole lot more for Internet access and won't do one bit to stimulate competition. It won't cause anyone to spend more on the infrastructure to make the last mile, and/or the Internet in general better. It probably will even consolidate the ISPs even more, which means more lost jobs.
If you look at the infrastructure of the Internet is really hasn't gotten any better or really changed much in the last 5-10 years. Things are pretty much the same. The reason is the big guys drove the locally owned ISPs out of business and seriously hard core reduced the amount of competition they have. The fact that you can make a form to ask people what ISP they use and put in 10 default answers and 1 other, and cover 90%-95% of the population is a clue that something is seriously wrong compared to 15 years ago.
Telephone service for the telcos isn't unprofitable. I don't know where you heard that but you need to look at their annual reports. They are ranking in profits hand over fist and it isn't coming from their Internet side. Now you will hear those companies whine about phone service, but that is because they aren't able to rape the public anymore they have to compete a bit with VOIP, cell phones and other things. Most telcos have already switched or are switching to TCP/IP based networks. There is no chance in hell any of the established companies are going to switch to SIP and will fight like hell against it. They make huge profits off phone lines and their network, no way they are upsetting that apple cart. The telcos and cable companies already went round and round over the Internet VOIP companies and tried to get regulations and models of doing business passed that would have put the VOIP companies out of business and/or paid huge sums of money to the last mile guys. No the telcos are not hurting at all, and the definitely aren't your friend.
Sounds like a great plan. I have said for years the last mile needs to be owned by the city allowing anyone and everyone to use it to reach that last mile that companies protect like a dog with a bone. It would make revenue for the cities and provide tons of competition since anyone could play.
You can thank you city and state governments...and oh heck throw in the national government, for setting up monopolies for the last 40-100 years, both telcos and cable companies. Then using regulations to restrict competition at the last mile. Good job government you have effectively killed or allow to be killed Internet competition.
Because we don't have true free markets when it comes to last mile. Instead we have companies (telcos & cablecoms) who have been given monopolies for 40-100 years and aren't about to give those up easily. The very serious very real problem is a lack of competition and a lack of ability to compete at the last mile due to city and state government regulations.
The problem in this whole mess for competition is that the cable companies and telcos (who were just divided up AT&T and the remerged over time) have had an unfair advantage against every other company that tries to compete with them. They have had government and city approved monopolies for 40-100 years. When they are that entrenched and existed that long with no competition, they clearly have an unfair advantage to anyone competing with them. Also using their monopoly advantage to drive everyone else out of the Internet market because they can use their monopoly position on the last mile and the other side of the house (phone, TV) to prop up the Internet side while they drop prices and give unfair advantages.
At this point you can't just turn them loose in an open market. They will cream everyone else as they clearly have done. How many locally owned ISPs exist anymore? It isn't because of mismanagement either. You have to regulate these historically long monopolies different from everyone else in the market to even hope to have a level playing field for everyone. That didn't happen and the public is paying the price.
Wow I can tell you have never had to compete directly against the telcos or cable companies. I can tell you have never gone to your state capital to get the telcos and cable companies to play fair and stop lying to your customers. Only to be told that the telcos and cable companies are big contributors and that State congressmen were told that isn't how it would work or what happened, so little guy get out. I can tell you have never had to fight local city hall and the state over the right to lay your own cables. Big corporations would never do anything to strangle competition or give themselves an unfair advantage or lie to your state congressmen. They would never use their profits from one side of the house to prop up their Internet side so they could lower prices to drive everyone else out of business. Big corporations would never give special deals to their Internet side that no one else can get even though they were court ordered to keep the Internet side at arms length.
Nope Corporations would never do those things, they always play nice with others, and never abuse their monopoly positions.
If you believe any of that, which I have seen first hand is false, then I have a bridge to sell you.
The ISP doesn't have to know what the payload is of the TCP/IP traffic of Skype. There is plenty of other information that is generated that they can use to traffic shape, reroute do what ever they want to do with that TCP/IP packet including dropping it on the floor if they wanted. How do you think school block BitTorrent? They break open the TCP/IP packets and look to see what is in there and what application created the packet then apply their rules to that packet. This isn't rocket science for ISPs and they have been doing it for years.
Absolutely. There are dozens of products already on the market that do this exact thing. They crack open every connection, look to see where it is going, who it is from, what application created the packet, and what kind of content it is then route & traffic shape on it based on the ISPs rules. How do you think ISPs have throttled BitTorrent and schools who have been doing the same thing for years? It is very easy and very simple and very cheap for ISPs to set up the servers/appliances to do this, and I would be very surprised if there is an ISP left in America that isn't already doing this. Oh you think there is too much traffic to look at/crack open every packet? Wrong, just load balance the traffic across multiple servers/appliances and you won't have a problem at all. If you can think of a rule it can be done.
You can route based on if it is an image in the web request and transparently redirect it to a different server. You can redirect based on geographic location aka global load balancing. You can redirect if it is an web input response to the web database servers. You can dig deep into the packet payload and do all kinds of things based on what you find there including session redirections. For example you are streaming a video, the streaming server you are on fails. No problem transparently redirect the user to another server, set up the session, and the user is none the wiser. You can even do all kind of sneaky things if you wanted. The ISP could if they wanted transparently cache every streaming audio and video coming in to their network then insert their own commercials into the stream every 5 minutes,. ISPs used to do this exact thing with web pages. They would throw up ads while you surfed that didn't come from the website you are on. They have even used this to make network announcements, and could in theory use this idea for weather alerts, national emergency announcements, and amber alerts. Corporations have blocked java scripts on web pages, and all kinds of other things. If you can think of a way to alter or mess with TCP/IP traffic it can be done and probably already has been done.
They may not be able to shake down websites but they can for sure do what they are already doing and now sweeten it up with making the local traffic preferred. They can sell local rack space to CDN (content distribution networks) so the traffic is local and give it priority since they just want to make their own network run well, and they can't control what happens out on the big bad Internet. Yahoo, Netflix, and many many other 3rd party CDNs who sell service to CNN, ABC, etc are already doing this. Akamai was one of the early companies who did this. They paid to put their servers in ISPs to make their clients traffic come up faster for the public. Now how do you address this issue?
You forgetting that most of the time these are bot nets that are doing the DoS. So if hundreds to thousands of machines all hit 1 IP address or network at the same time it can and does flood out connections so that nothing else gets in or out. At that point the ISP can do nothing since his incoming pipe is completely slammed and no amount of blocking or traffic shaping will do any good since the pipe coming in before it gets to his first router is completely saturated. That is when you have to go to upstream providers and providers closer to the attackers and get them to shut things down.
Who defines reasonable and what are the technical specs for reasonable network management. If an ISP wants all their local traffic to run perfectly then isn't it reasonable for them to have a higher QoS for their traffic than others? Netflix, Yahoo, and other CDNs pay to put servers in the ISPs racks and suddenly those are local services that get priority routing as well. They are only making the local network run better for their customers. They will tell you "How in the world is it bad that I make my own network run well? I can't control the Internet at large but at least I can make my own network run really well." Add in to the mix private connections sold to large web sites by backbone providers, and suddenly those lines are part of the network and they get priority routing as well.
That is exactly how ISPs and backbone providers are going to use this to make all the money that they can grab off the table. This whole thing is worse than if the FCC had done nothing.
What exactly does the ability to shape traffic on their networks to improve network performance mean to you? It means to me that they can favor any traffic they want without actually blocking traffic. If I traffic shape you down to 2k/sec, hey I didn't block you and I made my network better. Oh your stuff is unusable now? Too bad, deal with it. Every ISP and backbone provider will start doing this. You want your traffic to be preferred above all others? Well that is going to cost you, how much do you have? No I can't tell you a price, until you tell me how much you have. That is exactly what is going to happen. The software and the hardware to do this exact thing is already out there and is very cheap to buy and easy to setup and very powerful at controlling traffic.
We heard about the "hope" and the "change" but it seems like to quote Princess Bride "I do not think that means what you think it means."
Or he can write Executive Orders and by pass Congress for most things. Executive Orders have become a serious problem in that they get around the whole checks and balances system originally setup.
If you think you can get around your ISP actively controlling all your traffic you don't understand how the Internet or ISPs works. ISPs already do have machines that look inside every TCP/IP packet and figure out what kind of traffic they are and then route or bandwidth shape based on their rules. You think BitTorrent, SIP, Skype, etc. couldn't be shut down in a heartbeat by an ISP, think again. If you know about an application the ISPs know about the same applications. They just install load balancers, spread the load across multiple servers/appliances and then crack open every packet to see what is going on and where it is going and what exactly it is. This is child's play now. I can name at least 5 different products off the top of my head that do this already and I am sure there are loads more out there. An ISP can block or traffic shape anything they want these days without any problems at all. People need to give up this idea that what they do online is a secret or private. Wrong! Any ISP along the way to the destination site can see everything you are doing anytime they want to. It isn't a question of if they can see, it's a question of if they want to bother to do it. SSL and other encryptions don't hide who you are communicating to and what application your using, it just hides the specifics of what you are doing in the application. So even encrypted traffic can by blocked or shaped.
What the FCC has done is just make all of this more legal, rather than issue of just contracts with the customer.