Re: Evil monopolists and the future of the internet

In sci.econ, sinister
<sinister@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote
on Wed, 8 Feb 2006 10:17:31 -0500
<JMKdnZnZVJwMlnfeRVn-sg@xxxxxxxxxxx>:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060213/chester

"The End of the Internet?" by Jeff Chester

First 'graph:
"The nation's largest telephone and cable companies are
crafting an alarming set of strategies that would
transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet
of today to a privately run and branded service that
would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online."


It costs money to move those electrons, after all. How
much, I'm not sure, but ideally we'd be able to establish
a standardized number of joules or watts per terabyte or
terabyte/second, and charge users appropriately.

(Not that I like the idea, but one pays either directly
or by taxes. Pick your poison.)

I should note that, if one is paying $19.99/month for 512
kb DSL service, then one is paying about 1 1/2 nanocents
per bit -- regardless of whether one uses them or not.
So it's not all that much -- but it's not zero, either.
In fact, there used to be a secondary market for selling
excess bandwidth after hours (I don't know if such is still
the case admittedly), and one prime requisite of piracy
is something that is "free of charge"; one may recall,
for instance, that high seas got very safe once ships had
to put into port to refuel, though the privateers helped,
and a fair number of phone pricing plans differentiate between
peak and off-peak minutes.

So maybe charging by the gig is a good idea. (Or not.)

Additional considerations ensue if one uses any routers
(usage thereof is really unavoidable anyway!), and since
TCP/IP can use any router it wants (within hop limits)
things get interesting if tracking software gets installed
thereon. There's also the question of hop distance; I'd
have to look up the signal lossage per mile of cable. I do
know that fiber optic's good for a few miles but that's
about it; it then has to go through a repeater, at least.

Again, pick your poison: track your costs, or track
your data, or track the fact that one established
multiple connections to a website based somewhere in Rio
de Janeiro to find an attractive 20something to have
a fling with, while away from one's significant other.

(Substitute as appropriate.)

Or all of the above. The possibilities make J. Edgar
Hoover look like a milksop, and there's already a debate
regarding a "two-tier" internet: one is either with
a service and gets preferential treatment, or against
a service and gets to hop through -- *that* router, the
one with the slightly dodgy connections, the occasional
hiccup, and the undermaintained power supply and/or
bandwidth card and/or prone to overheating because nobody
changes the filters. Don't like it? Pay the moohlah. They're
amenable, corrupt, and in power. (At least until the
electricity runs out.)

And then there's the now-laughably-outdated Telecommunications Act,
which among other things requires tarriffs and such for
long distance providers. Could they have envisioned VoIP?

And that's just at the transport level. At the data level,
one can get even more creative; witness, for example,
Google/Baidu's helpful censorship of Chinese subnets. (Admittedly,
I'm not sure how effective this is, but then I'm not in China,
either.) The good news: 6/4 is available to anonymously browse
and/or communicate. Or perhaps it's Six Four. I can't say
offhand, but my understanding is that it's based on a rather
infamous date: 1989-06-04, the day maybe thousands of
students died (the officials put the figure between 400 to 2600).

Not quite as bad as 2001-09-11, perhaps, but far more
significant to the Chinese, and possibly to the world at
large, as 9/11 was an economic disaster (if a nasty one)
but 6/4 a political one, very broadly speaking. Besides,
tanks can't run over planes.

Of course, it'll cost extra; https:// versus http:// gives one a
little more security but might sap as much as half one's bandwidth.

Welcome to the New World Order. Did the Founding Fathers envision
this? Is it speech? Is it press? Is it media, and therefore
censorable as it might influence little Timmy and little Sally to
hear those Seven Little Words on the 'Net? Is it fairer (and to
whom?) to pay by the bit, by the second, by the socket connection,
all of the above?

Stay tuned.

--
#191, ewill3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
It's still legal to go .sigless.
.

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