The Death Of The Open Internet 315
Crackerman111 writes "There's an article up on Economy.com's The Dismal Scientist that's sort of a follow up to the /. post a few days ago that talked about how businesses want a new profitable internet."
Re:Forget Superhighways! Let's look at Real Roads( (Score:2, Insightful)
Highway systems are not meant to turn a profit, they serve public as well as military interest
Thats why it is a good analogy - the communications infrastructure and TCP/IP protocol were never intended for "turning a profit" either, they are merely generic transport mechanisms, like the roads. The best someone can hope for is to make money laying the pipes, like the companies that make money laying the roads. The whole point is precisely that the Internet isn't "meant" to turn a profit - the people who designed the original ARPANET didn't go out to build an infrastructure for making money. Good communications infrastructure in an area should also encourage growth. If I buy a chair and I bring it home in my car, the chair manufacturer doesn't charge me for the transport of the chair on the road - I can (within limits) carry whatever I want on the road, and its nobody's business - the road is just what lies inbetween the two endpoints which are actually the important part of the sale, that is, my home, and the chair manufacturer. Same should apply to the Internet, if I order Duke Nukem 1 from 3DRealms and download it from their site, the fact that the Internet was used for transport of the software is arbitrary and irrelevant, what mattered was what happens at the endpoints, i.e. the transaction between seller and buyer.
Let's look at this (Score:2, Insightful)
1) The problem isn't with the internet as it stands today, but with the application of the internet. It's not the anarchy on the internet that caused the dot-com.death -- it was stupid business practices.
2) "Businesses are growing so frustrated by the unreliability of the public Internet" (from the LA Times article) So What! Do I (meaning correct-thinking, techno-saavy america) want to turn every last scrap of online freedom over to corporate superpowers? The Government, austensibly, is supposed to be "of the people, for the people..." and like that. Corporations are "for the money, because of the money, and all about the money". They only answer to the ledger book (spread sheet, I guess). Do you want to put them in control?
3)"Thanks to people who had the foresight to keep the middle stupid, we've been able to discover new, totally unanticipated applications " (again from the times)
Damn Straight! Remember the scare the "Halloween Documents" put into the "anarchist hippies" (psssst - that means ME and YOU) with Microsoft wanting to control the protocols on the web, make them no longer a commodity (that means something that anyone can supply - in case you didn't know) So M$ would have control of web communications with their protocol. THIS IS WORSE!!! This is giving over the protocol, the router, the switch, and even the wire.
4)"Whether the open model and the business model can comfortably coexist is debatable" (Times again)
Screw THAT! They can coexist, as long as business doesn't try to bend over the public and cornhole them and expect the public to thank them for the innovation (See the history of AT&T). No - there won't be no mega-corps if the whole world followed the Open model, but....HEY! wait a minute!!! That's not a bad thing at all!
5) "Telecom executives say that without a major redesign of the Internet, such eagerly anticipated applications as video-on-demand, Internet Telephony and Webcasts of live entertainment events will never be economical." (again)
Uhm - this might be an unpopular view but...Do we really need that crap? Is it worth handing the keys to the internet over to the blackest pit-spawn of the nether-corporate planes?
6)"Companies Are Having to Pay for Reliability" (Times again, this is a bold-faced heading to a section)
Really? Oh those poor soulless bastards! They have to PAY for something? Like I do. OH the INJUSTICE OF IT ALL! Maybe we could get like....Prince and U2, and Micheal Jackson and a bunch of other musicians from the 80s to do a benefit concert for them...like a Billionaire-CEO-Aide benefit concert. Thos poor billion dollar corporations have to PAY for reliability like I do. damn. It just ain't right.
So, in closing, I'd like to ask that when you go to the polls this november, remember that honesty and integrity count, and that I promise to do the job....Oh wait, I'm not running for office....
But - if this hideousness happens in our dimension, or a nearby paralell plane, boycott the bastards. Don't use their crappy product.
Re:The War is coming. (Score:2, Insightful)
You go on to say that centuries down the road, a more enlightened America will decide that similar separation ought to apply to business. Business, after all, being the new Church, should not have privileged or systemic influence over the State. It sounds great on the surface-- "Finally, the Corporate whores^H^H^H^H^H^H Suits at Exxon can no longer install an unelected & curiously unintelligent man as President on their whim!"
However, even based on your own argumentation, there's a fatal flaw: the State can now no longer infringe on the free exercise of business. At least, if we're keeping up with your analogy in terms of Church and State. In fact, what we've basically accomplished through this wonderful corporate secularism has another name: laissez-faire capitalism.
Call me confused, but, didn't America try that approach extensively throughout the 19th century? I believe it was Mark Rosenfelder who described those times as: "Filth in our meat, shantytowns, racism, 'No Irish need apply', company towns, union-busting goons, monopolies, corruption scandals, a punishing business cycle, old folks living in poverty, failing banks, Boss Tweed, gunboat diplomacy..."
I'm not suggesting for a second we're much better off at this present date... but, "Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me." I suppose it's too much to ask of our enlightened future America to think of the mistakes of the past ;)
Separation of "business" and State in this manner, as you describe it, is also self-contradictory-- how precisely do you plan on separating the two one the one hand, when we've just gone ahead and given business an unlimited license to act as it pleases on the other? We need to think this through a little more clearly-- we should perhaps start looking at the actual sources of distress and poverty in our society (yea, in our World) and address those issues on a more fundamental level. Perhaps we need to rethink our concepts of economics, of labour, of government-- and build a more free and more fair system from the ground up.
Just my two cents...
BRx.
Profitable Internet? (Score:5, Insightful)
This, Is Stupid. (Score:3, Insightful)
AOLization (Score:5, Insightful)
I say, let the businesses have their internet, and watch it crash and burn. If they haven't learned yet, maybe this will teach them.
Death? (Score:5, Insightful)
Down with the commercial Internet. Up with content and open standards. Look at the power of the site you're reading - created entirely with flat HTML. Broadband isn't the revolution. This is the revolution.
If it isn't broken, don't fix it (Score:5, Insightful)
The greatest strenght of the intenet is its decentralized nature. It reminds me of the form of govenrment the founding fathers tried to create, one where no one person or group had too much control and anything that one group did could be countered by the others.
So now some suits don't like the fact that they can't exploit people online they way they have been able to do traditionally. Well boo fucking hoo. There is plenty of money to be made online, just look at Amazon or Ebay.
Lee
yeah well.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Think about it, advertising on the net is unique in that it is integrated within the content. the closest thing would be magazines where the ads are mixed with the content, but most magazine ads are on their own page.
In radio, you listen to a song, hear a commercial, then another song. They don't stop in the middle of the song to tell you about McDonald's and then play the rest of the song - but that same principle is what internet advertisers are wanting to do.
Bottom line is advertising on the net just does not work very well, especially pop up ads.
Has anyone seen the pop up ads that appear just a bit too far to the right, out of the screen area, so that the maximize button is on the edge of the screen. If out of habit, you click the top right of the pop up window, you will maximize it rather than close it. Sneaky, sneaky.
Re:This, Is Stupid. (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not as far from the truth as you might think.
The fast food chains have changed the face of ranching, farming, meat packing, travel, etc.
The moral of the story is, the businesses who stand to make money from a more business friendly internet have the resources to try to make that a reality.
On the other hand, who would want to use their new crappy internet? The money they're making has to come from somewhere- so New Crappy Internet (I think NCI should be the official name) will cost a fortune to anyone who uses it. Nice.
-J5K
A commercial "internet" (Score:3, Insightful)
Why? After all, the "free market" is what people crave. (Actually, people are only -told- they crave it. The "free market", as invented by the French, has had almost no long-term effect. The old trading Empires have simply been replaced with new trading Empires. Standing still isn't progress.)
The problem with the Internet, however, is that the Corporate Sector never paid for it. Nor did they design it. Nor (for the most part) do they run it. Nor could they, as it stands. It requires far too much cooperation, openness and integrity.
What the Corporate Sector wants is a free lunch. Or, at least, a free launch. A new way to sell their junk and tripe, without any of that R&D nonsense, and without any bills to pay.
If this happens, what -WILL- happen IMHO is that serious "Internet" users will find ways to migrate onto Internet 2, or some comparable tripe-free network.
And, what will happen then is that all the Domestic Users at Home (DUH) will decide that the Internet has lost all the good stuff, and they will switch over to some (inevitable) ISPs that serve this new, high-speed network.
Once that happens, of course, the prawn-merchants and the advertisers will drop the old Internet, and switch to this new, exciting service, where they will get to plague humanity all over again.
Of course, when they do that, the high-power users will complain that their new ultra-expensive networks are too slow, and they'll go and build an even faster one. At THEIR expense.
And, so, the entire cycle will repeat. Endlessly and stupidly.
The high-power users don't -really- need a faster network. They need to have all the advertisers and prawnographers deported to the Andromeda Galaxy. That'll improve network capacity by more than enough.
Advertisers and Web Crawlers are the ones -really- killing the Internet. I've seen guesstimates which place the total bandwidth eaten by banner ads plus web search engines at around 65% of the Internet's capacity.
Sending those BSE-rejects into deep space may well be the only hope humanity has of survival. I only hope it's not too late.
Re:If it isn't broken, don't fix it (Score:4, Insightful)
Other things which are worth noting is that, while I don't have any figures for this, the number of dot coms going bust is probably around the same for any number of real world business in the same geographic zone, ie world-wide. Another is banner ads and the complaint people don't click on them. Heck, nobody clicks on adverts in a paper magazine, so how an earth can they say that the final response rate is any less?
This goes back to the orginal point, a company will try to adapt the market to their own ends, if they can't then they will complain that the environment is not tailored to their needs. Life is chaos, and if you can't stand the chaos, you are better playing elsewhere, IMHO.
Already have "Profitable Internet" AOL, MSN, etc. (Score:1, Insightful)
They also don't reach as wide an audience as a free and open internet, do they?
Take your pick.
The War is coming. (Score:3, Insightful)
Everything that the free Internet does and facilitates is in direct contradiction with our economic ideologies (at least in the US). The rapid rate of technological innovation has our traditional capitalism busting at the seams. The only thing that holds it together is the massive power of corporations working with legislators to promote huge amounts of new legislation that protect companies' rights to make money for anything.
While this country's ideologies were based on personal freedom, and the separation of church and state, I think that those values are not enough in today's society.
I think a new world leader is likely to emerge in the centuries ahead with ideologies based on the separation of state and business. Think about it, the free market is a wonderful ECONOMIC tool. It provides unequaled productivity and efficiency. However, it does NOTHING for GOVERNMENT. The government should be there to set down the ground rules, things like environmental protections, and anti-trust laws.
Corporations as citizens is an alarming concept. It promotes the idea that business has the RIGHT to make as much money as possible. That is utter BS... the free market should dictate how much money can be made, and the government should dictate how far companies can go to sell their products.
The Internet is a reflection of people's needs to be free and have a realm of expression outside the control of big business. Let companies do what they will to squeeze every cent of profitability out of the Internet. I think the end of American greed-based capitalism is on the wane.
How to make profits on the Internet (Score:1, Insightful)
2) Figure out how much revenue you'll generate by selling your product. Again, for the Stanford MBA, "revenue" is "money that someone else pays you". You can figure this out by applying an advanced mathematical technique called "multiplication". Multiply the selling price of your product by the number of units you expect to sell. There are calculators and computer programs to help you with this if you have difficulty. Call this number "b".
3) Compare b to a. If b is greater than a by a large enough amount that you'll make significantly more than just putting your capital in a savings account, you're in good shape. If a is greater than b, you're screwed. Find some way to decrease a or increase b. Do this before you start your business. If you can't do it, the business model is uneconomic. Give it up and think up something else.
This appears to be a bit harder than the alternative: selling $10 bills for $1, then blathering about "failure to abide by economic laws" when the business fails.
Re:This, Is Stupid. (Score:2, Insightful)
"please mr newton, it would be sooo much easier if we didn't have to deal with these silly wings and engines"
1 thing can kill the public internet in the USA... (Score:3, Insightful)
The danger is in the regulation of the internet. What the business/government alliance will attempt is to regulate the internet via the FCC probably as if it were a broadcast technology. At that point it could be made illegal to have an independent presence on the internet except in little for-the-public preserved zoos of the public access cable variety.
How will they do this? With the economic threats of piracy and hacking (viruses, worms, site hacking), and with the social threat of terrorism and dangers to "the children." Think the argument that it hasn't destroyed society yet will stave this rhetoric off? Marijuana has been illegal for 70 years in the USA despite a 5000 year history of civilized pharmacological use with no sign of significant negative social impact. Why do we maintain a costly, inneffective and pointless prohibition? Why, it's for "the children."
Keep a close eye on the government, kids, because they're going to try to steal the internet and give it away same as they stole the digital television spectrum and sold it for chump change in campaign donations from the teevee giants. And we'll all grumble on slashdot (as plug-pullin' day fast approaches) that our beloved dumb-pipe internet ISN'T a broadcast technology, it's a private one-one communication network and all communications over it should be protected just like a telephone conversation. Well it won't make a damn bit of difference any more than the DMCA being a crappy piece of unconstitutional legislation could keep Sklyarov from getting arrested.
All I can say is when the time comes we better be prepared to do a hell of a lot better job than we did when faced with the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
Re:The net isn't stupid, it's differently robust (Score:5, Insightful)
The article mentions that the end node are where the intelligence is. that is quite wrong.
the pc's at the end don't have a clue as to how to get a packet from point a to b, they just send it to the default router and hope that all goes well.
the routers are where the intelligence resides on the internet, all 100,000+ of them. (some more intelligent than others)
if anything, the internet is an example of a decentralized intelligence. There is no single point of control. there is no single point of failure. there is no single person who can thus guarantee that stuff will work since they dont control everything from point a to b.
now, ATT was able to have 99.999% uptime because they controlled the entire thing. Many of the larger ISP's also have what is very close to that same level of reliability _within their own network_. Once it leaves their network it is out of their hands. ATT does not take responsibility for QOS of calls to china and ISP's do not offer any SLA's for packets that leave their network
The backbone can support all that various business wants it to, they just dont want to pay for it. Think about it, a single long distance call from New York to San Francisco cost about $0.05 a minute (us) That gets you a dedicated 64Kbps link from point a to b (assuming the old uncompressed telco data rates where a T1 carried 28 voice channels). Now, what does a typical dialup line cost? $20 a month? That would buy you 400 minutes or a little under 7 hours. How many hours of surfing does the average person do per month on their 56K line? I bet that it is a good bit over 7 hours, prob closer to 30+ (not counting slashdot users. I racked up over 550 hours in one month once when i was telecommuting and only had a dialup. the isp was not happy with me).
So, using the telco networks price as a guide, if we all want dedicated, guaranteed access, we should be willing to pay for it. Thus, our 30 hours per month of internet access should a) not exceed 64Kbps and b) cost about $90. Want to do video @1.5Mbps? That will cost you a bit more
Re:A new internet (Score:1, Insightful)
That's the problem with elitism; it's practically impossible to weed out the idiots without using artificial criteria that also exclude many deserving people. And when the whole point is to have open communication, restricting who can participate is ultimately self-defeating.
Re:This, Is Stupid. (Score:3, Insightful)
Rather than the laws of physics, think of the practicalities of flying. The art and science of flying and the airways were developed by what today would be called "general aviation" flyers
Over the last 20 years general aviation has been pushed to the margins of the airways, and at this moment the airlines are pumping various ATC privitization schemes which would essentially lock general aviation out of any airspace more crowded than Montana. "Thanks for the memories, but you are in the way of maximum profit".
I am old enough to have actually seen the first "coming death of the Net" message on netnews. This time it may actually happen, I am afraid.
sPh
Herein lies my fear. (Score:2, Insightful)
Chances are, given the way things are working out now, I'll have to.
Socialization of costs and privatization of profit is a macro-level expression of a kid eating a candy bar, then throwing the wrapper on the street because he doesn't want to find a trash can. It expresses the same level of maturity.
Forget Superhighways! Let's look at Real Roads(tm) (Score:5, Insightful)
a) don't have to pay per use of the roads (mostly)
b) don't have guaranteed quality of service (traffic jams)
c) can't make money from the roads (unless you are a roadbuilder)
d) some people make money shipping stuff around though
e) some people make money building stuff to use the roads
f) some people make very small amount of money telling you were to find things (map makers)
g) roads cost tax money to build and run, yet don't directly make ANY money!
Yeah, and the people who pay for the roads don't usually make money back from them! All these roads are therefore a commercial failure, and we need to privatise all of them so that businesses can make money. It's obvious! How could I have missed it?
Re:AOLization (Score:3, Insightful)
Quick responses and callow attitude like this will kill the "free Internet" if we are not careful.
The fact that this response was moderated up is disturbing in itself. It reminds me of the sinking island in 'Erik the Viking' where all the inhabitants are convinced the island itself is not sinking - and they all drown.
The entire Internet is in danger at the moment - look around you (Sklyarov, School Website Protection, .NET). People have lost a lot of money, and they're pissed. And they're ready to change things so they can make money again.
And freedom does not make money.
So what's happening at the moment? AOL and Microsoft and AT&T and god knows what other corporate behemoths want to privatize the net. AND THEY CAN. And that's the problem.
A few billion dollars can go a long way, especially when everyone is upset about a poor economy and the 'failed promise' of the net.
Don't think that because you don't want it to happen, it won't. It IS happening.
So the real question is, what can we do?
Re:yeah well.. (Score:2, Insightful)
This is exactly what television adds do. These days when you have 10000 companies selling exactly the same product at prety much the same price (be it icecream, cars or airline tickets) any average consumer will just pick the one with the name they like and trust. This involves getting your name out there.
Most companies think that banner adds only work if you are showcaseing a particular product or special.
why dont we see more Burger King ads, Toyota ads or ads for specific brands of cereal?
Basicly because its hard to mesure how effective this is, not much harder then it is for television ads, but then again, television stations have got great marketing people to sell ad space for them. I'd like a real study done (and if there is one can someone PLEASE tell me) on brand building through banner ads (or even those ginormous ads in yahoo now).
OLGA (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah - you almost brought tears to my eyes bringing up OLGA. What a sad travesty that was - and indeed, it was the first salvo. I remember thinking at the time how absolutely ludicrous EMI's accusations were. Now, well... That's par for the course.
However, OLGA does live on [olga.net] - and they are seeking support [olga.net] in order to stave off future legal bullying. In any case, I'm glad I don't have to pull out all the archives I 'backed up' before they went down...
The Information Superhighway metaphor! oh, gods!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
The Internet is infrastructure, just like roads, as has been mentioned already. The reason society funds roads is because they're multi-purpose and elevate the pursuits of everyone involved. Roads are platform-agnostic (as long as you follow a few simple physical rules, you are ready to rock) as well as purpose-agnostic. It is these two things that make highways so damned useful.
What's funny about the "Information Superhighway" metaphor is that most people used it (and cracked on it) without really understanding it, but it had the core of the Internet's promise contained in it. To say that the Internet's value was only contained in silly dot-com only businesses is to say that the entire point of the interstate highway system was to create motels and Cracker Barrels. But that isn't true- the value of the highways is realized when you want to go visit your friend in Philadelphia, but you live in Baltimore. It's realized when you have to truck a shipment of goods to another city. You could take ten million tiny little toll roads through a million little municipalities, but that would take forever and be a pain in the ass. No one benefits from that, just like no one benefits from a fragmented, incompatible, gate(s?)-infested Internet. These folks don't want an Internet, they want 65 different Fidonet-alikes. Well, that's not infrastructure.
The true value of the Internet is when it makes us all more capable, universally. If all goes well, it will become so universal we forget it's even there. That is the promise that TCP/IP has been thus far fulfilling. But if it doesn't go well, it will be as bad a loss as if the interstate highway system had been junked.
Re:worked in the old days (Score:3, Insightful)
Someone mentioned the L0pht/@Stake "In Case Of Fascism, Break Glass" plans for a wireless roving network of packet-switched fun.
Suppose we update it with present tech. Imagine a few hundred geeks in any given city, using hax0r3d 802.11 gear hooked up to laptops with 80G hard drives, featuring end-to-end-encrypted store-and-forward UUCP-style transmission and replication of data. Something like a cross between Freenet and USENET, but with UUCP as opposed to NNTP as the transmission mechanism. Sure, it may take a few hours for a requested file to "hop" from one end of the country to another. Who cares, as long as you can get the data -- you send a request and later that night, the file appears.
The world can have AOL at 53K dialup speed. Hell, they can have AOL at 500K cable modem speed. (With a 1-kilobyte paragraph of text requiring 40K of Flash Banner Ad download and 10K of HTML and Javashit to put frames and popups around it, the throughput is about the same as dialup with image autoloading off ;-) The rest of us will go, not to the stars, but underground.
Re:My Theory about dinosaurs... (Score:3, Insightful)
You might be closer than you realize - New Coke probably served it's purpose well (possibly to cover up a planned formula change [area.com] from expensive sugar, to sweeter corn syrup in the origional product; or as a means of attracting massive amounts of media attention as Negativland [negativland.com] suggested on one of the tracks of Dispepsi [negativland.com]).
Announcing a NEW! SHINY!! network with lots of NEW! SHINY!! content would catch the eye of the overstimulated, media saturated, passive good little consumer we are all supposed to be. Get AOL or MSN on board, running your special protocal, with maybe a lone proxy allowing communication with the oldnet (Old BAD! see how slow it is? Ohhhh! Shiny Link!!!) Simplify it, and make it gradually as passive of an experience as you can.
That's how you kill off the old net...