The internet is over!

[maffick]

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060213/chester

"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.
"

[glatt]

We need to all get together and start a co-op internet.

[maffick]

I have a couple 2400 baud modems and one 9600 baud FAX/modem I can donate.... Oh and some UTP wire......

[Elspode]

Umm...is PODS and other BBS functionality still in place somewhere? We might need that soon.

This whole thing is just further proof of an earlier posting I made, which posits that the entirety of humanity is seen as nothing more than a cash cow ripe for milking in ever more efficient ways. "Be Rich or Get Screwed" should be stamped on the currencies of all the nations of the world.

Last time I checked, I was already paying someone for my Internet access, but that apparently isn't enough. Right now, Time Warner is sucking over $200 per month out of me for cable, phone and Internet, but that isn't enough, apparently, since I still have enough money to eat and live indoors.

Hell, even reviving BBS's won't help. Back at the peak of BBS popularity, Southwestern Bell was on the verge of charging much higher rates for phone lines which were used to connect to BBS's. Why? Because they decided that such services were "businesses" (despite the fact that virtually all of them were free, and despite the fact that the mere existence of BBS's guaranteed that they would have many more lines in service than they would have otherwise). In actuality, the Phone Company just wanted a bigger piece of the pie, and that was their bullying way of getting it.

So's this.

[Aliantha]

Isn't the internet really just a conglomeration of privately owned companies anyway? Really, when we pay our ISP for our access, we're also paying them to store our information such as emails, webpages, posts on message boards and any other digital information we look at during our surfing the net etc. This information is stored sometimes for a long time e.g. webpages which we've made using our server provided space, or a short time e.g. emails etc. It's all just information being transferred through ISP's who store the information and pass it on when requested.

I can't see how that's likely to change any time soon other than for larger ISP's to try and create a monopoly and therefore take advantage of us poor saps.

[Sun_Sparkz]

Pfft, if it ever gets to that i would simply just stop using the internet. I'm not paying a fortune for for the thing, everything thats done online for me personally isn't important anyway, and if you need it for work, then that the employers problem (which they can claim on their taxes anyway).

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by Aliantha

Really, when we pay our ISP for our access, we're also paying them to store our information such as emails, webpages, posts on message boards and any other digital information we look at during our surfing the net etc. This information is stored sometimes for a long time e.g. webpages which we've made using our server provided space, or a short time e.g. emails etc. It's all just information being transferred through ISP's who store the information and pass it on when request it.

Huh? I wasn't aware Comcast was storing anything for me, except my emails until I retrieve them.

[Beestie]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

Huh? I wasn't aware Comcast was storing anything for me, except my emails until I retrieve them.

Well, they might not need to keep it since ...

"...a car in every garage, a chicken in every pot..." has become "...an FBI agent in every colon..."

The FBI has developed new software, formerly called Carnivore, that allows the FBI to "tap" the Internet.
...
Carnivore, acting like a "sniffer," searches through all traffic on a network on which it is installed, and not just traffic emanating from a particular computer connection. Carnivore supposedly records only information sent to or from a suspect under surveillance. The information Carnivore records is then viewed by FBI agents.
...
The FBI, however, has not released detailed information about how Carnivore works so no one is really sure if what the FBI claims Carnivore does is actually true. Since the government, and not ISPs control Carnivore, there is no way of knowing exactly what information gets through the filter and into the FBI's hands. Since Carnivore is installed directly into an ISP's network, the program literally monitors every piece of information that travels across the network.

[richlevy]

From here.

<nyt_headline version="1.0" type=" ">Postage Is Due for Companies Sending E-Mail </nyt_headline>

<nyt_byline version="1.0" type=" "> </nyt_byline> by PAUL HANSELL
Published: February 5, 2006
<!--NYT_INLINE_IMAGE_POSITION1 --> <nyt_text> </nyt_text>Companies will soon have to buy the electronic equivalent of a postage stamp if they want to be certain that their e-mail will be delivered to many of their customers.

America Online and Yahoo, two of the world's largest providers of e-mail accounts, are about to start using a system that gives preferential treatment to messages from companies that pay from 1/4 of a cent to a penny each to have them delivered. The senders must promise to contact only people who have agreed to receive their messages, or risk being blocked entirely.

Now Yahoo is a free service, but AOL isn't. If this is simply a case of putting a 'preferred' sticker on certain items, then this isn't really new. If you do a directory search in the Yellow Pages online, preferred advertisers are given a special section above local merchants.

If however, they attempt to degrade e-mail delivery from companies who don't pay, this is a huge issue for paying customers. Not just sales circulars that we want to receive, but important commercial responses such as registration confirmations, e-mails about flight or subscription/account cancellations might be purposely delayed to blackmail companies to sign up for 'preffered' service.

For a free service like Yahoo, the answer is that you get what you pay for. For AOL, if I found out that an important confirmation or cancellation notice from an airline was dumped as spam even though I had previously received them, I would drop AOL like a hot rock.

[Aliantha]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

Huh? I wasn't aware Comcast was storing anything for me, except my emails until I retrieve them.

When you look at a webpage (like this one for example) you use your terminal to connect to your server. Then you type in a web address, and your server looks for it and finds it on whichever server it's on. The information that you look at on this page is stored on someone's server, and the person that owns the site pays the server for the space. You just get to look at it. If you had your own webspace, it would be stored on a server which is paid for somehow, either by you directly, or the space owners (such as geocities) might choose to use advertising to make their money, so that means that they're giving you space for free, but you're advertising their site which puts things like pop-ups etc (which someone has paid geocities to use) on your page.

[xoxoxoBruce]

When I request a web page I'm not looking at it on the server that's storing it. It's downloaded to my PC via the web by my ISP (comcast). Thats why if my cable connection is broken, the page is still displayed on my screen.

Comcast transfers the pages I request but only stores my emails, while I'm offline, untill I request them. As part of there service they set aside two blocks of their storage capacity, that I can use. One for pictures and such and one if I wanted to have a small site. I choose not to use them so they are storing nothing for me, except emails.

[Aliantha]

Right. Well that's fairly obvious. I thought you didn't understand what I was saying Bruce. Looks like you understand after all. Anyway, my point was that nothing online is free now, so what I don't understand is how people think it can become even more privatised.

[Undertoad]

People, please. This is the Internet, and we are in charge here.

There is no advantage in being a big company on the Internet. Bigness doesn't really matter on the net. No single entity can hope to truly control any major part of the net; the net won't tolerate it.

This is the internet. Every product on the Internet is one click away from every other product. Companies that charge must actually add value. And as only a select few have learned, on the Internet, it is extremely difficult to gain power by exercising control. Google found that it gained power by giving power away. By doing so it has accumulated more net worth faster than any company in history.

This is the Internet. We are not "consumers", eating products and shitting money. We are all partners. No single company can control you - that is, unless you allow it.

[Elspode]

"Preferred Email"? Talk about your euphemisms! Isn't this pretty much "it is alright for you to spam our customers as long as we're making money off of it"?

[tw]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

There is no advantage in being a big company on the Internet. Bigness doesn't really matter on the net. No single entity can hope to truly control any major part of the net; the net won't tolerate it.

We can hope that is true. But reality says such big companies are already manipulating so as to charge more money for new services such as VOIP.

From IEEE Spectrum of October 2005:

A seven-year-old Mountain View, Calif., company, Narus Inc., has devised a way for telephone companies to detect data packets belonging to VoIP applications and block the calls. For example, now when someone in Riyadh clicks on Skype's "call" button, Narus's software, installed on the carrier's network, swoops into action. It analyzes the packets flowing across the network, notices what protocols they adhere to, and flags the call as VoIP. In most cases, it can even identify the specific software being used, such as Skype's.

Narus's software can "secure, analyze, monitor, and mediate any traffic in an IP network," says Antonio Nucci, the company's chief technology officer. By "mediate" he means block, or otherwise interfere with, data packets as they travel through the network in real time. ...

The desire to block or charge for VoIP phone calls extends far beyond the Middle East. According to Jay Thomas, Narus's vice president of product marketing, it can be found in South America, Asia, and Europe. International communications giant Vodafone recently announced a plan to block VoIP calls in Germany, Thomas says. A French wireless carrier, SFR, has announced a similar plan for France. ...

"But there's nothing that keeps a carrier in the United States from introducing jitter, so the quality of the conversation isn't good," Thomas says. "So the user will either pay for the carrier's voice-over-Internet application, which brings revenue to the carrier, or pay the carrier for a premium service that allows Skype use to continue. You can deteriorate the service, introduce latency [audible delays in hearing the other end of the line], and also offer a premium to improve it." ...

U.S. broadband-cable companies are considered information services, which by law gives them the right to block VoIP calls. Comcast Corp., in Philadelphia, the country's largest cable company, is already a Narus customer; Thomas declined to say whether Comcast uses the VoIP-blocking capabilities.