I'm not as up-to-the-minute on this issue as I need to be. I just read the House voted against so-called "Internet neutrality," which would give the government and corporations--such as Verizon--even more power to monitor and regulate our Internet activities. The bill now has to pass the senate.

Question: How dangerous is this bill if it becomes law, and how will it be enforced?

:o ???

Privacy implications are nil:  The government has already arrogated to itself the privilege of monitoring all network activity.  The telecoms are complicit, because if they scratch the government's back, they'll get what they want in return.

But the business model implications are terrifying.

Isenberg's "Rise of the Stupid Network" is probably the most important paper written on the subject, and it dates back to 1997.

The followup "Dawn of the Stupid Network" is almost as important.


The Internet works because it's a stupid network.  You shovel bits around.  Bits are bits.  You pay for the size of your pipe.  All the brains are in the nodes on the network:  the computers, the routers, and so on.  Your FTP client, your web browser, your P2P application, your video game... none of them care about whether the bits get shoveled through dialup, wirless, DSL, cable, T1, or OC-3, nor do they care whose pipes the bits get shoveled through.  They're just bits.  If you want bits to do something they can't do already, you write some code and you shovel your newfangled bits through the stupid network, and maybe you make a few billion dollars, and maybe you go bankrupt.  The network doesn't care about your application (it's stupid!), and your application doesn't care about the network (meaning that you don't really need the phone company, or the TV company, or anyone except "the guy who has the cheapest and fastest bit-shoveling offer")

The telcos don't like stupid networks, because they never understood them until it was too late.  The voice phone network is an intelligent network:  your phone is stupid (it's a microphone, a speaker, a transducer, and some wire).  AIt's useless without the intelligent network behind it: massive banks of centrally-controlled (and expensive, which is why you have to pay for local phone service) switching equipment and trunks behind it.  There are only a few thousand of these things, which your telco likes because it means nobody else can start up their own telco, and your government likes because it means there are only a few thousand things it needs to tap to keep an eye on everyone :)  TV broadcasters and cable companies are also intelligent networks:  An analog television is basically an antenna, a few filtering circuits, a few sweep circuits, and a vacuum tube.  It's likewise useless without a signal pumped into it by means of a million-dollar antenna, or a multimillion-dollar set of cables and head-end gear, and a whole lot of expensive and intelligent gear on the back end; the same logic applies.

But go back and read the two Isenberg papers, because he said it a lot better than I did.

If you grok those two papers in their fullness, it's pretty clear what's going on:  Now that everything from phone calls to TV shows are bits, and stupid networks are better at shoveling bits around than intelligent networks ever were... well, a telco or cable TV company's business model doesn't merely rely on the presence of its own intelligent network, it also relies on the absence of a competing  stupid network.

When the appropriate laws have been purchased through the lobbyists, the stupid network known as "The Internet" will cease to exist, and be replaced by the intelligent network of "The Internet that only works as long as we can gouge an extra $90 out of every $100 Google makes, under threat of being able to  throttle their pipes down to nothing and redirecting all of their search queries to  AT&ComcasticSearchizon.com, powered by AOL and brought to you by NASCAR, Target, and whoever else has a few million bucks to spend on getting connected to the intelligent network before they can even fantasize about writing a new application for it.  (And if they do manage to write a new application that people like, they take all the business risk in coming up with it, and we get all the financial reward.  We can fire the entire engineering staff, and if nobody ever develops a new application for our network, that's fine too, because stagnation's just as profitable as innovation on an intelligent network.)"

I haven't yet read the papers you linked, maybe they answer the questions I have here.
It seems to me the Internet has been in massive public use for ten years, and more interested parties were using Internet as we now know it for several years before that, perhaps starting around 1989. In any case, isn't public demand too high for this thing we know and love as the Internet or the World Wide Web?  Will the public to tolerate corporations seizing it all and restricting our access until we pay such exorbitant fees as charged by the phone company or the satellite service provider?

When the corporations seize control of the known internet, will it be possible for us to found a new free internet by networking our own "stupid networks"? Maybe an "underground" internet, or an "undernet"?
???

(I know I'm naive. Humor me. Sometimes it's the only comfort I've got left!)

I'm not as up-to-the-minute on this issue as I need to be. I just read the House voted against so-called "Internet neutrality," which would give the government and corporations--such as Verizon--even more power to monitor and regulate our Internet activities. The bill now has to pass the senate.

Question: How dangerous is this bill if it becomes law, and how will it be enforced?

:o ???


Oddly, even though I've been going online for 8+ years now, I'm still a little inexperienced on exactly how some of this works. ;) When you say "monitor our activities", do you mean from a distance without us knowing (i.e. using "cookies") or would it flat out prohibit us from going to certain sites, or less of them being Free, etc?

I haven't yet read the papers you linked, maybe they answer the questions I have here.

Heh, stop reading me and spend some time with the papers.  They're delightfully apolitical; they're written from a purely engineering standpoint.

Will the public to tolerate corporations seizing it all and restricting our access until we pay such exorbitant fees as charged by the phone company or the satellite service provider?

The public will tolerate what they're told to tolerate.  Joe Sixpack  wouldn't miss Google if it had never been invented, for instance.  He got along just fine without even having CompuServe in his house, let alone AOL!

Joe Sixpack doesn't realize that the reason all the cool stuff on the Internet exists is because the phone company stayed out of the way. 

He doesn't even know the difference between his computer and a TV.  And if you look at the telco/cableco public service announcements on TV, they're not talking about network neutrality. They're just telling Joe Sixpack that if he wants to "watch TV on his computer", he should write his Congressdrone.

Joe Sixpack is pretty happy paying $0.10 to his cell phone company to send a 30-character "email".  He's happy to spend $5/month to get a new ringtone every month.  He's happy to spend $15/month to download episodes of his favorite TV show, which he can only watch two or three times on a 2-inch screen.

You really think he's gonna miss the Internet? :-)

  When you say "monitor our activities", do you mean from a distance without us knowing (i.e. using "cookies") or would it flat out prohibit us from going to certain sites, or less of them being Free, etc?

Network neutrality:  Content will be more likely to cost money -- AT&T would much rather be able charge YouTube $0.01 per movie downloaded, forcing them to charge their users, or forcing them out of business altogether and letting them step in with AT&Tube that charges you $0.01 per video.  A conventional voice phone call (analog telephone network) uses 8 kilobits per second of bandwidth -- so when you've got a 512/128 pipe, you've got enough bandwidth to run your own PBX.  Hence the phone companies' mortal fear of VOIP from companies they don't own.

Monitoring:  More like a combination of technologies. 

China, frankly, is going about it the wrong way.  You don't want to block your citizens from seeing what happened in Tienanmen square.  You want to make sure they see what they google for.  The ones who see the picture of Tank Dude and then go back to whatever they were doing before are harmless.  The ones who keep clicking on Western websites and reading more about what happened are the ones you want to keep tabs on, and in extreme cases... hang on, there's a knock at my door :)

Everything's wonderful!  Be free!  Let a thousand flowers bloom!

The public will tolerate what they're told to tolerate. 

Evidentally. And that's what scares the living f**k out of me on every important issue facing us!
http://www.inthe00s.com/smile/13/icon_pale.gif

OK, time for my favorite little topic: The Internet.

Here is the biggest secret of the Internet:  it does not exist.

That's right, there is no such thing as "The Internet".  That is because it is not a thing, it is an idea.  It is a concept.  It is all imagination.  You can no more show somebody the Internet, then you can show them Freedom, Goodness, or the US Government.  It is simply a concept that millions of computers work by through common agreement.

Any computer that follows the guidelines and plugged into the common network are on "The Internet".  From the home computer you are reading this on to the Mainframe in Bangladesh that handles corporate e-mail to the communications server on the International Space Station.  They are all on the Internet.  Change the way they handle network communications, and they are no longer on the Internet.

The Internet is simply a standard set down decades ago by ARPA, to handle internal e-mail and communication.  It evolved over the years, and was adopted by universities and defense contractors to speed up the exchange of information.  And you had hundreds of private companies trying to duplicate this achievement, from The Source and Compuserve to AOL and Prodigy.  These all started as stand-alone civilian versions of the netowrk that ARPA already had in place.  Then about 16 years ago, the US Government decided to open it up for everybody to use.

I myself do not worry about tracking.  That is because in reality, about all the Government is able to track is where you go.  They can tell that at such-and-such a time, you contacted thise web site on this server.  And guess what?  Anybody cqn do that!

The Internet was designed as an open system.  Because it was originally to be used with the ultimate in closed network planning (no outside access), security was not a major issue.  If you were not authorized to be on it, you simply had no access.  All of the connections were dedicated lines, which did nothing but link the handfull of computers together.  And requests for information were sent "in the clear", and everybody had the capibility to see what everybody was doing.

Now fast forward 30 years, and the same ability is still there.  DO you want to see how messy "The Internet" is?  try this:

Go to a DOS prompt (Start/Run, enter CMD or COMMAND).  Then type "Tracert yahoo.com".  See all those items popping up?  They are all points you have to go through to get from your computer to "Yahoo.Com".  And every one of those knows who you are, where you are going, and how you got there.  And with tools like IP Sniffers and Packet Interrogators, I (or anybody else) can see this.  And it is legal, there is nothing you or anybody else can do about it.

So am I worried about the Government trying to find out where I am going on the Internet?  Not at all.  In fact, I am far more worried about Governments like China, who want to censor and block huge parts of the Internet.  That worries me far more then our Government wanting to know where people go.  I really could not care less if the US Government finds out abouy my private little interest in Furby torture and photographing nude Barbie dolls.  They have far more important things to do then bother me.

^ But is it possible for corporations to effectively end the free nature of the internet and make users pay for acess they now get for free?
(excluding the fee you pay for cable, satellite, or whatever)

^ But is it possible for corporations to effectively end the free nature of the internet and make users pay for acess they now get for free?
(excluding the fee you pay for cable, satellite, or whatever)


Somebody has to pay for the netowork servers, and the people needed to maintain them.  Not to mention all that fibre optic and satellite bandwidth used to transmit those bits and bytes.  :-\\

Interestingly back in the '90's when the 'net was growing like gangbusters, most of the players had this ridiculous idea that they did not need to run their businesses for profit, that their first job was to grow a "ppresence o the internet" whatever the heck that was.  Which is why we saw the tech stock bust in 2000.

The question of course is HOW MUCH should be paid?  If you want a one terabyte per second network connection that's mucho dinero.

Somebody has to pay for the netowork servers, and the people needed to maintain them.  Not to mention all that fibre optic and satellite bandwidth used to transmit those bits and bytes.  :-\\

Interestingly back in the '90's when the 'net was growing like gangbusters, most of the players had this ridiculous idea that they did not need to run their businesses for profit, that their first job was to grow a "ppresence o the internet" whatever the heck that was.  Which is why we saw the tech stock bust in 2000.

The question of course is HOW MUCH should be paid?  If you want a one terabyte per second network connection that's mucho dinero.

I am not referring to the maintenance costs of the cyber infrastructure. I'm talking about corporate profiteering under the aegis of the interests of a consorious government.

I'm not as up-to-the-minute on this issue as I need to be. I just read the House voted against so-called "Internet neutrality," which would give the government and corporations--such as Verizon--even more power to monitor and regulate our Internet activities. The bill now has to pass the senate.

Question: How dangerous is this bill if it becomes law, and how will it be enforced?

:o ???



Two words: Big Brother.

Somebody has to pay for the netowork servers, and the people needed to maintain them.  Not to mention all that fibre optic and satellite bandwidth used to transmit those bits and bytes.  :-\\


Absolutely right.


The question of course is HOW MUCH should be paid?  If you want a one terabyte per second network connection that's mucho dinero.


And that's exactly how it's done today.  You wanna shovel bits, you pay for a pipe.  Doesn't matter if you're Google shoveling a terabyte of search requests, Flickr shoveling a terabyte of .JPG pictures over HTTP, or Vonage shoveling a terabyte of VOiP traffic over H.323 or some other protocol, or your ISP shoveling your web page requests over HTTP, or movies, pr0n, or MP3s over BitTorrent.  On a neutral network, all bits are equal.

What the media/telco companies want to do is break neutrality:  All bits are equal, but some bits are more equal than others.  The bits that go to yourphonecompanypictures.com are given priority over the bits that go to flickr.com.  The  bits that go to SomeCrappySearchEngine.com are given priority over bits that go to google.com.  If you want to hook up a VOiP (Voice over Internet Protocol) client, you'll discover that the 8kbps it takes to do it yourself is full of gaps.  And so's Vonage's, or Skype's.  But the $9.99/month "deal" offered by yourcablecompany.com works just fine.  Unless, of course, Vonage and Skype pay yourcablecompany.com (and someoneelsescablecompany.com) $9.98/month in fees on top of what they're already paying their own bandwidth providers in ransom.  And you can probably forget about stuff like BitTorrent and every other P2P application altogether.  ;-)

Two words: Big Brother.


I keep saying we're galloping into fascism, but nobody listens. Everything the right-wing does is to further the cause of a fascist state under neo-aristocratic rule...I mean everything from repealing the estate tax to the so-called "war on terror" to corporate confiscation of the Internet. Everything.

I keep saying we're galloping into fascism, but nobody listens. Everything the right-wing does is to further the cause of a fascist state under neo-aristocratic rule...I mean everything from repealing the estate tax to the so-called "war on terror" to corporate confiscation of the Internet. Everything.


And what, exactly does this little rant have to do with the topic under discussion?

What most of you seem to be missing is the fact that nobody owns the Internet.  The closest we have to ownership is ICANN, which is the company which passes out Domain Names.  They also run the giant database which converts the Domain Name you enter into the exact computer address that access a server.

In fact, I find most of this topic laughable.  There is simply no way to "regulate" which packets passing through The Intenet have priority.  That is because once a piece of information (a "packet") is sent into the Internet, they are all equal.  In fact, they are mostly doubled up, so are often sent 2-5 times each!  In fact, as you are reading this post, it is actually being routed many different ways, all at the same time.  It is then re-assembled at your end, and any duplicate packets are simply discarded.

The only way to regulate which information has priority is through "throtteling".  In other words, allowing some servers to have a higher bandwith then others, allowing them to send out more packets then a different server.  And this is already done.  This is why when you go shopping for a host server for your web page, they talk about their bandwith, and how many pipes they have.  More large pipes means your page is sent out faster.

You can see this in action by going to a few pages.  Geocities is largely a free service, so it is slow.  Yahoo dedicates much less bandwith to Geocities then it does to their own Yahoo.Com service.  So when you bring up Yahoo, it is almost immediate.  Yet if you bring up a Geocities page, it lags for a few seconds and takes longer to come up.  Corporate-Government meddling?  No, simply economics.  Geocities is a minor money maker, while Yahho.Com is their main source of income.

Once a packet is sent out, it simply travels through the fastest and most direct route it can find.  There is no "priority" bit telling routers or servers to make it move in front of other information, it is all handles on a "first in - first out" system.  And if anybody did the TRACERT I mentioned, you will see that it bounces all over the place.

TO put it simply, there is no way to assign priority to data on the Internet.  None.  The most that can happen is that one will be given a larger pipe at the source.  Once it goes into the Internet itself, all data is equal.

And if one group tried to regulate how fast data went through their connection, the data would simply jump to a faster connection.  Try the TRACERT diagnostic I posted earlier, and try it 2 or 3 times in a row.  You will more then likely end up with 2 or 3 different routes from you to Yahoo.Com.  I just tried it, and the first time I went through Atlanta to San Jose.  The second time, I went from Atlanta to Seattle.  The third time, I went from Atlanta to Chicago to Denver.  How on Earth

And as for fees, you are not paying for "The Internet".  You are paying for access from a local provider.  You are paying for the hardware to connect yourself to the infrastructure.  I helped run an ISP in the early 1990's, and there is a lot of money involved in setting up an ISP.  Even a small local ISP like we had involved a T-1 line, roughly 20 servers, and a bank of over 200 modems and phone lines.  The cost of the T-1 was relatively minor compared to the cost of all those phone lines to pass the service to the end user.

A few years ago, we had several attempts at "Free Internet".  Both Net Zero and Juno tried it, and both almost went bankrupt, finally dropping the free service and merging in order to stay in business.  Today, almost all of the small start-up internet services are gone, casualties to attrition, costs, and competition from high-speed services like Cable and DSL.

^ How do the Chinese manage to "censor" so much of the Internet?

???

^ How do the Chinese manage to "censor" so much of the Internet?

???


It is done in the Routers.  The same way that a lot of companies (and households with children) censor the Internet.

You simply set it up so all traffic in and out of your house (business, country) have to go through one set of routers.  You then program the routers to not forward any information from certain IP addresses.  Or to be even more secure, you set it to only forward information to and from pre-approved addresses.  That way, only the information you want is able to get through, and everything else is ignored and not forwarded to the end user.

Computers do it with firewalls.  Go into your computer firewall configuration, and you can block addresses like "Google", or as specific as images.google.com.  In this way, you can restrict what people are able to view.

In a country like China, all internet traffic goes through Government run servers before it is available to the people.  In order to get around that, a lot of hackers have created virtual proxies and private networks to try and get around these blocks.  I read a year or so ago that they even monitor the traffic that goes through phone lines to overseas ISPs.  If a person who is a Chinese citizen access the internet through an overseas connection (not censored) is caught, they face imprisonment and loss of all computer rights.

It is done in the Routers.  The same way that a lot of companies (and households with children) censor the Internet.

You simply set it up so all traffic in and out of your house (business, country) have to go through one set of routers.  You then program the routers to not forward any information from certain IP addresses.  Or to be even more secure, you set it to only forward information to and from pre-approved addresses.  That way, only the information you want is able to get through, and everything else is ignored and not forwarded to the end user.

Computers do it with firewalls.  Go into your computer firewall configuration, and you can block addresses like "Google", or as specific as images.google.com.  In this way, you can restrict what people are able to view.

In a country like China, all internet traffic goes through Government run servers before it is available to the people.  In order to get around that, a lot of hackers have created virtual proxies and private networks to try and get around these blocks.  I read a year or so ago that they even monitor the traffic that goes through phone lines to overseas ISPs.  If a person who is a Chinese citizen access the internet through an overseas connection (not censored) is caught, they face imprisonment and loss of all computer rights.

Is there any way the American government could do something similar, say, in the name of the "War on Terror"?

Is there any way the American government could do something similar, say, in the name of the "War on Terror"?


No, because the Internet in this country goes through millions of different servers, all run by private individuals and companies.  You would have to get the co-operation of every host, server, company, and backbone in the country in order to do something like that.  And I can promise you, it will never happen.

The only other way would be if the government nationalized the Internet.  I see that about as likely to happen as a UFO landing on the Mall in Washington DC.

Something like that can only happen in a country like China, where the Government runs every aspect of a person's life.  In China, the phone company, the ISP, and the television and radio stations are all owned by the State.  Nothing goes through without prior approval of some minister in the Governent.

Ironically, there is an aspect of the Internet that China ignores, and that is where it comes to illegal activities.  Internet servers in China are often used to hose sites dedicated to child porn, copyright violation, phishing, spamming, and all sorts of activity that is illegal in the US and other countries.  The Nigerian 419 scammers have been useing China e-mail servers for years to spread their scam letters.  The Government has taken the stance that as long as it is not violating their laws, they will do nothing about it.  So you have the dichotomy of China having both the most restricted Internet in the world, as well as the most open and lawless Internet in the world.

In short, other then in the case of a country like China, there is no way to restrict the Internet.  Only where you have 100% Government control will you have the ability to restrict access.  And even then, there are small private networks (like BBS systems) where the word can still get out.  Compare that situation to the informal USSR fax news services, which provided information to people that Pravda did not want released.  That was one of the major factors that doomed the 1991 coup by the military.

For this reason, fax machines in China are just as tightly regulated as computers and 2-way radios.  They only want pre-approved people to have the ability to communicate to other people without Government intervention.

You're 90% right -- but I'd like to respectfully disagree on two points:


There is simply no way to "regulate" which packets passing through The Intenet have priority.  That is because once a piece of information (a "packet") is sent into the Internet, they are all equal.


That's the difference.  We're not talking about bandwidth throttling a'la QOS -- we're talking about the Comcast routers that route packets from Comcast's subscribers doing things like, say, silently substituting the results for a DNS lookup  on banners.amazon.com with an IP address that resolves to banners.comcast.com.  Or perhaps substituting "referrer=comcast" to all Amazon.com HTTP GET requests.  ISPs have always been able to do these sorts of things, but have feared the business repercussions. 


Once a packet is sent out, it simply travels through the fastest and most direct route it can find.  There is no "priority" bit telling routers or servers to make it move in front of other information, it is all handles on a "first in - first out" system.  TO put it simply, there is no way to assign priority to data on the Internet.  None.  The most that can happen is that one will be given a larger pipe at the source.  Once it goes into the Internet itself, all data is equal.


In a neutral Internet, this is false.  Look up "QOS".  Quality-of-service prioritization is built into all routers now, and for good reason.

On a non-neutral Internet, it's even more false.  Maybe evilISP.com chooses to route all packets destined for Google through some-barely-tier-1-provider.com, rather than fattest-pipe-available.com.  Historically, we've gotten around this problem through the use of peering agreements.  Perhaps the media-affiliated ISPs are going to, as a Sith Lord once said, "alter the bargain."


A few years ago, we had several attempts at "Free Internet".  Both Net Zero and Juno tried it, and


There's "free as in free beer!", which NetZero and Juno tried, and which failed.

There's also "free as in freedom", which is an entirely different kind of freedom entirely.  The fight for network neutrality is ultimately about this sort of freedom.  If I can't buy bandwidth as a commodity, I can't develop any new networked service without the cooperation of the bandwidth provider. 

The Internet is the largest example of the stupid neutral network.  Stupid neutral networks have given us everything from the WWW, to pre-RIAA-lawsuit-Napster, to Google, to YouTube, and this message board.  None of these things were invented by ISPs.  They were all invented by random geeks who said "Hey!  I can write some pretty cool code, and I can buy my bandwidth to make this code useful to both my customers and my advertisers, and if enough people use my code, I can make money!" 

Cell phones are the largest examples of smart/non-neutral networks.  Smart/non-neutral networks have given us pay-$1.00 for a ringtone, pay $2.00 to watch a TV show on your cell phone, pay $1.00 to take a 640x480 picture, and pay $5.00/month for the privilege of sending it to your friends, who can only watch it on their 2"x2" cell phone screens if they pay $5.00/month for the privilege of receiving it, and this message I'm posting would cost me $0.10 to send, and each of us reading it would have had to pay $0.10 each time we read it.  When was the last time you saw Joe Sixpack hacking away on a new idea to make his cell phone more useful, as opposed to some poor schlub in India being paid $10/hour to beat some half-*ssed spec into shape because some suit at some American phone company hired his outsourcing firm to come up with some sort of half-*ssed feature that wouldn't last ten minutes in a non-monopolized market? 

You're 90% right -- but I'd like to respectfully disagree on two points:

That's the difference.  We're not talking about bandwidth throttling a'la QOS -- we're talking about the Comcast routers that route packets from Comcast's subscribers doing things like, say, silently substituting the results for a DNS lookup  on banners.amazon.com with an IP address that resolves to banners.comcast.com.  Or perhaps substituting "referrer=comcast" to all Amazon.com HTTP GET requests.  ISPs have always been able to do these sorts of things, but have feared the business repercussions. 


And that is why something like that will never happen wide-spread.  And there have actually been court cases over issues like "banner swapping" and "Address redirecting", in every case the person doing the hijacking and forwarding loosing.  AOL tried something similar about 10 years ago, and was threatened with a class-action lawsuit.  They quietly paid off the people who complained, and stopped doing it.

This will never be widespread for several reasons.  First of all, some states (California) already have laws in effect that make this illegal.  And several of the proposed Anti-Spyware laws before Congress also would make this practice illegal.

The other major barrier is user objections.  Microsoft got in trouble a few years ago for trying to force their own search engine as a default in IE.  They had to stop this, and put in the ability to change the default search engine to any search engine the user desires.  If an ISP tried this, it would suffer a customer backlash and probably would shortly be out of business.  The last time I know of this happening was with NetZero, because it was a free service.  When you get your Internet for free, you really can't complain much about the redirections and forced ads and ad changes. 

But it still can only be done on an ISP to ISP basis.  There is no way to put a box on the internet and force the redirection of every internet connection to someplace else.  This would require the cooperation of every ISP and backbone in the Country, and I simply can't see that ever happening.  In many ways, the Internet is still the "Wild West" of the new millenium.  It is the ultimate in Electronic Darwinism, where only the strong fast and innovative survive.  And the last decade is littered with the corpses of NetZero, PointCast, Gator, CometCursot, and every other company that tried tactics like that.

But we now have a federal government that was not democratically elected. The Bush Administration has twice crookedly imposed itself upon the American people, and the American people let it stand. If we are willing to put up with these "intolerable acts," as the Founders would call them, we would be willing to let the government federalize the Internet.
Once the will of the majority no longer matters, there is no limit to what government can do. Far more American people want us out of Iraq than want us in, and yet we are gearing up to occupy that country FOREVER!
Ten years ago I would never have thought we would have let an illegitimately elected government stay in office. I would not have thought this federal government would be trying to kill off the Voting Rights act.  I would not have thought the Supreme Court would uphold blatantly racist gerrymandering. Yet, all of these things have happened.
I have no reason now to disbelieve the federal government will say, "For the protection of children and to further the War on Terror, we are seizing control of the Internet. Anyone caught routing the Internet outside of the central hub in Washington DC will be prosecuted by the federal government."
We have far more in common with China than we did ten years ago!

We have far more in common with China than we did ten years ago!


That is rather off-topic, don't ya think?  We all know you do not like the current Administration.  Must you try to interject that into every topic that comes up in here Maxwell?  That really has no relevence on the ability to take over the Internet.  It simply is not possible.  Period.

And I will believe what you are saying when I see a line of tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Ave, running over and killing tens of thousands of people.

Trying to state that the Government here is like that in China does a great dis-service.  Both to those in office here, and to all those who died in China who really have been killed by their Government.

I'm not as up-to-the-minute on this issue as I need to be. I just read the House voted against so-called "Internet neutrality," which would give the government and corporations--such as Verizon--even more power to monitor and regulate our Internet activities. The bill now has to pass the senate.


By the way, you are totally misinterpreting the phrase "Internet Neutrality".

Under current laws, cable and phone companies are required to allow other companies to "piggyback" on their lines to provide internet service.  So if ABC Bell offers DSL service, you can go to "XYZ Internet" and pay them for DSL service.  The phone company is currently required to give XYZ Internet a discount price on DSL service.  This allows XYZ to make money, but also takes money away from ABC Bell.

This is because they basically have to provide the service to XYZ Internet "at cost".  XYZ is able to make a profit, even though they are actually providing nothing.  The phone company provides the phone lines, the internet access, even the technical suppot if something goes wrong.  The only thing the Internet company provides is the DSL Modem.

This rule made sense early on.  10 years ago, Phone Companies did not want to offer Internet service to local users.  They wanted to work as either a backbone for local ISPs, or as a provider to businesses.  Today, high speed has grown to a major part of the industry.  In addition, you also have other ways to get high speed in your home.

10 years ago, DSL was basically the only choice, and it was expensive ($100+) and hard to get.  Today, you have inexpensive DSL, cable internet, sattelite, cell phone, even wide area wi-fi.  The rule was originally put in as a way to prevent the phone companies from getting a monopoly in high-speed internet.  That monopoly is now broken by other technologies.

Where I work is a good example.  When my boss put in DSL 6 years ago, the phone company did not offer it in our area.  He had to pay another local company to get it installed.  Ever since then, when we have problems it has been a nightmare.  First we had to call the ISP, then the phone company.  And quite often, they would play "pass the buck", each one claiming the problem was with the other.  Finally a few months ago he dumped the ISP and we now get our DSL straight from the phone company.  And we have had no problems since then.  And not only that, the service is faster and cheaper!

The "Internet Neutrality" bill has nothing to do with anything but that, eliminating the requirement that phone companies have to lease their lines out "at cost" to third parties.  The major arguement has been that if that happens, it will cause prices to increase.  That is nonsense, since there is still competition between the various forms of high speed available.  If the phone companies increased their rates, the cable companies would drop theirs to pick up the business.  If both of them raised their rates, then wide area wi-fi companies will pop-up to take over the slack (in my area, we have had 2 different wide area wi-fi companies appear in the last 6 months, and we only have a population of around 125,000).

If the phone companies increased their rates, the cable companies would drop theirs to pick up the business.  If both of them raised their rates, then wide area wi-fi companies will pop-up to take over the slack (in my area, we have had 2 different wide area wi-fi companies appear in the last 6 months, and we only have a population of around 125,000).


If you think AT&T and Comcast have any interest whatsoever in peering with small upstart ISPs, you're dreaming.

If you think AT&T and Comcast have any interest in developing new and innovative services, you're dreaming in HDTV, which is about the only thing either of those companies would have any interest in delivering, as pay-per-view.

This isn't an (R) vs. (D) thing, except the telco lobby has had a 50 year head-start on buying legislators over the tech lobby.  If the (D)s were in power, the debate would be the same, but the party labels reversed.  Not one of the jerkwads up on the Hill has the vaguest idea of what they're talking about.  This is a technological issue, not a political one, and the only reason it's being talked about in the political arena is because the telco/cable operators haven't a clue on how to make money delivering anything more interesting than 500 channels of pay-per-view video, but they do know how to buy the laws that are required to stop the sort of innovation that has for 20 years rendered their business models obsolete.

If you think the Democrats are standing up for network neutrality for the sole reason that the Republicans oppose it, you're right.  They don't know (or care!) any more than the 'Pubs.

If you think the Democrats are wrong on the issue -- that is, if you genuinely think that bit-haulers like AT&T and Comcast provide more honest-to-Gawd value to the 'net than companies like Amazon, Google, and the entire Free/Open Source software community -- please, please reconsider your positions.  Just pretend you didn't know which party was lobbying for which side of the issue, and read the following two URLs:

Short editorial, pro-NN:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2003092244_telecom29.html

Detailed explanation of the issues from both sides:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_neutrality

Personally, I don't want to go back to the days of paying per-megabit traffic charges.  I don't want to go back to the days of "walled gardens" like AOL, Prodigy, or Compuserve.  And although I've had 20 years of fun using software and services that no telco would ever have invented, let alone tried to commercialize, I'd like to see what the next 20 years will bring.  This bill will seriously threaten the tech industry -- a lot of funding for new startups will be denied, and  fewer open source projects (particularly P2P-oriented) will ever reach critical masses of users.  That's fine if all you want to do is watch TV-over-TCP/IP, but I've got better things to do with my hardware.

That is rather off-topic, don't ya think?  We all know you do not like the current Administration.  Must you try to interject that into every topic that comes up in here Maxwell?  That really has no relevence on the ability to take over the Internet.  It simply is not possible.  Period.

And I will believe what you are saying when I see a line of tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Ave, running over and killing tens of thousands of people.

Trying to state that the Government here is like that in China does a great dis-service.  Both to those in office here, and to all those who died in China who really have been killed by their Government.

Must I inject it into every topic? That's like saying, "There's a man pointing a gun at your head, so what? Why are you always on about that?"
http://www.inthe00s.com/smile/07/nut.gif

No, the Bush Administration has not pulled a "Tianenman Square" on U.S. citizens yet, but I wouldn't put it past them!

Though, indeed, this is peripheral to the topic. I'm trying to understand this "Internet Neutrality" thing and you and Foo Bar have a much better grasp on how the Internet works than I do, so that's why I'm asking!

http://villagevoice.com/news/0114,ferguson,23569,1.html

i love what this dude says about the net. it's way over my head, most of it, but the basic idea seems to be that control can be exerted through something called the root domain server, so that as long as you are in one of the more typical extensions -- .com, .net, etc. -- you're pretty much owned.

http://villagevoice.com/news/0114,ferguson,23569,1.html

i love what this dude says about the net. it's way over my head, most of it, but the basic idea seems to be that control can be exerted through something called the root domain server, so that as long as you are in one of the more typical extensions -- .com, .net, etc. -- you're pretty much owned.



Hmmm..never heard of Garrin. I like Nam June Paik's work, though. He's been around since the '60s.
Anyway, that article describes things as they were five years ago. I wonder how much has changed since then.

Anyway, that article describes things as they were five years ago. I wonder how much has changed since then.


THings are pretty much the same.  And ICANN is still in charge of giving out internet domain names.

Remember to one of my first posts in here.  ICANN runs the monster database that does the redirection that sends you to a certain site when you type in www.sitename.com.  It does much more then simply give out addresses and charge money for it.  It also mediates in disputes over domain names (like the ongoing debate over www.nissan.com).  It also maintains the tens of thousands of servers that do the actual redirection.

There are clusters of these servers all over the world.  This is done both to make the redirection faster, and to provide a backup in case one goes down (through hacker attacks, power failures, line breaks, or other problems).  So it is not as simple as taking money for giving out a name.  ICANN also provides an extensive network of computers and other services that helps keep the Internet running smoothly.

For this kind of service, there has to be one company in charge.  Otherwise, you will have nothing but a mess of domain names and schemes that make no sense.  And you will then have a problem of who actually ownes a domain name.  If two companies try to register the same name through two different companies, which one gets the name?

The issue brought up in the article of having more "Top Level Domains", and that has been a battle for years.  And there are good arguements on both sodes for either allowing more of them, or keeping the number small.

On the con side, the more top level domains you have, the more slowdowns you will have by having to search through more names in the database before the correct one is found.  You also increase the cost of companies by having to reguster even more domain names to prevent "site hijackers" from stealing their clients.

WHen a company like Sony registers a site, they normally register the .COM, .NET, .BIZ, and every other possible variation available.  They will often register common mispellings also, to prevent others from taking advantage of a typo.  Now this does not have any effect on a company like Sony, they can afford to register thousands of different names.  But for a small local business, this can rapidly run up to more then they can afford.  Several years ago I set up a web page for a small casting company.  He paid $1,500 to register several variations of his site name, to prevent others from doing it and trying to steal his customers.  If you increase the number of Top Level Domains, that cost would quickly become astrononical.

One of the reasons there are only a few Top Level DOmains originally was for simplicity.  .COM, .EDU, .NET, .GOV, and .MIL was done in order to try and keep it compartmentalized and easy to find what was wanted.  Remember, originally the Internet was for research, government communication, and that was it.  Only later did the use of the net as a commercial tool become evident, and by then the names were already in use.

On the other hand, I would like to see more names out there.  .XXX is needed, and I think it was wrong for ICANN to not allow it.  Myself, I think that it should be put in force, and then all holders of .COM and other domain names be required to migrate within a set time (2 years) to migrate from .COM and others to .XXX.  This will free up millions of web names for other users, and keep them in their own little area of the net.  It will also make it easier for parents and others to restrict access to such sites from kids and others.

Some of the ideas people have though just go to far.  If they authorized the thousands of top level domains that people want, the internet will become pure chaos.  Right now, if you are told to go to a site, you can almost guarantee that it will be a .COM address.  If there was a .CAR comain for car lots and companies, you may then have somebody who wants to have a .CARS, so they can get a name that was already taken by somebody else.  The more top level domains that are made, the harder it will be to police them, and keep order.  In addition, the increased number of names in the list, the slower it will be for the servers to bring up the right site when you request it.

I have had to deal with ICANN several times over the years.  Some of the issues have been resolved to my satisfaction, others have not been.  In one case, a hacker hijacked a name we tried to register.  ICANN found out that the same person hijacked over 100 other names, and was trying to extort money from the rightfull owners.  WIthin a week we had the name.

In another instance, I was trying to register a name that was in use, but expired.  The owner had registered hundreds of names, and was squatting on them, trying to sell them to make money.  The one I wanted expired 3 months earler, but was still in the database.  ICANN said that it would be cleared up sometime in the next 6 months, and could not tell me when.  I watched that name for 4 months, but somebody else grabbed it before I was able to.  And of course, it was yet another squatter, who simply wanted it to sell to somebody else (the asking price was $10,000).

Sure, the current system has problems.  But the alternative would result in the fracturing of the internet, with an "every person for themselves" attitude, where nobody would be in controll and hundreds of companies would be trying to shove their idea of an "internet standard" on everybody else.That would result in a bigger mess then we have now.

I've seen the tye-o phenemonon myself. Apparently, Google did not regester the type-o variations, at least not all of them. Google.com is the address I type most often, so by probability, I have seen a bunch of type-o variations. I think a couple were porno sites, don't know if they're still there (I'm not referring to "booble" either!)

Even though Google is a private company, I think the service should remain free as a public resource. I use Google all the time for my work, it's the most facile reference tool on the Internet as far as I'm concerned.

I remember the "business.com" story. There's a difference between domain "squatting" and domain "selling." For instance the guy who runs Mode Records registered mode.com very early in the game. A little while ago, he changed his domain to moderecords.com.  He told me he did it because moderecords.com made more business sense. When I asked him if the sale of "mode.com" was a good deal, he just said, "Oh yeah!" I figured it wasn't polite to ask him how much he got, but I bet it was a good chunk of change!

I'm not sure it's fair to require all "adult" sites to register as .xxx or .sex or whatever. Who gets to say what the determining criteria shall be? Is it nudity alone, or does it have to be "explicit sexual content," or does it have to "appeal exclusively to prurient interests." Then there's the whole questions of "community standards." Jurists have been debating these questions for decades. I think you'd have a lot of difficulty enforcing such a domain requirement for so-called "adult" websites.

I don't know about corporations taking over the whole internet... but I do see some potential problems in the future.

There are many small time people/businesses that try to make things available to the public for little or no cost.   This becomes a problem when the businesses get big... and become targets for lawsuits.

Take, for example, Napster.   I realize that Napster was a resource for illegal material, however Napster was not charging users to upload/download this material, yet they were sued.  I may be mistaken, but I don't recall a swarm of ads on their site either, so how are they supposed to pay damages??

Craigslist is another example.  I've never advertised on there personally, but as far as I know you can post ads there for free.  They were almost sued because someone posted an ad for a roommate and in the ad said they were not comfortable with middle eastern people (or something to that effect).   How on earth is Craigslist supposed to have someone monitor every single ad that is posted when they receive no revenue from advertisers???

Unfortunately, people are always looking for someone to blame... and I am afraid that free websites are going to slowly fizzle away because domain owners are going to need to protect themselves from the sue-happy portion of our population.

Modified to add:  as I scrolled down this page of threads, I saw one titled "14 year old rape victim sues myspace"  I haven't read the thread yet... but this is another prime example.   So is myspace supposed to monitor everything posted somehow, and how are they supposed to pay people to do this when they are not charging the public?

These lawsuits take away from the publicness of the internet.   Because as long as it's truly public, there is nobody to blame.  And that works just fine for me, but I wonder how many people feel they have been wronged somehow and are furious that they can't sue the internet. ;D

Senator Ted Stevens, arguing against Internet Neutrality, displays his fine grasp of the issues involved:

http://blog.wired.com/27BStroke6/?entry_id=1512499

"I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?  Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially."

An internet.  When you send a letter by means of a fax machine, it's called a "fax", so obviously a letter sent by means of the Internet is called "an Internet"!  Stevens is one of the smart ones!

It gets funnier as it goes along.  His explanation of Netflix is nothing short of comedy gold.  But his misunderstanding of the reason why the... umm, those two IP networks that begin with "S" and "N" is even funnier.  Security?  Compartmentalization?  Nope, it's about delivering emails (oops, "internets", gotta show I'm hip with the new lingo! :) in timeframes of less than a day.

But to anyone arguing against internet neutrality:  The guy who's representing your side isn't even trying to understand the issue. 

If you read between the lines for the kernel of truth,  it's this:  "There's pipes.  If you're not paying for every megabyte you shovel through those pipes over and above what you're already paying, my clients -- the telcos and cablecos -- will shut you down.  After we've shut down all video-on-demand (YouTube, some future version of Netflix) or VoIP (Vonage, Skype) services offered by any company other than a telco or cableco, my clients can then sell their video-on-demand and VoIP services, because we've legislated away their competition.  An OC-192 for me, and none for thee, and I didn't even know 'The OC' was in its hundred-and-ninety-second season until one of my staffers sent me an Internet to tell me about it!"

I've seen the tye-o phenemonon myself. Apparently, Google did not regester the type-o variations, at least not all of them. Google.com is the address I type most often, so by probability, I have seen a bunch of type-o variations. I think a couple were porno sites, don't know if they're still there (I'm not referring to "booble" either!)


There is a good example with this site.

If you make a mistake and type "www.intheoos.com" instead of "inthe00s.com", you get redirected to a totally different site.  And it is obviously a "placeholder site", the kind which is simply there to keep the name registered.  And of course they are hoping to get some traffic by people who make a mistake when entering in the name of this site.

Of course, they are also making money each time it happens.  THere are sponsored links on this site, so they make money every time combody just enters the site.  Granted it is not much, but the more people see it, the more money they make.

Senator Ted Stevens, arguing against Internet Neutrality, displays his fine grasp of the issues involved


Stevens is a nasty piece o' work. Strom Thurmond north. Senile and bitter, this is a guy who threatened to resign from the senate if money for his Alaskan bridges got redirected to Hurricane Katrina victims.  This is a guy who wears an Incredible Hulk necktie to show the other senators how "serious" he is. This is a guy who called the day the senate voted down the Arctic oil drilling at ANWAR: "The worst day of my life!"
Senator, what about the day your wife died in a plane crash?
Who am I to say? I never met Mrs. Stevens!
http://www.inthe00s.com/smile/10/vogel.gif

I hope this "net neutrality" bill goes through.  I don't want the internet treated like a cable package, where you only get certain sites if they pay the ISP enough money.  What if the website your blog is on can't be accessed?  Then what?  Or what if you're bored and just want to surf around and see what you find?  Are they going to send you a list of sites you can access so you know which ones to avoid? 

I hope this "net neutrality" bill goes through.  I don't want the internet treated like a cable package, where you only get certain sites if they pay the ISP enough money.  What if the website your blog is on can't be accessed?  Then what?  Or what if you're bored and just want to surf around and see what you find?  Are they going to send you a list of sites you can access so you know which ones to avoid? 


I doubt that would ever happen.  It is a simple case of "Supply & Demand".

In the early days, AOL tried that.  And the result was that they lost thousands of customers to other services that did not censor their access.  MSN did it to a lesser degree, with the same result.  To put it simply, people do not want their access restricted.  And if a service tried it now, they would loose a large percentage of their customer base.

I have 5 choices for high speed where I am at.  If Comcast tried that, they would loose me as a customer forver, and I would go to one of the other services.  CenturyTel already lost me as a customer forever earlier this year by their incompetance to provide basic service.

And if you live in an area where you only have one company, I am sure that others would pop up to take over if your local company tried it.  One advantage of free enterprise is that when a provider pisses off their customers, there are always dozens of smaller companies willing and eager to take over where they have dropped the ball.  Look at how many people are dropping their home phones and useing cell phones for all of their needs.