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Two-tier Internet


Fidcal

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It's basically another money-grubbing scheme made necessary by competition.

 

My reading:

 

What it means is that content providers will be now be charged not only by their chosen ISP for their bandwidth, but also by any and all ISPs who's networks they want to move through. So...

 

Jack's Hammers will be online through BT, Jack's chosen ISP...

And, say, Natasha wants to see Jack's latest video demo of his New Pneumatic!

Natasha's ISP is AT&T.

Jack needs to pay AT&T to have a smooth flow into Nastasha networld...

A little extra greasing of the palms of AT&T get's a little smoother flow to Natasha...

 

IOW,

Eternal Headline:

Money-grubbing Mutherfuckers Continue To Muck Things Up

the system dictates

Edited by Aprilsister
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Actually, the way I read it the Content Connect service is actually a geographic content caching system, similar to Akamai. This allows content providers to pay a fee to have their content cached locally to the user by BT or the ISP, rather than having to meet all of their demand themselves.

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When an ISP starts to become a content provider, they begin to have an incentive to "throttle" or even ban other content providers from serving up high-bandwidth content, since they are pushing their own video streams. Without net neutrality, content providers will have to make deals with the ISPs to keep their content available to the customers, maybe even exclusivity deals. Bigger content providers will cut the deal because they imperil themselves otherwise, and it's an easy choice to make. Think ESPN, Netflix. Smaller content providers that play counter to the ISPs can't necessarily pay the extortion fees, and so they get marginalized in the face of faster offerings.

 

The ISPs are a stubborn bunch. They decry piracy because it maxes out throughput usage, but they don't want to be held responsible for identifying and snuffing out illegal content, that means more liability. They tell us that there's nothing they can do about bandwidth problems... while offering unlimited usage plans. Even a sensible option like metered usage plans is still a ripoff in price and bandwidth, since there is no willingness to build new infrastructure, and there are local monopolies at play. In the US, ISPs have squandered at least $200 billion of taxpayer money and still resort to the same bullshit excuses and fearmongering that streaming video or BitTorrent will overload the system. If you make only cosmetic improvements, sure. There's also an unwillingness to move to IPv6 among many other problems.

 

http://www.pbs.org/c...810_002683.html

 

On the flip side of all that, any Net Neutrality initiative has to be enforced somehow, by governments through new regulatory agencies or perhaps in the case of the States, a broad expansion of the FCC's "mandate", but these governments are already bought and paid for by the corporations and already like to monitor and copy traffic without warrants.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

 

Perhaps universal encryption could alleviate the problem of content being placed into tiers and given preference, but that raises its own suspicions and does nothing to guarantee that you'll be able to use anywhere near the amount of bandwidth you paid for or ought to be getting. (- aka they could just throttle all of your traffic personally)

Edited by jaxa
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Room 641A makes unauthorised phone tapping seem trivial by comparison. I guess all governments are doing it now. These words I'm typing no doubt will flow through these rooms.

 

Back on topic I'm getting the feeling that this two-tier idea means we will still be free to access everything we can now but a lot of non-ISP-favoured stuff will be very slow? So the ISP chooses what he prefers that we access by giving it more bandwidth?

 

Hard to see the effects of all this but it sounds bad for the user as usual. And probably costs more.

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Microsoft hinted at the possible future of these moves with it's "Dot Net" framework for Managed Code online. (ASP.NET ? forgot the name of the original plan...)

 

While the Dot Net we know now has it's benefits for Application development, the original plan was to have Websites running Dot Net code and getting authority to operate through strict hierarchical permission (similar to the SSL Certificate Authority). Microsoft's twist on this idea is that any sub-deployment at any time could be disabled and Microsoft would be at the TOP to the approval process. So if a website was not acting according to Microsoft's guidelines they could shut down all sites tied to that hierarchy. This would supposedly make the Internet more secure and wholesome at the expense of letting Microsoft run the show... :ph34r:

Edited by nbohr1more

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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