"Internet 2: The Death of the Internet" (try and google it, go on, i dare ya!)
ironically...
critical info has nearly disappeared...
and what's mostly left refers to "terrorist threats"...
which endorse greater control...
go figure...
sorry...
this is all i found...
but keep an eye out for Internet 2...
it's coming for sure...
(...)
CNN
Internet 2 works to reinvent the Web
From Kristie Lu Stout
Tuesday, March 11, 2003 Posted: 11:10 AM EST (1610 GMT)
HONG KONG, China -- Ten years after it began being embraced by the public, architects say the Internet is far from what it was destined to be, and they are working on a sequel.
In 1993 Marc Andreessen launched Mosaic, the first browser to navigate the Web. In this vintage cyberspace, gray pages and low-resolution graphics were rife.
"I remember downloading it and running it on x-windows when it was running, said Pindar Wong, from Packet Clearing House.
"So now it's really great to see parents and grandchildren and everyone using the Internet sort of through browser interfaces. It is a milestone. But I think the game is changing."
It is changing because these days, the Internet is a much bigger beast. The "critical infrastructure" that hosts governments, businesses and universities is far-reaching, but far from flawless.
With jerky video and hourglass icons, it's little wonder some call it the world wide wait. But one group is out to change that.
Internet 2 - FACT BOX
Internet2 is a consortium being led by 202 universities working in partnership with industry and government to develop and deploy advanced network technologies.
Enter "Internet 2" -- a U.S.-led effort to build cyberspace all over again, this time better.
"Well the current Internet is not designed for the next generation of applications," said Ted Hanss, Director of Internet 2.
"It's really focused on tens of millions of dial-up users. Not the applications that would really change how we do teaching, learning and education."
The Internet 2 backbone in the United States moves billions of bits of data per second, 300,000 times faster than the connection we have at home, said Hanss.
Moving with such speed, Internet 2 will be able to provide remote diagnosis for doctors, send detailed medical files in a flash, stage high-resolution videoconferences and download virtual reality applications.
Champions of the project say Internet 2 shows what the net will do three to five years from now.
'Wonderful experiment'
But even a souped-up cyberspace is susceptible to worms, viruses and just plain junk or spam.
And then there's the millions of mobile devices and appliances that are moving online, requiring more IP addresses.
Back at the Internet monitoring station, engineers are scrambling to surmount those challenges, taking heart from their recent achievement.
"I would view the last 10 years as a wonderful experiment," said Wong.
"Many of us were just kids, still young at heart now. We were trying all these different things. And we made our fair share of mistakes. The question is what can we learn from those mistakes?"
The challenge is to build a cyber-sequel that's not just a pipe dream.
SOURCE - http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/03/11/internet2/
(...)
TomPaine.com
The Death Of The Internet
How Industry Intends To Kill The 'Net As We Know It
Jeff Chester is executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy.
The Internet's promise as a new medium -- where text, audio, video and data can be freely exchanged -- is under attack by the corporations that control the public's access to the 'Net, as they see opportunities to monitor and charge for the content people seek and send. The industry's vision is the online equivalent of seizing the taxpayer-owned airways, as radio and television conglomerates did over the course of the 20th century.
To achieve this, the cable industry, which sells Internet access to most Americans, is pursuing multiple strategies to closely monitor and tightly control subscribers and their use of the net. One element can be seen in industry lobbying for new use-based pricing schemes, which has been widely reported in trade press. Related to this is the industry's new public relations campaign, which seeks to introduce a new "menace" into the pricing debate and boost their case, the so-called "bandwidth hog."
But beyond political and press circles are another equally important development: new technologies being developed and embraced that can, in practice, transform today's open Internet into a new industry-regulated system that will prevent or discourage people from using the net for file-sharing, internet radio and video, and peer-to-peer communications. These are not merely the most popular cutting-edge applications used by young people; they also are the tools for fundamental new ways of conducting business and politics.
These goals and objectives are visible to anyone who cares to look at the arcane world of telecommunications policy and planning, either in the industry trade press or government documents. The bottom line is the industry want to kill the Internet as we know it.
Take a minute and wade through this bit of arcana -- and ponder its implications.
"The IP Service Control System from Ellacoya Networks gives the Broadband Operator 'Total Service Control' to closely monitor and tightly control its subscribers, network and offerings." So reads the Web site of Ellacoya.com, a relatively new firm, describing the business-to-business service that it is selling to large Internet service providers.
Ellacoya is backed by Wall Street investment powerhouse, Goldman Sachs, which sees a major opportunity to turn around the red ink-plagued broadband sector. Continuing, the website explains, "Establishing Total Service control enables operators to better manage traffic on the network, [and] easily introduce a range of tiered and usage based service plans... Talkative applications, especially peer-to-peer programs like KaZaA and Morpheus, tend to fill all of the available bandwidth... The IP Service Control System allows operators to identify, limit and report on these aggressive applications."
The fundamental character of the Internet today is that it lacks precisely these kinds of tolls, barriers and gatekeepers. But technology like Ellacoya's hardware and software is not just an enticing idea; it's more of a silver bullet for beleaguered telecom executives. It's being tested in industry trials and points to the kind of Internet the industry would like to develop over the next few years. The way telecom corporations get from today's open-access Internet to their version of the future starts by changing how people pay for the net.
Industry's New Business Plan
Most people now pay a flat fee for online access. But the big media companies offering Internet service; Comcast, ATT, AOL -- would like to change that, and already have in a few test locations.
The broadband industry's plans to institute tiered pricing have been widely reported in its trade press. There are numerous articles about replacing today's open 'Net environment with industry-self-described versions of "walled gardens" or "Internet Lite." (See "Cable Operators Seek to Corral Bandwidth Hogs", Cable Datacom News, 10/01/02) The central feature of these proposals is much like telephone companies; there's a price plan for everyone.
To make the case to regulators that such pricing is fair and overdue, cable operators have begun a PR effort, spinning that a small percent of users account for a disproportionately large amount of bandwidth used on broadband networks. They've created and embraced the pejorative term, "bandwidth hog," to describe those -- such as music-obsessed college students -- who find robust uses for high-speed connections. Already major news sources, such as the BBC, and technology journalists are using the term in their reports.
To deal with this "problem," the companies are considering a variety of approaches to ensure they remain in full control of their bandwidth -- unless consumers can afford to pay the hefty access fees. Under a typical plan, a user would be allotted a limited amount of bandwidth per month, and would be charged extra fees for going over this amount. This approach isn't very different from the software industry, where the free versions of an application are intended to frustrate and prompt people to buy the 'better' version.
Bandwidth caps have already been implemented in Canada by major Internet service provider Sympatico, Inc., and observers have been quick to note that the limit -- 5 GB per month -- would effectively restrict regular use of emerging applications such as Internet radio, streaming media and video-on-demand.
Consider this excerpt from an article about Sympatico's bandwidth caps in the May 6 edition of Toronto Globe and Mail by reporter Jack Kapica.
A classic conflict has arisen over streaming media, especially of radio. In a recent letter to globetechnology.com, Andrew Cole, manager of media relations for Bell Sympatico, defended the 5GB bit cap, saying that "In my experience, Internet radio stations usually transmit at approximately 20 Kbps. This equates to 1.2MB per minute, or 72MB per hour. At this rate, a HSE customer could enjoy 70 hours of Internet Radio per month and remain within the bandwidth usage plan."
But a 20-Kbps stream is considered poor quality by many people who tune into Internet-based radio stations for such things as classical music concerts. For these people, audio quality streamed at 20 Kbps has been described as "pathetic at best, somewhat akin to AM radio" by Tony Petrilli of Level Platforms Inc. of Ottawa.
"Decent audio quality starts at 56 Kbps to 64 Kbps, and really gets acceptable only around 100 Kbps," he said. This alone, continued Mr. Petrilli, "will blow the cap, let alone any other form of surfing, such as looking at movie trailers or even reading Web-based news. Heaven forbid that someone listens to 90 minutes a day of quality Internet radio. That way we'd blow the cap in 20 days.
When you consider the fact that the largest American telecommunications firms are often part of the same mega-corporation with music, video or movie-producing entertainment divisions -- such as AOL-Time Warner -- you can see how an industry-regulated Internet would handily end music and movie industry worries about Napster-like file swapping by people who don't want to pay industry-monopolized retail prices for content.
Thus, the strategic and technically feasible solutions embodied by companies such as Ellacoya is obviously why Goldman-Sachs was keen to invest in the firm -- as it offers the actual means to monetize the net and turn around the revenue-poor broadband sector.
According to Ellacoya's technical datasheet, operators can create "up to 51,000 unique policies that can be combined to generate limitless numbers of subscriber policies." Such rules, they explain, can either permit, deny, priority queues, address lock, rate limit or redirect access. The same technology also poses new concerns over privacy, since Ellacoya's technology "collects usage statistics for subscribers and applications, capturing service events, session details, and byte counts.... Operators can 'stamp' the subscribers identity on all records."
The Industry Spin
The cable industry will argue that such ubiquitous control systems and restrictive pricing structures are necessary to resolve bandwidth backups. But the fact is, this cannot be the case, because cable systems are constructed to avoid bandwidth shortages. But don't take my word for it.
Mike LaJoie, vice president for advanced technology at AOL-Time Warner told MultiChannel News, "The way that the HFC (hybrid fiber coaxial) architecture works, we never run out of bandwidth," LaJoie said. "We can always split or do other things that will give us the bandwidth that we want, so it really ends up being a desire to provide the best and highest experience for our customers." (See "HD on VOD Searches for Resolution", Multichannel News, 09/30/02) What these statements make clear is that the cable industry's goal for broadband is to monetize bandwidth. By charging a toll for every bit, the industry can simultaneously extract great profits from the new applications that it allows on its networks, as well as restrict access to those that it finds problematic, i.e. those that compete with its own content offerings. In short, the industry finally sees a way to make money online.
Of course, these calculations are utterly self-serving, ignoring the fact that the net was developed with tax dollars and has been an incubator for an array of innovations that extend far beyond creating new profit centers for big media companies. The envisioned control structures will inhibit robust Internet use by early broadband adopters, and discourage development of new high-speed applications such as Internet-based telephone and video-on-demand, thus slowing overall broadband growth.
Worse, this business model will erect high economic and technical barriers to entry for non-commercial and public interest uses of the high-speed Internet, threatening civic discourse, artistic expression and non-profit communications. In moving to implement this highly centralized vision for broadband, the cable industry does not simply ignore the democratic and competitive history of the Internet -- it is actively hostile to it.
Consumption-based pricing and other restrictive access controls contradict the spirit of openness and innovation that built the Internet in the first place, and will do irreparable harm to its future as a medium for small business initiatives, non-commercial users and democratic discourse. New threats to privacy are also clear, given the intrusive nature of the technology to closely monitor all online use. If you think spam is bad now...
And Where Is The FCC?
This new threat to online communications is a direct consequence of recent Federal Communications Commission policies by Chairman Michael Powell that permit cable companies to operate their broadband platforms in a "discriminatory, non-open access" manner. This legalese means the FCC, the historic guardian of the public interest in the communications field, has abdicated its founding charge: to serve the public interest before private interests.
In sum, the Internet as we now know it -- and its revolutionary promise -- may soon pass into the history books. In the absence of public policy safeguards, the emerging pricing and control structures will fundamentally change the kinds of information -- and way it's delivered -- on the Internet. The ramifications extend far beyond the quarterly reports and shareholder earnings for the nation's telecommunications corporations.
The consequences are cultural and will affect the pace and character of progress in the early 21st century. If the communications companies impose tolls, roadblocks and dead ends on the information 'superhighway', they will be robbing public trust resources in much the same way 19th century mining companies pilfered public lands and 20th century radio and television networks privatized the public's airwaves.
Click here to subscribe to our free e-mail dispatch and get the latest on what's new at TomPaine.com before everyone else! You can unsubscribe at any time and we will never distribute your information to any other entity.
Published: Oct 24 2002
SOURCE - http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/6600
(...)
Led by more than 200 U.S. universities, working with industry
and government, Internet2 develops and deploys advanced
network applications and technologies for research and higher
education, accelerating the creation of tomorrow's Internet.
SOURCE - http://www.internet2.edu/
(...)
Bloggers lobby to fight regulation by government
Associated Press | July 1 2005
Web log founders who built followings with anti-establishment postings are now lobbying the establishment to try to fend off government regulation. Some are even working with a political action committee, lawyers and public-relations consultants to do it.
They say they have no choice.
"There's a certain responsibility I have to help protect the medium. I have the platform, the voice to be able to do so," said Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, founder of the Web log http://www.DailyKos.com.
Moulitsas testified Tuesday at a hearing on a Federal Election Commission proposal that would extend some campaign finance rules to the Internet, including bloggers. He urged the FEC to take a hands-off approach.
"We have a democratic medium that allows anyone to have true freedom of the press. We have average citizens publishing their thoughts through research, through journalism, their activism and encouraging others to do the same," Moulitsas told commissioners.
Moulitsas also is working with a lawyer who volunteered to help bloggers fight new government regulations and whose efforts were promoted in a PR firm press release Monday. Moulitsas is prepared to lobby Congress himself if necessary, and he is the treasurer of BlogPac, a political action committee formed last year by bloggers. Another witness, Michael Krempasky, founder of RedState.org, a pro-Republican blog, called bloggers "citizen journalists" and said that like traditional media, they should get an exemption from campaign finance regulation.
"What goal would be served by protecting Rush Limbaugh's multimillion-dollar talk radio program, but not a self-published blogger with a fraction of the audience?" Krempasky asked the commission.
Duncan Black — who founded the http://www.atrios.blogspot.com blog — featured a headline Monday on his Web site, "Bite me, Congressman," that linked to criticism of a Republican House committee chairman over global warming.
Asked whether testifying at hearings and organizing PACs are a signs that bloggers are adopting mainstream political techniques, Black said he and his colleagues do not have much choice.
"I think once you do achieve a certain degree of traffic, influence, notoriety — however you want to call it — eventually the outsider label is not perfectly applicable anymore," said Black, who describes himself as a "recovering economist." He too planned to testify before the FEC.
Federal election officials until now have steered clear of Internet oversight, siding with bloggers and other online activists who portray the Web as a laboratory of grass-roots political participation and an outlet for free speech that should develop unhampered by the government.
But online political activity has become increasingly more sophisticated since the FEC last examined it a few elections ago.
Since the 2000 presidential campaign, when Arizona Sen. John McCain made a splash by raising millions online, candidates have raised tens of millions of dollars, and online political ads, consultants and organizing have become commonplace. Political parties and campaigns have added blogging to their Web sites; some online political strategists raise their profiles through blogs, then get hired by campaigns.
A survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that just over one-third of U.S. adults went to the Internet during the 2004 elections to get political news, share their views on candidates or issues, volunteer for a campaign, or make a political donation. Nearly 30 percent of Internet users say they read blogs, Pew found.
Internet advertising is also big business, and it's becoming a standard feature of blogs. Black said a small number of bloggers make a living from advertising revenue, but he added that most, including himself, have other jobs.
Acknowledging the Internet's growth, a federal judge last year ordered the FEC to extend some of the nation's campaign finance and spending limits to political activity on the Web.
Bloggers fear that will mean new, unique limits on their activities, even though several of the commission's six members have indicated they have no desire to go beyond what the judge ordered.
The FEC plans to decide this summer how far to go. Bloggers view whatever the commission decides as just the first step in their quest to remain free of government oversight.
"We still have Congress, and beyond Congress we still have the courts," Moulitsas said.
SOURCE - http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/july2005/010705bloggerslobby.htm
(...)
Cable Industry Taking Control of the Net
The Internet
Posted by michael on Fri Oct 25, '02 04:03 PM
from the don't-touch-that-dial dept.
Tompaine.com has a piece warning of measures that cable internet providers are taking to control their users' experiences online. We've touched on this before, but this issue needs a lot of attention and it has gotten very little from the mainstream press.
THREAD - http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/25/1937222
critical info has nearly disappeared...
and what's mostly left refers to "terrorist threats"...
which endorse greater control...
go figure...
sorry...
this is all i found...
but keep an eye out for Internet 2...
it's coming for sure...
(...)
CNN
Internet 2 works to reinvent the Web
From Kristie Lu Stout
Tuesday, March 11, 2003 Posted: 11:10 AM EST (1610 GMT)
HONG KONG, China -- Ten years after it began being embraced by the public, architects say the Internet is far from what it was destined to be, and they are working on a sequel.
In 1993 Marc Andreessen launched Mosaic, the first browser to navigate the Web. In this vintage cyberspace, gray pages and low-resolution graphics were rife.
"I remember downloading it and running it on x-windows when it was running, said Pindar Wong, from Packet Clearing House.
"So now it's really great to see parents and grandchildren and everyone using the Internet sort of through browser interfaces. It is a milestone. But I think the game is changing."
It is changing because these days, the Internet is a much bigger beast. The "critical infrastructure" that hosts governments, businesses and universities is far-reaching, but far from flawless.
With jerky video and hourglass icons, it's little wonder some call it the world wide wait. But one group is out to change that.
Internet 2 - FACT BOX
Internet2 is a consortium being led by 202 universities working in partnership with industry and government to develop and deploy advanced network technologies.
Enter "Internet 2" -- a U.S.-led effort to build cyberspace all over again, this time better.
"Well the current Internet is not designed for the next generation of applications," said Ted Hanss, Director of Internet 2.
"It's really focused on tens of millions of dial-up users. Not the applications that would really change how we do teaching, learning and education."
The Internet 2 backbone in the United States moves billions of bits of data per second, 300,000 times faster than the connection we have at home, said Hanss.
Moving with such speed, Internet 2 will be able to provide remote diagnosis for doctors, send detailed medical files in a flash, stage high-resolution videoconferences and download virtual reality applications.
Champions of the project say Internet 2 shows what the net will do three to five years from now.
'Wonderful experiment'
But even a souped-up cyberspace is susceptible to worms, viruses and just plain junk or spam.
And then there's the millions of mobile devices and appliances that are moving online, requiring more IP addresses.
Back at the Internet monitoring station, engineers are scrambling to surmount those challenges, taking heart from their recent achievement.
"I would view the last 10 years as a wonderful experiment," said Wong.
"Many of us were just kids, still young at heart now. We were trying all these different things. And we made our fair share of mistakes. The question is what can we learn from those mistakes?"
The challenge is to build a cyber-sequel that's not just a pipe dream.
SOURCE - http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/03/11/internet2/
(...)
TomPaine.com
The Death Of The Internet
How Industry Intends To Kill The 'Net As We Know It
Jeff Chester is executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy.
The Internet's promise as a new medium -- where text, audio, video and data can be freely exchanged -- is under attack by the corporations that control the public's access to the 'Net, as they see opportunities to monitor and charge for the content people seek and send. The industry's vision is the online equivalent of seizing the taxpayer-owned airways, as radio and television conglomerates did over the course of the 20th century.
To achieve this, the cable industry, which sells Internet access to most Americans, is pursuing multiple strategies to closely monitor and tightly control subscribers and their use of the net. One element can be seen in industry lobbying for new use-based pricing schemes, which has been widely reported in trade press. Related to this is the industry's new public relations campaign, which seeks to introduce a new "menace" into the pricing debate and boost their case, the so-called "bandwidth hog."
But beyond political and press circles are another equally important development: new technologies being developed and embraced that can, in practice, transform today's open Internet into a new industry-regulated system that will prevent or discourage people from using the net for file-sharing, internet radio and video, and peer-to-peer communications. These are not merely the most popular cutting-edge applications used by young people; they also are the tools for fundamental new ways of conducting business and politics.
These goals and objectives are visible to anyone who cares to look at the arcane world of telecommunications policy and planning, either in the industry trade press or government documents. The bottom line is the industry want to kill the Internet as we know it.
Take a minute and wade through this bit of arcana -- and ponder its implications.
"The IP Service Control System from Ellacoya Networks gives the Broadband Operator 'Total Service Control' to closely monitor and tightly control its subscribers, network and offerings." So reads the Web site of Ellacoya.com, a relatively new firm, describing the business-to-business service that it is selling to large Internet service providers.
Ellacoya is backed by Wall Street investment powerhouse, Goldman Sachs, which sees a major opportunity to turn around the red ink-plagued broadband sector. Continuing, the website explains, "Establishing Total Service control enables operators to better manage traffic on the network, [and] easily introduce a range of tiered and usage based service plans... Talkative applications, especially peer-to-peer programs like KaZaA and Morpheus, tend to fill all of the available bandwidth... The IP Service Control System allows operators to identify, limit and report on these aggressive applications."
The fundamental character of the Internet today is that it lacks precisely these kinds of tolls, barriers and gatekeepers. But technology like Ellacoya's hardware and software is not just an enticing idea; it's more of a silver bullet for beleaguered telecom executives. It's being tested in industry trials and points to the kind of Internet the industry would like to develop over the next few years. The way telecom corporations get from today's open-access Internet to their version of the future starts by changing how people pay for the net.
Industry's New Business Plan
Most people now pay a flat fee for online access. But the big media companies offering Internet service; Comcast, ATT, AOL -- would like to change that, and already have in a few test locations.
The broadband industry's plans to institute tiered pricing have been widely reported in its trade press. There are numerous articles about replacing today's open 'Net environment with industry-self-described versions of "walled gardens" or "Internet Lite." (See "Cable Operators Seek to Corral Bandwidth Hogs", Cable Datacom News, 10/01/02) The central feature of these proposals is much like telephone companies; there's a price plan for everyone.
To make the case to regulators that such pricing is fair and overdue, cable operators have begun a PR effort, spinning that a small percent of users account for a disproportionately large amount of bandwidth used on broadband networks. They've created and embraced the pejorative term, "bandwidth hog," to describe those -- such as music-obsessed college students -- who find robust uses for high-speed connections. Already major news sources, such as the BBC, and technology journalists are using the term in their reports.
To deal with this "problem," the companies are considering a variety of approaches to ensure they remain in full control of their bandwidth -- unless consumers can afford to pay the hefty access fees. Under a typical plan, a user would be allotted a limited amount of bandwidth per month, and would be charged extra fees for going over this amount. This approach isn't very different from the software industry, where the free versions of an application are intended to frustrate and prompt people to buy the 'better' version.
Bandwidth caps have already been implemented in Canada by major Internet service provider Sympatico, Inc., and observers have been quick to note that the limit -- 5 GB per month -- would effectively restrict regular use of emerging applications such as Internet radio, streaming media and video-on-demand.
Consider this excerpt from an article about Sympatico's bandwidth caps in the May 6 edition of Toronto Globe and Mail by reporter Jack Kapica.
A classic conflict has arisen over streaming media, especially of radio. In a recent letter to globetechnology.com, Andrew Cole, manager of media relations for Bell Sympatico, defended the 5GB bit cap, saying that "In my experience, Internet radio stations usually transmit at approximately 20 Kbps. This equates to 1.2MB per minute, or 72MB per hour. At this rate, a HSE customer could enjoy 70 hours of Internet Radio per month and remain within the bandwidth usage plan."
But a 20-Kbps stream is considered poor quality by many people who tune into Internet-based radio stations for such things as classical music concerts. For these people, audio quality streamed at 20 Kbps has been described as "pathetic at best, somewhat akin to AM radio" by Tony Petrilli of Level Platforms Inc. of Ottawa.
"Decent audio quality starts at 56 Kbps to 64 Kbps, and really gets acceptable only around 100 Kbps," he said. This alone, continued Mr. Petrilli, "will blow the cap, let alone any other form of surfing, such as looking at movie trailers or even reading Web-based news. Heaven forbid that someone listens to 90 minutes a day of quality Internet radio. That way we'd blow the cap in 20 days.
When you consider the fact that the largest American telecommunications firms are often part of the same mega-corporation with music, video or movie-producing entertainment divisions -- such as AOL-Time Warner -- you can see how an industry-regulated Internet would handily end music and movie industry worries about Napster-like file swapping by people who don't want to pay industry-monopolized retail prices for content.
Thus, the strategic and technically feasible solutions embodied by companies such as Ellacoya is obviously why Goldman-Sachs was keen to invest in the firm -- as it offers the actual means to monetize the net and turn around the revenue-poor broadband sector.
According to Ellacoya's technical datasheet, operators can create "up to 51,000 unique policies that can be combined to generate limitless numbers of subscriber policies." Such rules, they explain, can either permit, deny, priority queues, address lock, rate limit or redirect access. The same technology also poses new concerns over privacy, since Ellacoya's technology "collects usage statistics for subscribers and applications, capturing service events, session details, and byte counts.... Operators can 'stamp' the subscribers identity on all records."
The Industry Spin
The cable industry will argue that such ubiquitous control systems and restrictive pricing structures are necessary to resolve bandwidth backups. But the fact is, this cannot be the case, because cable systems are constructed to avoid bandwidth shortages. But don't take my word for it.
Mike LaJoie, vice president for advanced technology at AOL-Time Warner told MultiChannel News, "The way that the HFC (hybrid fiber coaxial) architecture works, we never run out of bandwidth," LaJoie said. "We can always split or do other things that will give us the bandwidth that we want, so it really ends up being a desire to provide the best and highest experience for our customers." (See "HD on VOD Searches for Resolution", Multichannel News, 09/30/02) What these statements make clear is that the cable industry's goal for broadband is to monetize bandwidth. By charging a toll for every bit, the industry can simultaneously extract great profits from the new applications that it allows on its networks, as well as restrict access to those that it finds problematic, i.e. those that compete with its own content offerings. In short, the industry finally sees a way to make money online.
Of course, these calculations are utterly self-serving, ignoring the fact that the net was developed with tax dollars and has been an incubator for an array of innovations that extend far beyond creating new profit centers for big media companies. The envisioned control structures will inhibit robust Internet use by early broadband adopters, and discourage development of new high-speed applications such as Internet-based telephone and video-on-demand, thus slowing overall broadband growth.
Worse, this business model will erect high economic and technical barriers to entry for non-commercial and public interest uses of the high-speed Internet, threatening civic discourse, artistic expression and non-profit communications. In moving to implement this highly centralized vision for broadband, the cable industry does not simply ignore the democratic and competitive history of the Internet -- it is actively hostile to it.
Consumption-based pricing and other restrictive access controls contradict the spirit of openness and innovation that built the Internet in the first place, and will do irreparable harm to its future as a medium for small business initiatives, non-commercial users and democratic discourse. New threats to privacy are also clear, given the intrusive nature of the technology to closely monitor all online use. If you think spam is bad now...
And Where Is The FCC?
This new threat to online communications is a direct consequence of recent Federal Communications Commission policies by Chairman Michael Powell that permit cable companies to operate their broadband platforms in a "discriminatory, non-open access" manner. This legalese means the FCC, the historic guardian of the public interest in the communications field, has abdicated its founding charge: to serve the public interest before private interests.
In sum, the Internet as we now know it -- and its revolutionary promise -- may soon pass into the history books. In the absence of public policy safeguards, the emerging pricing and control structures will fundamentally change the kinds of information -- and way it's delivered -- on the Internet. The ramifications extend far beyond the quarterly reports and shareholder earnings for the nation's telecommunications corporations.
The consequences are cultural and will affect the pace and character of progress in the early 21st century. If the communications companies impose tolls, roadblocks and dead ends on the information 'superhighway', they will be robbing public trust resources in much the same way 19th century mining companies pilfered public lands and 20th century radio and television networks privatized the public's airwaves.
Click here to subscribe to our free e-mail dispatch and get the latest on what's new at TomPaine.com before everyone else! You can unsubscribe at any time and we will never distribute your information to any other entity.
Published: Oct 24 2002
SOURCE - http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/6600
(...)
Led by more than 200 U.S. universities, working with industry
and government, Internet2 develops and deploys advanced
network applications and technologies for research and higher
education, accelerating the creation of tomorrow's Internet.
SOURCE - http://www.internet2.edu/
(...)
Bloggers lobby to fight regulation by government
Associated Press | July 1 2005
Web log founders who built followings with anti-establishment postings are now lobbying the establishment to try to fend off government regulation. Some are even working with a political action committee, lawyers and public-relations consultants to do it.
They say they have no choice.
"There's a certain responsibility I have to help protect the medium. I have the platform, the voice to be able to do so," said Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, founder of the Web log http://www.DailyKos.com.
Moulitsas testified Tuesday at a hearing on a Federal Election Commission proposal that would extend some campaign finance rules to the Internet, including bloggers. He urged the FEC to take a hands-off approach.
"We have a democratic medium that allows anyone to have true freedom of the press. We have average citizens publishing their thoughts through research, through journalism, their activism and encouraging others to do the same," Moulitsas told commissioners.
Moulitsas also is working with a lawyer who volunteered to help bloggers fight new government regulations and whose efforts were promoted in a PR firm press release Monday. Moulitsas is prepared to lobby Congress himself if necessary, and he is the treasurer of BlogPac, a political action committee formed last year by bloggers. Another witness, Michael Krempasky, founder of RedState.org, a pro-Republican blog, called bloggers "citizen journalists" and said that like traditional media, they should get an exemption from campaign finance regulation.
"What goal would be served by protecting Rush Limbaugh's multimillion-dollar talk radio program, but not a self-published blogger with a fraction of the audience?" Krempasky asked the commission.
Duncan Black — who founded the http://www.atrios.blogspot.com blog — featured a headline Monday on his Web site, "Bite me, Congressman," that linked to criticism of a Republican House committee chairman over global warming.
Asked whether testifying at hearings and organizing PACs are a signs that bloggers are adopting mainstream political techniques, Black said he and his colleagues do not have much choice.
"I think once you do achieve a certain degree of traffic, influence, notoriety — however you want to call it — eventually the outsider label is not perfectly applicable anymore," said Black, who describes himself as a "recovering economist." He too planned to testify before the FEC.
Federal election officials until now have steered clear of Internet oversight, siding with bloggers and other online activists who portray the Web as a laboratory of grass-roots political participation and an outlet for free speech that should develop unhampered by the government.
But online political activity has become increasingly more sophisticated since the FEC last examined it a few elections ago.
Since the 2000 presidential campaign, when Arizona Sen. John McCain made a splash by raising millions online, candidates have raised tens of millions of dollars, and online political ads, consultants and organizing have become commonplace. Political parties and campaigns have added blogging to their Web sites; some online political strategists raise their profiles through blogs, then get hired by campaigns.
A survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that just over one-third of U.S. adults went to the Internet during the 2004 elections to get political news, share their views on candidates or issues, volunteer for a campaign, or make a political donation. Nearly 30 percent of Internet users say they read blogs, Pew found.
Internet advertising is also big business, and it's becoming a standard feature of blogs. Black said a small number of bloggers make a living from advertising revenue, but he added that most, including himself, have other jobs.
Acknowledging the Internet's growth, a federal judge last year ordered the FEC to extend some of the nation's campaign finance and spending limits to political activity on the Web.
Bloggers fear that will mean new, unique limits on their activities, even though several of the commission's six members have indicated they have no desire to go beyond what the judge ordered.
The FEC plans to decide this summer how far to go. Bloggers view whatever the commission decides as just the first step in their quest to remain free of government oversight.
"We still have Congress, and beyond Congress we still have the courts," Moulitsas said.
SOURCE - http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/july2005/010705bloggerslobby.htm
(...)
Cable Industry Taking Control of the Net
The Internet
Posted by michael on Fri Oct 25, '02 04:03 PM
from the don't-touch-that-dial dept.
Tompaine.com has a piece warning of measures that cable internet providers are taking to control their users' experiences online. We've touched on this before, but this issue needs a lot of attention and it has gotten very little from the mainstream press.
THREAD - http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/25/1937222
posted by Black Krishna at 1:43 PM
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