The End of the Internet (...as we know it)

[Davey Boy 2.0]

America's big phone and cable companies want to start charging exorbitant user fees for the supposedly-free internet.

This is infuriating

[boiler]

Smells like the old school online services. when AOL and Prodigy and the like controlled their own content. The "Internet" was an extra you had to pay for.

[thatpatguy]

I thought this was the end of the internet

http://home.att.net/~cecw/lastpage.htm

[mattm]

my god thatpatguy, I've been searching for the end of the internet for years, how'd you find it?

After having read the article all I can think is man those americans are greedy. There's already a charge for using the pipes so folks would essentially be paying again for what they already pay for (and, of course, wouldn't take the time to actually look into it and hence probably won't notice it in that way). Not to mention the heavy users of the internet are probably 75% or so folks trying to download/stream something or other. I think there'd be some sort of revolt although it's the states so they'll probably just make up some lie, over-glorify it and the americans (by this I mean the americans as a whole, not the few free thinkers) will buy it (litterally). I bet they'll say something on the lines that terrorism will skyrocket if they don't start charging more. I'd be willing to be lots of money here that when they do it they start saying that the companies and countries that don't comply are terrorists or something on those lines. The shitty thing will be if sites like this one get pretty much canned due to not being commercial enough. we'll see.

Who knows. I hope they don't kill the internet but I hope even more that we as canadians don't fall for this shit like the americans will.

[kookycanooky]

How likely is it that we will see any of these changes in canada?

(although...we're sorta seeing it already when internet providers start port throttling to slow down bittorrent and other things...)

[timouse]

...these tools are also being promoted as ways that companies, such as Comcast and Bell South, can simply grab greater control over the Internet. For example, in a series of recent white papers, Internet technology giant Cisco urges these companies to "meter individual subscriber usage by application," as individuals' online travels are "tracked" and "integrated with billing systems." Such tracking and billing is made possible because they will know "the identity and profile of the individual subscriber," "what the subscriber is doing" and "where the subscriber resides."

so really, this all stems from a consortium of big bandwidth providers who now want to make billing easier by keeping track of what you're up to, which has the added bonus of them knowing what you're up to, and will no doubt inform someone if you're up to anything that isn't enriching them.

they also claim that they can selectively allow or delay traffic by what they call "deep packet inspection," so the video on demand data that's making them money doesn't have to queue up at a router, while the bittorrent traffic or the video from the Greenpeace website get pushed aside.

this technology will no doubt make its' way here, and the cable guys will probably get on board so that they can use more of their copper and fiber to make them money

As Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig has long noted, it is government regulation of the phone lines that helped make the Internet today's vibrant, diverse and democratic medium.

But now, the phone companies are lobbying Washington to kill off what's left of "common carrier" policy. They wish to operate their Internet services as fully "private" networks. Phone and cable companies claim that the government shouldn't play a role in broadband regulation: Instead of the free and open network that offers equal access to all, they want to reduce the Internet to a series of business decisions between consumers and providers.

Edited February 6, 2006 by Guest
further outrage