Imminent Death of the Net Predicted (again)

[Captain Newbie]

Slashdot (http://slashdot.org) is reporting on a story from The Nation (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060213/chester) that pay-per-play or 'tiered' Internet may not be that far off.

The nation's largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online.

Verizon, Comcast, Bell South and other communications giants are developing strategies that would track and store information on our every move in cyberspace in a vast data-collection and marketing system, the scope of which could rival the National Security Agency. According to white papers now being circulated in the cable, telephone and telecommunications industries, those with the deepest pockets--corporations, special-interest groups and major advertisers--would get preferred treatment. Content from these providers would have first priority on our computer and television screens, while information seen as undesirable, such as peer-to-peer communications, could be relegated to a slow lane or simply shut out.

Ladies and Gentlemen, please return to your seats, fasten your seat belts, extinguish your cigarettes, and prepare for rough times ahead. - CN

[Sjaak]

Nah, not gonna happen. I don't grasp any advantages of it anyway.

[Captain Newbie]

Nah, not gonna happen. I don't grasp any advantages of it anyway.
I'm playing that joke - "Imminent death of the Net predicted" - but it's still disturbing.

Mods may close/delete/merge this as they see fit; a thread on this topic actually exists in GCRD, sorry 'bout that.

[Sjaak]

We should make a 'what if the net died' thread xD

Uncle Sam Says: What Would You Do If The Net Died?

[dicecca112]

companies would have to pay for the nets services, severly limiting there profits, so I think corporate america would rally against this, as well as the average man. So we have to pay for the cable/dsl/dialup service, then pay again to use the Internet, alittle redundant don't yah think?

[Drec]

I don't think the government would allow that. They still have overall control over the net right? atleast TCP/IP.

[dfonda]

Be a good reason to get rid of my PC and do something useful for a change. :)

[su root]

There was a proposed Canadian bill a little while back, I don't know it's current status. The bill was oddly worded, in one way of looking at the bill:

Every ISP, after a certain date, would be required to have the ability to tap all communications (including the decryption of encrypted communications) of any individual, given 24 hours notice, without a court order, from either an officer of the law, or a list of other non-policing bodies (including some private companies), store this data for at least 3 months, and deliver this data in a timely fashion.

The other way of looking at it was:
Every ISP, after a certain date, would be required to tap all communications of all individuals (including the decryption of encrypted communications), and without a court order, from either an officer of the law, or a list of other non-policing bodies (including some private companies), hold this data for upto 3 months, and deliver this data within 24 hours.

Now, obviously, a lonely ISP can't decrypt high-bit RSA encryption, but if this bill were to be invoked, it would be a massive privacy concern, and may provoke some ISPs to use man-in-the-middle proxies, in order to satisfy the decryption requirement. I haven't heard much about this bill in the last 3-4 months though, I imagine it was thrown out quickly. (but this is the kind of stuff that goes on in parlement..)

[futura2001]

Gah, Slashdot.
Mostly a reservoir of latent paranoia, perhaps a result of doing hallucinogens with Woz back in the 70s.
I would fear UN regulation more than corporate regulation. Mostly because corporate regulation couldn't happen without major uproar around the nation and world. And if the US became so compliant to the whims of megacorps, well... the UN would step in and take over Internet regulation. Since the US doesn't want to give up control of the Internet, this won't happen.
But megacorps scare me a lot more than the UN does. At least the UN has good intentions instead of morals governed by the almighty dollar, but as I have heard before, "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions..."

[ƒÓÒl]

So we have to pay for the cable/dsl/dialup service, then pay again to use the Internet, alittle redundant don't yah think?

Like that's something new...Don't you pay income tax and sales tax?..paying when you get it, and when you use it?...sound familiar?

I really wouldn't be surprised if greed killed the intarweb, and sent us all back to the '50s. It ruins everything else...

[gorilly]

can you imagine the servers they would need... its not going to happen, it would be too costly for upkeep of a system that tracked everything

[Oroka Sempai]

You will never see this on stand alone internet, but when view on demand systems become realtime and pratical, then I can see this happening. If a customer is already paying for the content being delivered on the vod, who benifits if the customer sees google ads or yahoo ads? It isnt going to be the customer, so the ISP will rake in some money. Customers will pay a fee for the basic service, then proably pay per show or movie. Charging content providers is like... charging someone to put a poster on the side of your house. If they are going to do it anyways, might as well make some $ off it. So really, vod will be on the same internet, but it will provide a seperate service.

The WWW will always be a wild web of porn, backyard wrestling, and p2p.