Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Switchboard >

Net neutrality + the year the internet ends ./

12:18 / 16.10.08

[hope this belongs here. would qualify as activism, not sure though. apologies if not. also, this is probably old news to many, but i couldn't find a topic on it.]

belgian net-activitsts I Power have posted this video in june 2008, claiming that 'Bell Canada and TELUS (formerly owned by Verizon) employees officially confirm that by 2012 ISP's all over the globe will reduce Internet access to a TV-like subscription model, only offering access to a small standard amount of commercial sites and require extra fees for every other site you visit. These 'other' sites would then lose all their exposure and eventually shut down, resulting in what could be seen as the end of the Internet.' [quoted from the press release accompanying the video, see link above.]

la times blogged about it and debunked some of the farfetched scenarios I Power envision, yet pointed to an ongoing discussion ars technica reported on earlier that might not exactly translate to the dystopic fears of I Power, but surely similarities cannot be denied.

and although I Power are known for their (or rather tania derveaux's) publicity stunts i'd like to raise the question if 'net neutrality' (or whatever it should be called) is a topic necessary of discussion. if even further more this 'net neutrality' is in need of activist protection.

please, bear with me if i lack knowledge on these matters. i've spent a lot of time pondering about and researching the various developements and abilities of and in the internet as such, but shortsightedly failed to collect information about the political whereabouts of the whole mess.

hope this discussion can teach me something and even clarify myths, semi-truths and facts.

14:20 / 25.10.08

I confess this is something about which I know very little and have not given much thought, but it does make me wonder about how I use the internet. It seems to be two things -- one is a social space where I keep up with my friends and make new ones, and present my digital self, and the other is a magic box that gives me answers to every question, all too often ones I didn't ask about what celebrities do in their private lives.

While the first would not be too hampered by a pay-per-site model (I already pay to use Flickr and LibraryThing, for example) the second very definitely would. But given how important the internet has already become as a research tool, both for academic research and more informal research (like learning about new music, or researching digital cameras), I am having a hard time imagining that open access would not be maintained, perhaps through subsidies of some kind?

Anna de Logardiere

10:36 / 26.10.08

I suspect too many people work using internet connections for this to be an accurate prediction. I also wonder how they envisage the billing system to work, it sounds a bit complicated.

21:18 / 26.10.08

... Also, you say it will be ISPs doing this? I might be naive, but I can't see how an ISP would sell such a service; ISPs seem to be able to get along okay at the moment so they presumably aren't financially pressured into doing this, and so it seems reasonable to think that if they tried it, people would just say forget that and go find an ISP which is happy to give them unlimited access? Or have I misunderstood how it's supposed to work?

04:41 / 27.10.08

That's entirely unsurprising. In Ontario, Canada, the infrastructure the net runs over is wholly owned by one of two telco companies - Bell owns the phone lines (DSL) and Rogers has the cable. Stricter controls over the internet only serve their larger interests. In the last year, Bell started throttling the 5% of their lines that were government-mandated to be provided for resale to third-party ISPs*. The legality of this is in dispute, and it's worth noting that they're trying to launch a new TV-over-IP option while reducing the bandwidth provided the "regular" internet.

I'm ill-informed on the actual minutae, having forgotten the finer details. dslreports can provide some - check their Canadian forums, particularly the Bell and Teksavvy ones.

* in addition to their own. Bell began throttling P2P traffic on their own network, and started haemorraghing customers. They then began to throttle the lines across the board, affecting any ISP offering services over phone lines.

07:36 / 27.10.08

[hce, thanks for kicktarting this thread. *g*]

Pingle music is not a crime wrote: Also, you say it will be ISPs doing this? I might be naive, but I can't see how an ISP would sell such a service; [...] Or have I misunderstood how it's supposed to work?

Vanity Case wrote: I also wonder how they envisage the billing system to work, it sounds a bit complicated.

truth be told, i don't really know how (if at all) that is supposed to work.
from a technical viewpoint the way i can imagine it is that broadband isps offer modular packages. for instance the 'media' package, that contains popular websites w/ mediacontent (like youtube and so forth), or the 'social' package with myspace and facebook and all that. customers would have to pay flat fee for usage of whatever's in these packages, if they surf onto websites not included in any of these packages (if that is possible at all, because technically it's quite easy for an isp to block websites and dns addresses) they will experience throttled bandwidth. also, as fluid state pointed out, there are many countries where few telcos own the majority of the infrastructure. i can also imagine how these isps would have websites pay to be included in any of these packages.

pingle, yes, i don't know either how that would be marketed, good point. but what if there are no alternatives for the customer? what about pirated access? is that still possible at all?

fluid, do you know more about the legal issues?
(thanks for the dslreports link, will check that out later.)

while we can safely assume that I Power reports are exaggerated, there seems to be some sort of truth in there. what could a possible scenario look like and what are its consequences?

10:45 / 06.11.08

the FCC frees up white space and that is magnificent. plus i think it will have - or potentially can have - tremendous impact on the whole issue of 'who does the internet belong to?'.

one of many scenarios: open source developers band together using new broadband and wifi technology made possible by unlicensed white space usage to establish the first 'free internet'.

what do you think, could this actually happen? what would that mean for the internet as sociopolitical aggregator?