Re: Cyberspace: doomed to become a "vaster wasteland"?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Daniel O'Connor" <darius () dons net au>
Date: April 30, 2009 9:54:37 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Cc: "ip" <ip () v2 listbox com>
Subject: Re: [IP] Cyberspace: doomed to become a "vaster wasteland"?
Reply-To: darius () dons net au

On Fri, 1 May 2009, David Farber wrote:
> Cyberspace: doomed to become a "vaster wasteland"?
> by Paul Saffo
> <http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/saffo/detail?entry_id=38565>
> Nearly 50 years ago, then-FCC Commissioner Newton Minow lamented in a
> speech to the National Association of Broadcasters that the once-
> promising young medium of Television had become a "vast wasteland."
> Well, history is repeating itself as the once-promising medium of the
> Web is maturing into a vaster wasteland of cyberspace. The latest

I think you mean..
"Well, history is repeating itself as people again lament about how a
new medium is becoming a wasteland".

Television is a very popular wasteland, the internet also seems very
popular for an up and coming wasteland..

> Look for Time Warner's competitors to follow suit, and count on the
> fact they won't stop at usage charges. As today's media giants flee a
> crumbling mass media order, we can count on the big players doing
> everything they can to make cyberspace ever more friendly to
> corporate interests at the expense of innovative upstarts and the
> public at large. The media establishment is determined to create an
> Internet where not all packets are treated equally. As fans of
> Bit-torrent learned two years ago, bit-flows from sites favored by
> your provider will arrive faster than bit-flows from unapproved
> sites.

Personally, I don't think it is a big issue IF there is decent
competition in the ISP market. ie bandwidth caps aren't inherently
problematic to the consumer.

If there is competition then ISPs have to tread the line between
becoming leech magnets (which loses them money due to increased costs)
and making their customers unhappy (which loses them money due to
decreased revenue).

Without decent competition then there is no real incentive for the ISP
to do what the customer wants.

This happened in Australia - when ISPs were forced to advertise
truthfully (ie no "unlimited" accounts with limits) heavy downloaders
used to switch ISPs quite often as various companies dabbled with
unrealistically large download quotas. This didn't last very long as
they either went out of business or forced people off those accounts.

--
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
 -- Andrew Tanenbaum
GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C



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