The End of the Internet?

[Cpilot]

Little fuel for discussion...looks like they want to take our toys away. 

The End of the Internet?

"Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment, and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!"

Of course AT&T have forgoten (or won't acknowledge) that they had a monopoly until the 80's and built those pipes on our, the American consumers, dime.

[mouser]

so typical.. if there's money to be made then you can bet someone is going to restrict access and sell access.
there are probably businesses out there trying to figure out how to sell air.

[Carol Haynes]

They have already conned people into buying water !!

[craigcolby]

To mouse,

I know I am replying to a old topic, but what you said about trying to figure how to sell air, they did, called compressed air, which you can buy in a spray can. 

Craig

[Gothi[c]]

The Internet has been dying a slow dead ever since the commercialization and the ad's came, but soon it may be dying a second death as soon as ISP's start prioritizing and blocking traffic more frequently, and governments have more and more laws on what is allowed to be on the Internet. It seems the days of the 'wild wild west' Internet are coming to an end as governments start to realize that complete freedom of information threatens their authority, and corporations start to realize that there is more money to be made if they limit their users use (eg: by making them pay per email sent, per website visited, as suggested by some ISP's). This vision is far far away from the academic Internet of the early days.

Personally I'm already starting to look for alternative WAN's to use for when the day comes that the drip floods the bucket and the Internet just won't be usable/economic for my purposes anymore.

There have been some interesting developments from HAM radio operators who run their own TCP/IP bridges and BBS servers over packet radio networks, sometimes even at decent speed as you get higher up in the radio spectrum (the higher the radio freq. the higher bit rates that can be used, or the less bandwidth a signal needs to use to achieve the same speeds.(and the FCC is VERY concerned about bandwidth usage).) These guys have their amsat project. They have a non-stationary bird in space which runs a BBS; so when the satellite is over the USA someone can upload a message, and a few hours later when it's over Europe, a person in europe can download the message from the satellite and read the message. Quite interesting.

I'm also looking at how people are creating large wireless networks in some areas, though it seems that there is also more and more regulations in that area.

Does anyone know of any other interesting WAN projects that could some day be an alternative?

[cnewtonne]

I could not believe it too when I saw my hospital bill. They charged me for 'air' when I did my colonoscopy too!!!

[iphigenie]

They have already conned people into buying water !!

I think that if you use resources that are shared by everyone but not necessarily renewable with no costs to society, there should be a charge - that goes for wrecking water by pollution as well as using it. Having to pay for it gives people and businesses an incentive to think about what is done and how and possibly find better ways to do things.

The big challenge is who should get this money and what it should be used for.

The water company should get a fee for delivering the water and pressure, but they should be paying for the water they use. Partly they do it by paying for the treatments plants I guess, but still, if they had to pay for the water they probably wouldnt waste it as much.

[Carol Haynes]

I was thinking more of the current obsession with bottled water.