Re: Well thats a load of crap . . . (The Web Toll)
Coyote Wilde, Sat May 27 2006, 02:05AM

Crap indeed.
I was talking to a network guy about this the other day, and he pointed out that it might not be such a bad thing. If this thing goes down, the best, the brightest, and the Open Source are all going to exodus. Leave The Web, Web 2.0, and the rest. TCP is old, the argument went. We have learned since then.
Perhaps, I was told, this could be a chance to start anew. To start fresh.
... I really don't think I buy it; my hopes rely on petitioning non-US gov'ts to not follow suit, if this administration caves. That way, I won't personally be screwed-- though the higher prices for online services will doubltessly be passed on to everyone, whether we're a part of this tiered structure or no.

Re: Well thats a load of crap . . . (The Web Toll)
AndrewM, Sat May 27 2006, 05:21AM

Start fresh?? By what, building your own copper or fiber world-wide infrastructure?? Its stands to reason that the telecoms would automatically fie any start-up technologies in the low-bandwidth category.

Re: Well thats a load of crap . . . (The Web Toll)
Mike, Sat May 27 2006, 06:01AM

This is also called the opposite of Net Neutrality, it is more of an old idea...
There have been a few videos and petitions that want people to sign. I paticularly aren't that considered, I doubt seeing it happen, and if it does, there isn't much we can do about it without a Massive opposition....

Mike

Re: Well thats a load of crap . . . (The Web Toll)
Alex, Sat May 27 2006, 03:59PM

Oh, oh, I have an idea! Charge more for internet access. I guess that would be too obvious, though. If you're not getting enough revenue to provide the services you're selling, then you're not charging enough. Maybe that makes too much sense.

Re: Well thats a load of crap . . . (The Web Toll)
Madgyver, Sat May 27 2006, 05:04PM

Well around here there is something like taht coming. The almighty GEZ(Whatever that stands for, they collect taxes one television and radio broadcasting) plan to to take taxes on COMPUTERS for the POSSIBILTY of using th internet in order to listene to Internet radio braodcast.

Well thats a big load of....

Re: Well thats a load of crap . . . (The Web Toll)
ragnar, Sat May 27 2006, 11:20PM

After reading this, I thought back to propositions in Australia to put taxes on writable CD media to increase its cost, so that the gov't has money to combat software piracy.

Why should all the good people have to pay extra money on their media because others abuse it?

Re: Well thats a load of crap . . . (The Web Toll)
Simon, Sun May 28 2006, 01:31AM


When people in power (whatever kind) come up with ideas that stupid it's usually just the best excuse they could think of for something they just wanted to do.

Re: Well thats a load of crap . . . (The Web Toll)
ragnar, Sun May 28 2006, 04:10AM

Almost as (totally) stupid as the Labour party's votegrabbing proposition to try to ban pornography in Australia.

TOTALLY unenforceable, irrational. The result would be a monopolisation of the porn industry by P2P (but what has changed? :P)

The thing that annoyed me about this was that the ISPs would be held responsible. So I'm guessing if an islamic person found a picture of an islamic girl's face, he/she could take offense and sue his ISP. How far do you take it?

Similarly, how far do you take it with the speed of the 'net?

The way I see it, if you want your visitors to see your site faster, you get local servers and hire somebody who won't design a bloated website.

Secondarily, if your VISITORS want to see your content faster, they buy faster connections.

Where's the 'profoundly retarded' smiley face when I need it?

Re: Well thats a load of crap . . . (The Web Toll)
joshua_, Sun May 28 2006, 07:59AM

Well, on the SA forums, it's ... I've been following this for the past month or so when someone mentioned it there, and I'm going to have to agree with your assessment that it's absolutely a idea. If kernel.org already has two gigantic gigabit links out, why do they need to pay *twice* to get bandwidth? They're already paying huge amounts once...

Re: Well thats a load of crap . . . (The Web Toll)
..., Wed May 31 2006, 04:23AM

looks like we (users) are not the only ones pissed off... check out this e-mail from ebay

Net Neutrality and the eBay Community: A Call to Action


Dear krogen234,

As you know, I almost never reach out to you personally with a request to get involved in a debate in the U.S. Congress. However, today I feel I must.

Right now, the telephone and cable companies in control of Internet access are trying to use their enormous political muscle to dramatically change the Internet. It might be hard to believe, but lawmakers in Washington are seriously debating whether consumers should be free to use the Internet as they want in the future.

The phone and cable companies now control more than 95% of all Internet access. These large corporations are spending millions of dollars to promote legislation that would divide the Internet into a two-tiered system.

The top tier would be a "Pay-to-Play" high-speed toll-road restricted to only the largest companies that can afford to pay high fees for preferential access to the Net.

The bottom tier -- the slow lane -- would be what is left for everyone else. If the fast lane is the information "super-highway," the slow lane will operate more like a dirt road.

Today's Internet is an incredible open marketplace for goods, services, information and ideas. We can't give that up. A two lane system will restrict innovation because start-ups and small companies -- the companies that can't afford the high fees -- will be unable to succeed, and we'll lose out on the jobs, creativity and inspiration that come with them.

The power belongs with Internet users, not the big phone and cable companies. Let's use that power to send as many messages as possible to our elected officials in Washington. Please join me by clicking here right now to send a message to your representatives in Congress before it is too late. You can make the difference.

Thank you for reading this note. I hope you'll make your voice heard today.

Sincerely,

Meg Whitman
President and CEO
eBay Inc.

P.S. If you have any questions about this issue, please contact us at **link**.





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Re: Well thats a load of crap . . . (The Web Toll)
Mike, Wed May 31 2006, 12:56PM

Here is another big article about it on Wired.com
,71012-0.html?tw=wn_index_1

Re: Well thats a load of crap . . . (The Web Toll)
McFluffin, Thu Jun 01 2006, 12:09AM

Hmm....theres always the Seattle Wireless approach. Time to take out my hot rodded WRT54Gs :) I have enoughj networking equipment at my house to wire up maybe 100 or 200 computers...it would be a start anyway. I would imagine that this might be able to work fairly well in cities, but wouldn't be able to really cross continents are make it between cities. I'd sooner try to create citry run internet gateways than to have traffic limited. This concept would crush start-ups. The internet might need to be more well regulated, but not if it interferes with people's abilities to use it. Running e-mail through filters to block spam might be an option, but I would hate to have my e-mails blocked as false positives or blocked because they were considered politically undesirable etc.

Re: Well thats a load of crap . . . (The Web Toll)
..., Thu Jun 01 2006, 02:21AM

good thing this is on chatting since this is heading way off topic...

There are rumors that google has plans to do something like this, they have bought up tons of 'dark' fiber (left over from the internet boom) have had some engineering done on seeing how many servers can you put in a box trailer, the google secure access (secure tunnel into a google server which is connected to the internet--you are safe on open access points but google gets to look at your surfing--and that hot spot that they put up... Could be big; very big.

Imagine if everyone could have free internet access but they had to look at a google ad every time they opened the browser or something like that

I think the primary problem is bandwidth... Heck, at my school the laptop carts with a 100mb link to the for the classroom laptops have a hard time keeping up with the load of 30 students surfing the web (the activity bar graph on the switch gets into the red zone and the collision bar get like half full at times) imagine what it would take for a city. Say you want to give everyone a 1mb/s link (enough for most streaming content)... With a 802.11.b access point you could (optimistically) handle 50 people... Now in LA there are what, 10 million people? That is like a half million access point just to handle the load... And a terabit backbone connection! Even if you say that only 1% of people will use their allotted 1mb/s that is still a 10gb/s backbone connection...
Now if someone like google were to be the provider they could host their own streaming music/video service so they only need enough bandwidth to handle the rest of the web and the people that are streaming from somewhere else, but that is still a ton of bandwidth... Until fiber gets cheap enough to give away...


Hmm, I could probably wire in the adjacent houses into mine (with about 10 of my total 30 ports available) and then they would be able to stream all of the multimedia content I have on my server Although kind of the opposite is happening now, I am leaching off my neighbors wireless to get extra up speed... We could have one heck of a connection if we all teamed togher and combined out total 1mb/s up and 10mb/s down...