The internet is about to be killed. The fun is over. We had a good run but the end is near. The writing is on the wall.
Normally I stay away from issues like this because of the firestorm that it starts, but hey, sometimes even I have to stand up and shout out the obvious.
So why do I say that it’s over? Why is the internet going away? Because it’s ideals are dead.
It’s not free anymore, everyone is here to make money. The damned ISPs are pissed because we’re “using too much bandwidth”. So now content providers are going to have to pay more to get a higher slot in the QoS of those ISPs. WHAT A CROCK! Basically, the big boys like MS, Google, Yahoo, etc are going to pay the tariff and get high priority, and all of the content I like to read (including this site) is going to go slow. The next thing that’s going to happen is that more and more sites are going to sign up for this and the ISPs will generate monstrous lists of hosts that get high priority and the rest, the next trend here is that they’ll have to upgrade their hardware to actually watch that much traffic. And of course, consumers will get the bill for that hardware upgrade with some new “tier” of service. Oh, and let’s not forget that the internet is a mega network made up of a few larger providers and subdivided into a lot of smaller providers. That’s a problem… and here’s why.
So for example’s sake, let’s say I have to go through AT&T, Sprint, and Qwest to get to Google. Google signs up with AT&T and Qwest for “premium” bandwidth, but they don’t sign up with Sprint. So now, AT&T and Qwest push them up in their QoS and Sprint pushes them down. Guess what?!?!?!?!?!?!? Google is still slow b/c they didn’t pay off everybody. That’s right, I said PAY OFF, because that’s what this is. This is major providers pushing the government and the government bowing down to them and allowing stuff like this to pass through.
This is wrong and everyone knows it. Would someone please get the governments away from my internet? The internet used to police itself, if you didn’t like what you saw, it was your choice NOT to go there. I don’t agree with a lot of the stuff I see on the net, but I recognize the freedom of expression.
The next problem… censorship. Ooof, i’m not even gonna rant too long about this one. I shouldn’t have to. Just start looking folks, censorship is happening all over the damned place. It’s just not cool.
So anyway, the fat lady is about to sing. The freedom of the internet is over. It’s just a place to do your job and buy stuff now. 