Look at" Who owns what " on line and you will discover a few people own an enormous amount of our media institutions. they are gathering more all the time. If you are convinced that all the methods of communication in this country being in a few hands is benign, good for you. If you really don’t see any danger ,thats nice, I am sure they love people like you.
But it has alarmed many since our country started. We have been endlessly warned of the dangers. But thanks to people like you ,there will be more centered control of the messages the American citizens get. What could be wrong?
They could only do that on their own small piece of the network, and it would be stupid for them to do so, especially if they were caught doing so. To me this is an extremely silly discussion, since it’s clear you haven’t a clue how the internet actually works…especially if you think that only ‘3 or 4’ people or interests control it.
What’s funny, to me at least, is that what is actually happening is pretty much exactly the opposite of what you fear…there are more sources of information available today from more different places than ever before. NBC? They are a has-been. Comcast? Their pipes suck and it’s only a matter of time before they go the way of the dinosaurs that they are. Merged? Who gives a rip?
Basically, if Comcast is the only game in your town (and if broadband is the only option in your town then you must live in the boonies, since even here in the wilds of New Mexico we pretty much have DSL everywhere) then go satellite.
Even if this were true (:dubious:), so what? At one point in this country you had one option for telephony…Bell and it’s subsidiaries. Look at how things are today. And where is Bell these days? If a few media moguls are trying to corner the market on information they are going to find that they have spent an awful lot of money for nothing, since it will be like trying to catch smoke in their fingers. The real information revolution is just starting, man…we are still in the very early days, before folks have figured out whether steam or internal combustion will be the best way to go, when the concept of a nation road system isn’t even a pipe dream.
I don’t fret because traditional news doesn’t equal communication, and benign really isn’t it. I see plenty of danger ahead, but, frankly, I’m more worried about the government putting it’s thumb in ‘for the good of the people’ or ‘for the children’ than I am that some loony Marxist type vision of capitalist taking over (Until There Is Only One!) happens. The internet is to diffuse to allow that to realistically happen. It would be like saying ‘capitalists are taking over the ocean, and soon they will completely control it!’.
We have been told similar apocryphal things about the evils of the dread capitalist for over a century, and so far most of them have simply been the fever dreams of the wacked out left wing chicken littling us endless. The meme gets old.
To me, the most ironic part of your OP is that you, gonzo, are notorious for posting drive by links…drive by links to all manner of fringe web sites. Do you not see the irony in you fretting that the sources of information are drying up or somehow narrowing?? 
-XT
So let’s solve that problem by . . .
. . . putting 'em all in the hands of the government, instead?
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2012494647_guest02karr.html The intent ,and the providers have said it, is to have different internet speeds at different prices. Big companies will get the fastest and pay more. The internet will have a sliding scale with speed determined by ability to pay. We have not allowed that to happen before, but it will soon. Then you will whine about what you gave up.
The internet has been a great place for job creation and innovation. It has been open enough where anybody could get their foot in the door. That will end. The big corporations will own the airwaves which are supposed to be the property of the people.
Our cable providers have done a terrible job. They have no competition and can do what they want. Our internet is the 17th fastest in the world. We have no plans on how to make it faster or better. We do have plans on how to take it over though.That is what our corporations do when they control the market. Innovation and job creation suffer. But American people are well trained. They believe that our oligarchies do great things. That they will innovate and compete because they are American. The last 30 years did not happen. We have not and will not learn.
Not the government , the people. The government has done a weak job of regulation since Bush. That has apparently not changed. But the net has been available for anyone who comes up with a great idea. But if they go through the gatekeepers, the owner corporations, then it will be stifled.
Do you even know why our Internet has been surpassed by other countries?
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The USA is a big place. Therefore, the average will always get dragged down by Bumfuck, Montana because all you can get out there is satelite.
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Our pipes were already in place 30 years ago. Tearing up the US data infrastructure is a massive undertaking that is only just beginning to be discussed. In the meantime, we built the Internet on technology that was cutting edge 30 years ago. Technology that never existed in some of those countries that now occupy #1-16. So when they put down fat pipes, they used the biggest and best of today for superior speed.
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Few people were clamoring for more speed until very recently. Standard cable data rates were plenty good enough before and, for the vast majority of people, are still plenty good enough. Again, tearing up the infrastructure is a big job and if there’s no demand to do it, why do it now?
One… more… time…
The Internet has no gatekeepers and no matter how many times you say it does, that won’t make it true.
Hey, Jayb, just so you know, most of the academics who have really studied this issue tend to agree with gonzomax here. At least that was my experience when taking media studies courses in college and doing a few research projects on the subject. Even some conservative/free market types think media consolidation has been a bad thing, because it has absolutely decimated competition and killed a lot of local media outlets. Here’s a micro case study into one of the worries over consolidation. I’m not saying you have to be wrong, but look into it some more, and consider the possibility that you might be wrong.
Dissolved by the government. What’s your point?
That we not only don’t have that situation today, but that the same government is still out there to ‘dissolve’ any such entities that may emerge. Seemed rather obvious to me…
-XT
I’m not saying media consolidation is a good thing. I’m saying that the howling at the wind gonzo is doing is ignoring that media isn’t really that consolidated the way he’s saying it is.
There will never be a lack of “free” voices in the marketplace, regardless of how much consolidation goes on. But on the other hand, you’re right, consolidation of local outlets is a bad deal. However, with the weakening of Clear Channel, I think that’s going by the wayside for a freer marketplace.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-04/google-verizon-are-said-to-have-reached-deal-on-how-to-handle-web-traffic.html
Here is a Bloomberg article of it. Google was against allowing the network providers to regulate traffic speed until they got a guarantee they would not get shafted. They also say that they were concerned that the dominant conglomerates would select winners and losers. They could screw up the load speeds as they chose. But some still think they want the power for no real reason. Yep, there is no way that they would make it better for their content and their partners. I suppose you believe they would provide great service for sites with contrary opinions or sites that would compete with theirs.
As long as people believe corporations will act in the public good ,we are doomed. They are designed to ignore ethics and morality to do do the prime directive, make money. It is our job and the governments job, to keep them fair and honest. In the last decades we have seen how well that works. Oh when will we ever learn.
Google, Verizon Deny Striking Web Deal That Could Upend Net Neutrality (UPDATED) | HuffPost Impact Here is a Huffpo article explaining Comcast and Verizon have been discussing this for almost a year. The end is that Comcast can charge different rates and provide different download speeds. The article also suggests prices will go up.
I am sure there will be job cuts, rate hikes and frustrating loads for those who Comcast does not approve. All is well. We could use some good old fashioned censorship.
Can someone explain to me how an ISP could potentially “speed up” websites that the corporate masters wanted you to see and intentionally “slow down” ones it didn’t want you to see? Your speed is your speed, right? Your slowdowns are generated by shared usage (say in the case of cable internet) on the user end and by server load on the website end…right? I mean, I can’t envision an army of data entry workers for Comcast feeding some software thousands and thousands of URL’s designated for “slowdown” due to corporate disapproval of their content.
That’s exactly what would have to happen. This website describes pretty well what’s in an Internet “packet.” Each time a user types in a URL (say straightdope.com) or clicks on a link, dozens of packets are sent back and forth to deliver all of the information that makes up a single webpage.
By entering a command at the switching station, an ISP can delay requests made for packets with a certain Destination Address or from a certain Originating Address.
I find this idea that people would charge more money to provide more services bizarre and threatening. In no other area are people charged different prices depending on the quality of service provided. This strange and wicked idea must be crushed before it spreads to other areas of the economy and restaraunts start charging more for chateaubriand than they do for meatloaf. This could give the ISPs an incentive to provide fast speeds and the electrons could shoot out of our computers and infect our precious bodily fluids.
It all depends on where the host web site resides. All ISP’s have peering agreements with other ISP’s (tiers, depending on how big or small they are). So, when they go from their network to another ISP’s network they have a series of routers that routes the traffic from their own networks to another ISP’s network (and vice versa). Potentially you could slow down traffic going from your own network to some other ISP’s network in any number of ways, though if you did that it would be pretty apparent to the ISP’s you are peering with that you are throttling the traffic (which would probably get you downgraded from, say, a tier 1 provider to a tier 2 provider…not to mention that they would probably not want to peer with you anymore, and most likely retaliate in kind). Of course, ISP’s don’t constitute all of the pipes that make up the ‘internet’, either, and some of the folks who own the big nodes would be just a touch put off if one of their tier 1 providers started doing stuff like the OP describes as well.
No…you apparent speed is dependent on all manner of things.
Again, no. Your apparent speed and perceptions of ‘slowdowns’ are caused by all sorts of factors. Routing would be one of those factors. If I have a large primary pipe going to another provider and a smaller backup pipe going to the same place, an interruption of service on the big pipe will translate into slowdowns at the user end for any traffic that needs to traverse that big pipe to get where it’s going. Think of a web (heh)…there could be many routes to get to the desired location, but some of the threads are thicker than others. If you break the think threads then traffic has to find a new (and in most cases less optimal) path to get where you want to go.
As far as on the users end, broadband (‘cable internet’) is an older technology that is ‘inelegant’ under load. What that means is that as the load increases the service goes down sharply. One of the major issues with broadband in the US is that a lot of the companies who were putting it in a decade or so ago oversold their service, and that’s causing a lot of the issues we are running into today with people complaining about slower service. The equipment is also aging, the technology is old, the infrastructure is old, and it costs a lot of money to fix it. If you happen to live in a part of the country with either newer infrastructure or with a lot of potential high speed internet users then in most cases you have many options for providers (at my house, for instance, there are at least 3 companies that offer high speed DSL and 2 that offer broadband, not to mention something like satellite…my own service through Qwest DSL is for a 40/20 pipe, for which I pay something like $59/month).
You wouldn’t have to manually do something like this anymore. Simply up in some sort of filter on all traffic going to networks other than your own and you will add delay into the system. Of course, if you do this then the providers you peer with will know about it (since they all monitor traffic on their own networks as well as between peers), and they won’t be too happy about it. Of course, since there are only 2 or 3 companies controlling all of the internet (:p) they are probably all in on it, so…
-XT
xtisme, does your “40/20” pipe mean “40 down and 20 up”? I haven’t heard of upload speeds in that range. I do happen to have Comcast cable/internet/phone/HD/HBO, etc and I pay about $170 a month. My advertised internet speed is 20Mb download, but I generally only get about 2Mb uploading. My understanding (possibly a faulty assumption on my part) is that upload speed is throttled by ISP’s (and I don’t know why that is).
I usually get about 12-18Mb downloads. It helps that I’m the only Comcast customer on my side of the street and very close to one of their nodes. Everyone else where I live has satellite, which I cannot get due to the way my house sits on a hill and the height of the mature trees in the woods behind my house, which unfortunately is the direction the dish would need to point. At least, that’s what the satellite guy told me when he attempted to install when I moved in.
Yes, that’s exactly what 40/20 is. The basic DSL package is (IIRC) a 10/5, with the intermediate (again, from memory) being something like 20/10 and the premium package being 40/20.
Since you have Comcast cable, you are on a broadband network, so your speeds are going to be dependent mostly on how many folks are on your particular network segment (and what other traffic besides data they are send across their pipes). All of the speeds are theoretical, of course, and rarely do you actually get upload or download at the speed they advertise (my own runs more to something along the lines of 10-20 down and 5-10 up, depending).
As for throttling you, yeah, they probably do. I’ve found that many broadband companies especially do this. They do it because there is only so much pipe to go around, and it’s better to throttle back everyone than to have the system crawl due to load if a few people are hogging up large portions of the resources.
Basically, broadband is (this is must MHO here) the equivalent of the buggy whip…it’s old and outdated technology. Unfortunately, companies have a large investment in it, so it’s going to be with us for a while yet. If you have any other choices (such as DSL) in your neighborhood, I’d switch providers, even if the bundle looks attractive…unless high speed internet isn’t something that’s really important to you. Personally, I wouldn’t use Comcast if they were the last provider on earth, but that’s more from my professional experience with them than from an end users perspective.
-XT
I don’t have any other choice where I live except Embarq’s DSL, and they are the same price for DSL as I pay now with a slower advertised speed. I have certainly had my issues with Comcast too. Last May a train derailed near here and wiped out one of their fiber optic hubs, so that wasn’t really their fault. But, days later, after everyone else’s service was restored, I began to get intermittent service, and a flurry of technician visits determined that the line across the street from me that ran under some guys driveway to a node (where my drop to my house under my street originates) was bad. They blamed the rocky soil where I live having compromised their line.
But since I was the only customer downstream from the breach in the line, it literally took them two months to send out a crew to use a boring machine to run a new line under my neighbor’s driveway. Meanwhile my internet speeds crawled, my upstairs cable box didn’t work, etc. They did credit my account for two month’s worth of bills, so that was good.
Funny thing is, the crew they sent to bore the new line under dude’s driveway hit and broke the water main in there. Of course they blamed Comcast (they were subcontractors), and Comcast blamed the water company for not locating their water pipe properly. So now this crew tore up this guy’s yard and ripped a huge swath out of his concrete driveway, and he’s all kinds of pissed. And all because little old me kept complaining over a two month timeframe to get them to restore my service properly. So I get home that day and not only do I not have internet, TV or phone service, I have no water either! So they finally get that all squared away and just a few days ago (mind, my service had been off or intermittent since the end of May!) they got another new line put in (because they damaged the other new line they put in to get to the water main break!) and I’m supposed to have yet another tech come out next Tuesday to see where I’m at.
Which brings me full circle to gonzomax’s OP. I don’t fear this merger because Comcast is far too inept to even provide the services they sell, let alone rule the media and internet!
