begin oe_protect.scr
Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
> The $200 Billion Lunch: We're switching to IPv6, dontcha know, and it might
> be worth it.
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
>| To a certain extent, it is Sputnik all over again. Some people see this as
>| a place where there will be a commercial disadvantage unless the U.S. keeps
>| up. It is comparable to NTSC vs. PAL television standards (hint: PAL is
>| better but we don't have it).
>|
>| [...]
>|
>| And what is happening in the USA? Well we have Net Neutrality. We
>| have a telco rebuilding a national monopoly. We have Cisco and
>| Microsoft working together on Network Admission Control (NAC). I can
>| see a time in the near future when they'll try to charge me for every
>| PC in my house. While China is building a national resource, our
>| government is letting companies turn the public Internet into an
>| expensive private toll road.
> `----
>
> http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2006/pulpit_20061102_001174.html
>
> This is related to coordinated restrictions on [f/F]reedom.
It's an interesting piece, but you can sum it up as "Telcos should be
competing private companies" and "the internet should be a free public
resource".
Unfortunately, everyone does seem to forget that the internet runs on
the telecoms networks, and always has done. It's not in any way
independent of them, although it's been used to arbitrage telco services
over the years, but then, so have other methods.
Infrastructure intensive industries form natural monopolies, you cannot
get away from the economics of it. Margins for current fixed-line
telcos are << 10%, so they can only hope to stay in business by
consolidating rapidly. Their margins are little better than those of a
high-street retailer, but their investment cycles are several years
longer, and orders of magnitude greater.
Personally, I think that Telcos need to move to charging per bit-moved.
That way, arbitrage won't happen, and you'll merely pay for what you
use, no more and no less. If you move multiple DVDs around the network,
you'll pay more than the person who just sends a handful of short, text,
emails. This is /correct/. You pay for what you use. It's not a
poll-tax, which is the approach favoured by heavy net-users (of course,
it's in their interests).
You also need to pay a fixed amount for the maintenance of your access
link, of course. This probably should be a poll-tax approach, as
anything else would penalise those people who happen not to live close
to an LE.
--
| Mark Kent -- mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk |
Don't tell me that worry doesn't do any good. I know better. The things
I worry about don't happen.
-- Watchman Examiner
|
|
