The end of the Internet?

You didn't think all this cheap, unlimited usefulness and fun was going to last, did you, without another layer or two interposed to siphon aff more money?

 

They will have a hard time with the barn door and the horses. I wouldn't want to be the a$$ running for re-election with that on my voting record.

This also relates to Broadband. If it doesn't effect dial-up, I see a lot of people going "I can deal with slow and free" and sticking to the 'Net Nazis.

Way to be really, *REALLY* unpopular.

So....I'm not worried. I can't imagine anyone being that stupid. At least, not after the 2006 elections.

 

Somehow I can envision the hacker community issuing a call to arms over this one.

 

No surprise.

Bureaucracy is slow, like Jason in the Friday the 13th movies, it always catches up...

 

Eh. The internet is just a fad anyway.

 

I'm looking forward to the day when all email costs 0.1 cents or so per message. I think it is the simplest, and perhaps only, way that spam will go away. It will also have the side-effect of cleaning up the major pipes, in effect making the providers money, so that they will be less pressured to set up tollways in order not to lose money.

 

I hate it when morons talk like this (from the OP's link):
As Ed Whitacre, chairman and CEO of AT&T, told Business Week in November, "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!"

Why should they be allowed to use YOUR pipes??? Because it is your freakin' customers who paid for access to the pipes and have asked for the information or service to be delivered! :angry:
Why should you AT&T be allowed to use someone else's pipes to deliver content from an AT&T subscriber to a non-AT&T- subscriber???

If my ISP ever started talking in that tone, I'd make a point of dumping their nice person as my provider. [ I hope it never comes to that since I have 10Mbps up&down fiberoptic for about $50/month. B) ]

 

I had also heard of a plan, where every time you send out an e-mail 1 0r 2 seconds of your CPU's time is taken up processing it for each recepient.(as opposed to the nano second it currently takes up). Not a big deal to those of us who do 20 to 30 e-mails a day to a few people, but it would slow down the CPU systems of spammers sending millions. I'm sure there's a way it can be hacked into though.

 

Don't believe everything you read.........

Dewey defeats Truman

Bush took Florida, no Gore, No Bush

etc. etc. etc.

The media's a joke

I've been on this "fad" for 11 years now

There are those that think these cars are a fad

Let's all make it a point to laugh at those people
in the years to come........... -_-

 

In the early days of radio everything was free and the first broadcasters were amateurs. Then someone figured out how to use advertising to make money off it. Then so many folks got in on it that the government had to regulate the airwaves. There are still some frequencies for amateurs and CBers, but most of the spectrum is for corporations to make money.

The internet starts out free, mostly in universities and government. Then it grows and ordinary people can get on it for a few bucks a month. Then broadband, if you're willing to pay a bit more.

As the net matures there will be more control and more profit for the big players. We'll probably always be able to have the bandwidth and the content we're willing to pay for. But the price will go up as ISPs charge more for their "pipes" and as free-content providers start charging. It amazes me that so many newspapers give away their content for free. It's great, but it won't last. I happily pay for content from Consumer Reports, and for service from eFax. And I'd love to see a net-wide fee of a tenth of a cent to send an email. It'd kill spam, though a subscription to an e-newsletter might cost a dollar or two a year.

The internet is young and will continue to evolve. There will be more and more content available, and there will be more money transfered from users to providers.

 

It would figure the internet was Al Gores idea... Now they want to bend everyone over in the name of greed.

If this happend I would install a 50' push-up pole and a $110 FM/TV antenna and go back to free .

Free-Air TV here we have 2,6,9,12,15,24,35,45,55,65, that are local stations. The 100 mile tv ant would give you even more channels.. hmmm.. that would save me $112.10 a month for cable..

 

This issue won't be a campaign issue; Republicans will push the bill but not while elections are on the near horizon.

When you'll see a bill like this make headway is when nobody's getting elected, and you'll see it as a rider on another bill with a name like "Voter Tax Relief Act of 2007," or some nonsense like that. And it will get defeated and come in as a rider on another bill with another misleading name. Just like it already has several times.

If you don't agree with it, get on a mailing list and sign a protest every time they try. A big list of voters that will remember the Senators who signed the bill will make those Senators back off. A small list will make them favor the big campaign contributions they can expect from Verizon and SBC.

 

A penny an email won't stop the spammers ... ever take a look at the junk mail you get? The way to stop spammers is to make email addresses property of the ISP, and enable them to sue the only people making money by selling what is their property ... the "@ISP.COM" portion of the email address.

The real money is "unsolicited commercial email" is in harvesting email addresses and selling some poor slob a list of 10 million email addresses because he thinks he can make more money pushing penis enlargement pills than he did with Amway. Oh, and he needs to buy the delivery of the emails because TimeWarner blocked his account.

Do away with the ability to traffic in the ISPs property, and spammers go away.

As to the "pay per byte" idea, that has been a fight between the old communications structure and the new communications structure for a long time. But the infrastructure was built with consumer's money, with protected monopolies and a guarantee that the old communications players would make money. So it does not really belong to "them". It belongs in the marketplace.

 

The best way to stop spam actually is:

Spam Throttling!
http://www.martiansoftware.com/articles/spammerpain.html

A typical spam filter begins analyzing each message as it's downloaded. If, as it downloads, it begins to have a higher and higher "spam" rating, the server reduces the receive rate of that message more and more. However, it never completely stops receipt of the email, just in case the email is not actually spam.

For someone sending one email, if their email is falsely caught in this filter and it takes them 2 minutes to send their email... no big deal.

For a spammer, if they can't send their 10 million emails in a few minutes, they're out of work. They've got another 10 million emails to send later - they don't have 10 minutes to wait for this batch to send. The result is that spammers computers get jammed up while legitimate email flows freely. And when legit email is occasionally caught accidentally, it still gets there eventually - that last part is essential because most plans harm or inhibit legit email.

And no cost to anyone! No postage required.

The best thing you can do to stop spam is to use email providers that use spam throttling. But, those are still getting their feet. So...

The second best thing you can do to stop spam is to use email providers that stop spam best, and never use ones that don't. For example, my old ISP, Comcast, gave me an email address with my account. I didn't use it because the spam filter on it was a mess; I never gave that account out to one person and still managed to receive spam at it. By abandoning it entirely I eliminated that part of the spam audience.

Gmail and Yahoo! Mail are both widely known to be great at stopping spam. This is partly because when an email comes in, and say 10 people (none of them knowing each other obviously) all happen to mark it spam, it's never delivered to the other 1 million users who that spam was sent to - you never even have to look at it. Occasionally you will see 1 or 2 spam messages, and when you mark them as spam you're saving millions of other users the trouble. Using services like these and ONLY services like these makes it harder for spammers to make a dime.

So - don't vote for legislation that charges all email, good or bad, money. And don't vote for legislation that charges big web services like Google for use of the Web (like the bill discussed here). Legislation like that isn't what's needed, just smarter technology. And people will invent it, you just need to make sure you use it as soon as they do.

 

Don't worry, Walmart will get involved. With $4 prescription drugs, who knows what they could do!

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(SoopahMan @ Sep 23 2006, 04:39 AM) [snapback]323835[/snapback]</div>

I use Yahoo. It is very good at stopping spam. But I still have to scan through my "Bulk" mail folder on-line because about once or twice a week it registers a false positive. Of course, once I tell it the mail is not spam, I will receive mail from that sender. But there's always another.

 

Yeah - I can't vouch for Yahoo! Mail directly because I've only heard from users that it's excellent; I use Gmail. I've been using it for over a year and have had one false positive and perhaps 30 spam emails ever reach my Inbox. And don't think I don't use it much! I use that email account a lot.

I only listed Yahoo and Gmail to make it easy for those who don't want to do research to pick something as simple as an email provider. If you have the interest please do assess your options in terms of spam throttling and false positive rates, that sort of thing. Don't let my suggestions slow you down.