2012 is it the end

[Fester]

It is been said that 2012 will be the death of the internet due to a change in the way the internet will be sold to the public by I.S.P's

Do you think this can happen ?

Fester

[baggheed]

i dont think it will be the end it may be the begining of something different like what they've been doing with digital tv,the 12yr death of analogue,but with the technological advances that r being made whatever they do should be better and shit it'll take me till 2012 to suss it out lol oh and a monk told me the earth would be struck by a meteor in 2028 mankind wont become extinct till 2032

[Supernova]

There are large arguments with net neutrality based groups about the whole idea...
for those less well informed, it was proposed (rumoured) that ISPs might begin selling access to the internet on a prescription based service much like sky television. You pay for a, say education package, and get access to educational sites.

It won't hold.

Unless the sites are ridiculously cheap, there will be ISPs ready to pounce in after the big guns have said yes who will start selling "normal" internet and make a killing. Nobody wants limited internet!

[Jonnywhy]

Although there's the possibility that they might start selling different standard packages, with lower standards being slower and not prioritised, and the higher packages being given precidence

[Del]

the internet != amerika

It might be the end of the net as we know it for merkins, but sure, the internet here (oirelande) has been fucked from day one.

In the US, Time Warner Cable has just started trialling a tiered internet package, ie "Slower services of 768 kbps with a 5-gigabyte monthly allowance are going to run $29.95, while their fastest and larger service with fast downloads at up to 15 megabits per second and a 40-gigabyte cap will run $54.90 per month." go over that and you pay $1 per GB.

That is precisely what we have as 'internet' here, with the exception of one or two hard to avail of ISPs. We have ok-ish speeds and laughable monthly bandwidth caps that can be used up in a day or less. Go over and you may be charged. I'm not aware of anyone being charged for overuse yet, but it's in the t&c's of the contract you sign w/ both the main dsl providers here, it's at their discretion.

In the UK the ISPs are whinging about BBC's iplayer - BBC pay for big fat servers with big fat pipes onto the internet backbone. Joe Public then avails of these services for watching decent quality tv streams. The ISP's are whinging about the amount of bandwidth this uses and want to charge BBC for people (who pay the ISP for broadband) to be able to access this service, thereby getting paid twice. That's akin to making a phone call and having both the caller and receiver being charged for the privilige(on top of monthly line rental). They are theatening to throttle the BBC's service if they dont pay up.

Of course the beeb have told em to go fuckemselves in polite politikspeke, it's totally the problem of the ISP's who have been overselling their capacity for far too long and now that people are waking up to what broadband internet means, it's coming back to bite them in the ass.

ISP's with proper infrastructure have nothing to worry about(look at Sweden, S.Korea, Japan), but alas they are few and far between, the rest are running scared.

Of course for Big Business, in TeamUSA 'running scared' means throwing millions at lobbying corrupt clueless fuckers in washington.

some interesting links
Glasnost, a bittorrent blocking(not shaping) test. Already one Irish ISP blocking
http://broadband.mpi-sws.mpg.de/transparency/results/
Azureus Wiki on shaping ISPs
http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Bad_ISPs
The reg on the beeb and the isps
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/20 ... sps_broke/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/09 ... i_iplayer/

we are living with tiered internet, we just havent been officially told We'll be back to dialup performance again soon, the good old World Wide Wait. in other words....

The fucking fuckers fucking fucked

[FullMetal_old]

Bullshit,it's just like Y2K lol so much hype of crap for nothing.

[Johnimus Prime]

I think this ties in nicely with my problems with BT at the moment. They can offer it, but their woefully substandard infrastructure can't deal with it.

If they try and do what they suggest there would be massive consumer backlash, and in the UK I think ofcom would step in quite quickly and say that they could only consider charging like this if they substantially upgraded the comms infrastructure.

Takes the piss when you think that the creators of the internet were all about information sharing, not shafting!

[tanzadog]

not sure if this is on topic but i pay £16 a month for my 8mb unlimited broadband with sky. and i do get 8mb as well!, i aint complaining!!! I just d/l the bourne ultimatum 4.7gb in just a few hours. wicked! (slightly slower than it should be coz it was a bit torrent)