The Internet as We Know It

Many will remember the idea of SOPA a few years back, in which regulations were trying to be pushed on the internet. But an even greater threat is coming up, and it's all up to us to stop it. Currently comcast is trying to buy out Time Warner, and AT and T

Once this goes through, they own the internet as you know it, they own the pipes, they own your signal. They wish to capitalize on the idea by selling the internet to you in packages. Sites like Facebook and youtube will survive quite fine, but for small businesses, for sites like hip forums, blogs, you name it. They will easily die out if this ever comes into fruition.

I'm not sure if you knew this already, but Bill Clinton promised that we would be able to have free access to internet in all major cities. Was he lying? NO. People don't realize this, but that is more than possible, Singapore does it, and they have even higher speed internet than we see for what we pay top dollar for.

You are literally being fucked over by companies right now, but if comcast were to come through with this, it could set back every free idea out there

 

Real game of monopoly, as always....

 

yeah, that's what companies do best, rape customers

comcast, twc and at&t don't own shit tho, they dont own the internet. for one at&t split up a long long time ago into the "baby bells" which include verizon, pac bell, swbell, etc.

ever heard of level 3 communications?, even they do not own the internet even tho they are a tier 1 network

there should be some kind of law in place to prevent one company from having too large a network, because I can see one day some kind of monopoly owning the entire network and that would be shitty

comcast and TWC are not tier 1 providers anyway ..

 

Yes, but AT and T is a parent company to all the companies you mentioned actually, so they would own version and such too

But the thing is, when a company can decide wether or not to provide you a service, how exactly can you fight back? It is imperative for us all to stop paying comcast

Yes, but they own your connection to the internet

 

Sleeping Caterpiller:

you boycott the company and refuse to use any of their services, exactly what type of services are you referring to? connectivity?

the service these companies provide is IP transit. more or less allowing you to connect to other networks that make up the internet. these are the tier 1 networks, networks that can reach any other network without paying IP transit. they avoid the "middle man" ISPs. if these huge companies keep buying the smaller companies eventually there would be one big company and it would be impossible for any other companies to come up or survive. then they would have total control of the fees they charge for "services" which I would fight back by refusing to use and continuing to download free warez.

true, they do own the network that you must connect to to be connected to the rest of the networks that make up the internet.

 

From ICANN the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

 

any of you remember the concept of hypertext? the meaning and purpose, the whole point of it? the "h" in "http"?

in the beginning there was arpa-net, before it went public. in this case, the point of studying history, is to see how much, in our greed, we have in fact, stolen from ourselves.

 

Specifically a tier 1 provider which can reach anywhere public on the internet without paying peering fees, so its more a measument of scope rather than scale. Comcast does most of of its tracfic through peering, which does make them potentialy a tier 1. In scale, they are the largest home internet provider in the country. They're also ranked the worst by their customers.

I use them. It's the only real solutiom where I am. They are bad. The cable installer told my sisters girlfriend that we couldn't change our wifi network name, and if we did they'd change it back. Not only is that a bizzare naziesque show of power. It was also clearly spoken by a cable guy who has no idea how wifi works. It's s a radio name, level2 not routable. You should have to read one book on networking to be a cable guy. That ends my IT guy rant.