The End Of The Internet As We Know It?

[Percival]

WHAT??? NO MORE 4CHAN??? OH THE HORROR!!!




Has anyone else been following whats going on behind the scenes re: The Internet and its future?

Excerpt from Senator Jay Rockefeller's Cyber Security Bill 773
(recently introduced into the Senate):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ct9xzXUQLuY


QUOTE
"..may declare a cybersecurity emergency and order the limitation or shutdown of Internet traffic to and from any compromised Federal Government or United States critical infrastructure information system or network."



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QUOTE
Billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch gave a strange response when asked about plans for mainstream news websites to charge for content, declaring, “The current days of the internet will soon be over.”

He was making reference to the fact that corporate media websites cannot continue to survive under their current failing business model.

The establishment media is dying and advertising revenue has plummeted as people turn to blogs and the alternative media for their news in an environment of corporate lies and spin.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/rupert-murd ... -over.html


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QUOTE
"We have been at the forefront of that debate and you can confidently presume that we are leading the way in finding a model that maximizes revenues in return for our shareholders... The current days of the Internet will soon be over."

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/BUSINESS/05 ... index.html


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Save the internet:

Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWt0XUocViE

Site:
http://www.savetheinternet.com/





EU wants 'Internet G12' to govern cyberspace
LEIGH PHILLIPS

05.05.2009 @ 09:21 CET

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The European Commission wants the US to dissolve all government links with the body that 'governs' the internet, replacing it with an international forum for discussing internet governance and online security.

The rules and decisions on key internet governance issues, such as the creation of top level domains (such as .com and .eu) and managing the internet address system that ensures computers can connect to each other, are currently made by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a private, not-for profit corporation based in California which operates under an agreement with the US Department of Commerce.


Commissioner Reding wants internet governance fully privatised but overseen by an international forum (Photo: EURid)
Print
Comment article
The decisions made by ICANN affect the way the internet works all around the world.

EU information society commissioner Viviane Reding on Monday (4 May) suggested a new model for overseeing the internet from October this year, when the Commerce Department agreement runs out.

She called on US President Barack Obama to fully privatise ICANN and set up an independent judicial body, described as a "G12 for internet governance," which she described as a "multilateral forum for governments to discuss general internet governance policy and security issues."

"I trust that President Obama will have the courage, the wisdom and the respect for the global nature of the internet to pave the way in September for a new, more accountable, more transparent, more democratic and more multilateral form of Internet Governance," she said via a video message posted on her commission website.

The expiry of the agreement between ICANN and the US government "opens the door for the full privatisation of ICANN, and it also raises the question of to whom ICANN should be accountable," she said.

"In the long run, it is not defendable that the government department of only one country has oversight of an internet function which is used by hundreds of millions of people in countries all over the world."

Instead, Brussels would prefer that an international government forum that to meet twice a year makes recommendations by majority vote to the newly privatised ICANN. The forum would be restricted to representatives from 12 countries, with a regional balance taken into consideration.

Her "Internet G12" would include two representatives each from North America, South America, Europe and Africa, three representatives from Asia and Australia, as well as the Chairman of ICANN as a non-voting member. International organisations with competences in this field meanwhile could be given observer status.

The new US administration's position on global internet governance is not yet clear. However, during the Bush administration, Washington was steadfastly opposed to handing ICANN over to the United Nations.

The commission will hold a conference on Wednesday (6 May) in Brussels to discuss the issue with Europe's internet community.



http://euobserver.com/871/28065

[Percival]

I really don't think it's possible to shut down the int.....

[JackRiddler]

I really don't think it's possible to shut down the int.....

Are you serious?

Does Herndon, Virginia ring a bell?

[Percival]

I really don't think it's possible to shut down the int.....

Are you serious?

Does Herndon, Virginia ring a bell?

Well I have mixed feelings about this topic, on the one hand I do believe they probably could actually shut it down if they wanted to, on the other hand it seems you can't "shut off" the internet any more than you can "shut off" radio. So long as one computer can talk to another, the idea of a computer network will live on.


Additionally, the internet is a patchwork of interconnected networks owned by many different companies, individuals, universities, etc. It is highly robust and taking out a large number of its nodes would not shut it down.

Anyway I think Alex Jones and others like to spread hysteria, what is more likely to happen is that news sites like CNN and FOX will start charging us to read their content but I dont see how that really helps their business model because people will just go elsewhere to get their news.

Honestly I dont know what to make of any of this, in fact I dont know what to make of anything anymore, I am tired, exhausted and worn out from trying to make sense of the fucking world.

[justdrew]

I am tired, exhausted and worn out from trying to make sense of the fucking world.

somebodies mission is accomplished. Note that for all appearances the "great financial crises" that was going to destroy capitalism is over and done with, a storm in a teacup. As for all the layoffs, THAT was going to happen anyway. The "finanical crisis was just: 1. Convienient cover to blame, 2. hostile takeovers, 3. free MUNY from the nation of rubes.

A small fraction of the population is all that is needed to operate every machine, grow all the food, execute every managerial decision. It is no longer necessary for business to maintain the illusion of being "a big employer" to have unassailable clout. Therefore expect the shanty towns to spring up, only to be torn down soon after. Imprisoning and hunting the unemployed dead-enders will be one of the few growth areas.

[slomo]

Well I have mixed feelings about this topic, on the one hand I do believe they probably could actually shut it down if they wanted to, on the other hand it seems you can't "shut off" the internet any more than you can "shut off" radio. So long as one computer can talk to another, the idea of a computer network will live on.

Additionally, the internet is a patchwork of interconnected networks owned by many different companies, individuals, universities, etc. It is highly robust and taking out a large number of its nodes would not shut it down.

Two words: 1. sneakernet; 2. encryption.

(And, I guess, 3. steganography, if it comes down to filtering packets that fail some information entropy test, but that's probably a long way off.)

[Percival]

I am tired, exhausted and worn out from trying to make sense of the fucking world.

somebodies mission is accomplished. Note that for all appearances the "great financial crises" that was going to destroy capitalism is over and done with, a storm in a teacup. As for all the layoffs, THAT was going to happen anyway. The "finanical crisis was just: 1. Convienient cover to blame, 2. hostile takeovers, 3. free MUNY from the nation of rubes.

A small fraction of the population is all that is needed to operate every machine, grow all the food, execute every managerial decision. It is no longer necessary for business to maintain the illusion of being "a big employer" to have unassailable clout. Therefore expect the shanty towns to spring up, only to be torn down soon after. Imprisoning and hunting the unemployed dead-enders will be one of the few growth areas.

Sounds about right.

[Percival]

Two words: 1. sneakernet; 2. encryption.

(And, I guess, 3. steganography, if it comes down to filtering packets that fail some information entropy test, but that's probably a long way off.)

Sure, they could never stop a sneakernet but I suppose they could stop production of all file carrying removeable media (floppy, CD etc).

Might as well break out the typerwritters then, I think I still have a few in storage somewhere.


Steganography is fun stuff, my buddies and I used to play around with that, good skill to have.

[slomo]

Sure, they could never stop a sneakernet but I suppose they could stop production of all file carrying removeable media (floppy, CD etc).

That's still a ways off. The first step is to lock down networks and erect various firewalls. Australia was the first step in that direction. The countervailing strategy is to email items of interests to people in your social network (which is what I really meant by sneakernet, somewhat abusing the term). This will work until the laws clamp down on email content (which will follow, of course). Then encryption ensues, but at that point it might actually be safer to use steganographic means of communication, which is very hard. However, it is at least five years away, which gives people who know in advance what to expect time to prepare.

[Percival]

Sure, they could never stop a sneakernet but I suppose they could stop production of all file carrying removeable media (floppy, CD etc).

That's still a ways off. The first step is to lock down networks and erect various firewalls. Australia was the first step in that direction. The countervailing strategy is to email items of interests to people in your social network (which is what I really meant by sneakernet, somewhat abusing the term). This will work until the laws clamp down on email content (which will follow, of course). Then encryption ensues, but at that point it might actually be safer to use steganographic means of communication, which is very hard. However, it is at least five years away, which gives people who know in advance what to expect time to prepare.

So you think within a decade, give or take, it wont be like it is now where we just come to RI and chat freely and openly about whatever we wish?

[slomo]

So you think within a decade, give or take, it wont be like it is now where we just come to RI and chat freely and openly about whatever we wish?

I don't know how long it will take. There will first be the erection of massive firewalls, with pedophilia and terrorism given as the reason. Then there will be a slow mission creep as more and more politically charged sites get added to the content filtering. Eventually, deep politics sites will be subsumed.

Of course, there is a competing risk, described eloquently by the Archdruid in last week's post:

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/ ... n-age.html

Synopsis: the energy will run out, making internet access increasingly difficult and costly. IMHO, this will actually help the censorship process, as pricing models are used to entice people into walled gardens.

[Canadian_watcher]

I am admittedly uninformed about the workings of the internet...
but..
could "they" not just up the fees, fines, etc for ISPs..
and then of course there are the trunks,
not to mention the "series of tubes," which they could just stuff full of cotton

[Percival]

My best guess is that they will come out with what is now called "Internet 2" it will be advertised as MUCH MUCH faster than the current internet but it will have a lot less content, you will have the choice to upgrade to that or stay here on this one we are on now but this one will be made so slow that most people will tire of it and make the jump, slowly leaving this one in the dust like an old western ghost town. And then it wont be long until they start calling places like RI the new Spahn Ranch.

[Penguin]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/20 ... gle-garage

We must ensure ISPs don't stop the next Google getting out of the garage

Allowing ISPs to have too much would drastically hinder the chances of fresh new startups developing into major businesses – as happened with Google

If politicians want to effect economic recovery, national competitiveness, good public health and high civic engagement, they have a duty to keep the internet free and open. But politicians around the world seem willing to sacrifice their national interest to keep a few powerful phone and telcoms companies happy.

Take the Telcoms Package now before the EU: among other things, the package paves the way for ISPs and Quangos to block or slow access to websites and services on an arbitrary basis. At the same time, ISPs are instituting and enforcing strict bandwidth limits on their customers, citing shocking statistics about the bandwidth hogs who consume vastly more resources than the average punter.

Between filtering, fiddling connection speeds and capping usage, ISPs are pulling the rug out from under the nations that have sustained them with generous subsidies and regulation.

Take filtering: by allowing ISPs to silently block access to sites that displease them, we invite all the ills that accompany censorship – Telus, a Canadian telcom that blocked access to a site established by its striking workers where they were airing their grievances. Around the world, ISPs co-operate with censorious governments in their mission to keep their citizens in the dark: for example, ISPs in the United Arab Emirates are blocking access to stories about a UAE royal family member who was video-recorded torturing a merchant with whom he had a business dispute. As a matter of policy, Transport for London isn't allowed to block us from riding the tube to a rally in support of striking transit workers; British Gas doesn't turn our heat off if they suspect we're housing a benefits cheat; and BT doesn't divert our phone calls if we're ringing up a competitor to change carriers. Giving an ISP censorship powers — and then layering censorship in secrecy and arbitrariness — we make the internet a less trustworthy and less useful place to be.

ISPs would also like to be able to arbitrarily slow or degrade our network connections depending on what we're doing and with whom. In the classic "traffic shaping" scenario, a company like Virgin Media strikes a deal with Yahoo to serve its videos on a preferential basis, and then slows its customers' connections to Google, Hulu, and other videohosting sites to ensure that Virgin's videos are the quickest to load. As the Craigslist founder, Craig Newmark, said, this is like the phone company putting you on hold when your ring your local pizzeria, with a message inviting you to press one to be immediately connected to Domino's, its "preferred pizza partner".

But the real action in network fiddling isn't the battle between giants such as Yahoo and Google. Both well-established, have armies of otherwise unoccupied "business development" people lying around, and are handily capable of fanning out across the globe and buying lunch for their opposite numbers at every telcoms operator on the planet. The real victims of network discrimination are the nimble little startups, the firms that are in the same position today that Google was in 10 years ago when it consisted of a few marginally funded hackers and some taped-together hardware under a desk.

Google needn't be the last Google. It needn't be the last firm to emerge from the fevered imagination of two bright kids and turn the world on its ear. And it need not always come from Silicon Valley. Just as Research in Motion was able to take the world by storm from Waterloo, Ontario; just as Moo.com was able to conquer the world's business-card needs from Clerkenwell, so, too could the next remarkable startup emerge from the UK.

Unless, that is, the cost of entry into the market goes up by four or five orders of magnitude, growing to encompass the cost of a horde of gladhanding negotiators who must first secure the permission of gatekeepers at the telcoms giants. In that case, only the least experimental, safest, lowest-risk/lowest-return firms will be capitalized, because no one wants to take a big plunge on a risky proposition that could be stopped dead in its tracks by a phone company that's already given pole position to an incumbent.

Finally, there's the question of metered billing for ISP customers. The logic goes like this: "You have a 20Mbs connection, but if you use that connection as though it were unmetered, you will saturate our bandwidth and everyone will suffer." ISPs like to claim that their caps are "fair" and that the majority of users fit comfortably beneath them, and that only a tiny fraction of extraordinary bandwidth hogs reach the ceiling.

The reality is that network usage follows a standard statistical distribution, the "Pareto Distribution," a power-law curve in which the most active users are exponentially more active than the next-most-active group, who are exponentially more active than the next group, and so on. This means that even if you kick off the 2% at the far right-hand side of the curve, the new top 2% will continue to be exponentially more active than the remainder. Think of it this way: there will always be a group of users in the "top 2%" of bandwidth consumption. If you kick those users off, the next-most-active group will then be at the top. You can't have a population that doesn't have a ninety-eighth percentile.

But the real problem of per-usage billing is that no one – not even the most experienced internet user – can determine in advance how much bandwidth they're about to consume before they consume it. Before you clicked on this article, you had no way of knowing how many bytes your computer would consume before clicking on it. And now that you've clicked on it, chances are that you still don't know how many bytes you've consumed. Imagine if a restaurant billed you by the number of air-molecules you displaced during your meal, or if your phone-bills varied on the total number of syllables you uttered at 2dB or higher.

Even ISPs aren't good at figuring this stuff out. Users have no intuition about their bandwidth consumption and precious little control over it.

Metering usage discourages experimentation. If you don't know whether your next click will cost you 10p or £2, you will become very conservative about your clicks. Just look at the old AOL, which charged by the minute for access, and saw that very few punters were willing to poke around the many offerings its partners had assembled on its platform. Rather, these people logged in for as short a period as possible and logged off when they were done, always hearing the clock ticking away in the background as they worked.

This is good news for incumbents who have already established their value propositions for their customers, but it's a death sentence for anything new emerging on the net.

Between these three factors – reducing the perceived value of the net, reducing the ability of new entrants to disrupt incumbents, and penalizing those who explore new services on the net – we are at risk of scaring people away from the network, of giving competitive advantage to firms in better-regulated nations, of making it harder for people to use the net to weather disasters, to talk to their government and to each other.

Telcoms companies argue that their responsibility is to their shareholders, not the public interest, and that they are only taking the course of maximum profitability. It's not their business to ensure that the Googles of tomorrow attain liftoff from the garages in which they are born.

But telcoms firms are all recipients of invaluable public subsidy in the form of rights of way and other grants that allow them to string their wires over and under our streets and through our homes. You and I can't go spelunking in the sewers with a spool of cable to wire up our own alternative network. And if the phone companies had to negotiate for every pole, every sewer, every punch-down, every junction box, every road they get to tear up, they'd go broke. All the money in the world couldn't pay for the access they get for free every day.

If they don't like it, they don't have to do it. But we don't have to give them our sewers and streets and walls, either. Governments and regulators are in a position to demand that these recipients of public subsidy adhere to a minimum standard of public interest. If they don't like it, let them get into another line of work – give them 60 days to get their wires out of our dirt and then sell the franchise to provide network services to a competitor who will promise to give us a solid digital future in exchange for our generosity.

[8bitagent]

1. Obama signed a bill which allows him to shut down the internet

2. The creator of Linux was on Alex Jones today, saying the government plans to shut down the web as we know it

Hey...Im just saying:)

Anyone whose been following the news knows that the US and NATO have been involved in full on cyberwarfare war game and prep mode. Meaning, I wouldnt be surprised if a "Die Hard 4.0" scenario goes down