Time Warner to test usage-based Internet access rates: the new, improved rate structure arrives...

...improved for everyone but users, ISP subscribers, web site proprietors and other normal people not affiliated with the investor classes.

After that Cassandra-like piece I did the other day on the coming death of the Internet, I had a bunch of email wondering how or even if our overlords could in fact shut the whole thing down. Although I'm nowhere near being an Internet architect or expert technician, I do have friends who are and who have told me a little about this stuff. So I replied with what little I know.

Shutting the Internet down is technically unlikely because the Internet was originally designed with multiple redundancies (no single points of failure). Even the "backbone" is highly redundant, so if you were to cripple the "superhighway," another would take its place with little or no perceptible delay. And the traffic itself, using IP headers and router tables for navigation, can be steered onto alternative data paths (virtual circuits) on the fly. There's no main router or choke point I know of that, if disabled, would shut the whole thing down, although various denial of service attacks, worms and other disruptions have slowed it down considerably in the recent past.

However, I think the real threat lies in imposing financial barriers like exorbitant user fees, long distance tolls, higher ISP pop account rate structures and web site hosting charges, surtaxes for heavy users and multi-tiered quality of service levels with a rate structure that relegates the poor to dial-up speeds -- all those tactics would definitely have a chilling effect on who gets to use it, for how long, at what speed and from where.

So today, proving that little minds think alike, Time Warner's internet marketing geniuses announced that they were going to try to pry more money out of their subscribers by going to a usage-based billing structure. I.e., the more time you spend online, the more you pay per month.

Never mind that this seems to violate a basic rule of business by penalizing rather than rewarding their best customers. Nor does it make much marketing sense, given that they probably aren't going to attract many new customers by alienating their current ones. But, since Time Warner owns AOL and an assortment of AOL off-shoots, it's one of the top five Internet access providers in the country. And that means they pretty much get to do what they want. So here's the trial balloon:



So instead of building out their web server farm and raising overall available computing power, they're going to keep service levels the same and just soak their best customers. Excellent. But there are some bumps on the road to billing nirvana...




Even though that's exactly what they're getting.

And this may prove contagious...




This would be in sharp contrast to a friend's experiences, in which Comcast emailed her and told her that they were blocking a certain percentage of traffic to and from her site because she's a bandwidth hog. Well, not those words exactly, but...

I don't know who you scream at these days -- the FCC is corrupt, congress is useless, the larger ISPs like Time Warner are non-responsive... I suppose you could go the window, open it up and yell "I'm mad as hell...."

Ach... It's been done.


wp

:argh:

them how much you approve of their new plan to scalp their subscribers.

The only thing we have left - the power of where we spend our dollar.

and since Time Warner is part of the big Bilderburg/Trilateral 60 year plan to

take over all govts and make One World Govt., seems like it would be a good idea

to dump them.

:kick:

I'd suggest that, if people want to break the corporate stranglehold on their Internet use -- and as much else as possible, for that matter -- they try like hell to find their own locally owned ISP, along with their own locally owned hardware store, coffee shop, clothing maker, deli and so forth down the line.

We simply can't continue this hypocrisy of condemning corporate America on the one hand and continuously fattening its bottom line on the other.

We can't help but consume -- unless we're one of the truly evolved few who have managed to carve out a life based on the land and independent of the grid -- but we need to consume very carefully and wisely lest we end up investing in our own continued enslavement.

This flag is what this country is all about these days, and it's all our jobs to minimize the money and power these vampires are able to accumulate and use to impose their values on all of us.




wp

That's what I have too, and I couldn't be happier with it.

I would happily switch. I have Time Warner now.

We have a local ISP and it's just fine. My only worry after reading this thread so far is that if At&T decides to follow Time Warner, it could affect us too (the DSL works off of AT&T).

It may be hard for Time-Warner people to switch, if they have opted for the bundles Time-Warner is pushing (cable TV, internet, voice phone service).

Obviously I hate that idea with a passion. At least most of us lived through what apparently will be called the golden age of Internet freedom, it's probably going to be up to us if the ISPs get away with this.

I'm using my PDA at the moment...so I''ll save,print and share later.

that you are currently paying more for high level users. There is, in fact, a limit on available bandwidth at any given time, during periods of peak usage it is a fixed commodity to a particular geographic location. If everyone on your block is downloading movies (legally, of course) at the same time, your service will slow down.

I remember people paying by the byte for internet access in the BBS days. now you'll be paying by the gigabyte. go check your logs, how many gigs did you actually download last month? how many did you upload? so if they tell you that your current price point is for 2 gigs download and 1 gig upload, how's that actually going to affect your internet usage?

and, of course, if your 'friend' was running a webserver off of Comcast's home cable service, she was most likely violating the ToS in her contract. I know when I had comcast a year or so back the deal was that I couldn't host a server on my plan.

...although if this catches on, I may be in the future. This is mainly a cautionary note about how ISPs may be looking to boost revenue without providing anything in return, such as infrastructure upgrades to support more high-bandwidth users.

Ironically, AOL, which Time Warner now owns, used to use this billing model. I had it in the early '90s and, as long as I just used it for email and file transfer, the rates were consistent. But once I discovered their bulletin boards, and how many cretins were getting away with writing pure unchallenged bullshit, I started started to run up some pretty amazing bills. And I had no idea prior to getting the bill how much the month's diatribes were costing.

My disgust with the cretins was outweighed by my disgust for paying AOL all that money, so I disconnect them, found a local ISP and things have been fine ever since. And by "fine," I mean they represent a fixed cost and there are never any surprises.

The thing that worries me about this is the inevitability that this billing model will inject uncertainty into the monthly budget, and may result in some exorbitant fees and, therefore, some tough choices for poorer people, especially those on fixed incomes.

And if you find time to read that article I linked to in the OP, you'll see that my concern isn't strictly monetary. I'm generally concerned that, because the Internet is the only source of non-corporate information left in the US, there are many very good reasons for our massuhs to want to kill it -- at least the part of it that's not serving corporate interests and disseminating unapproved ideas.

So that's the bigger picture and, while the technical aspects of limiting internet access to corporate-friendly sites is probably an overwhelming task, the next best thing from that point of view would be to simply keep as many people away as possible by threatening them with heavy usage charges that they don't really understand and therefore react by just pulling the plug.

It the electronic version of the GOP's time honored strategy to suppress the total number of voters. Sure, you're going to lose some GOPer votes, but most of the losses will fall on the other side. Same here; for every BushBot you lose, there are probably thousands of financially strapped progressives who will no longer be able to afford participating on this kind of board -- or think they can't, which amounts to the same thing.

I could be completely wrong, of course. It's happened once or twice before. ;)


wp


Edited to add: re my friend's Comcast problems... She wasn't hosting a web site on their cable lines. The issues were a lot more complex and probably involved opposing political view to a certain extent. Fortunately, she's a lawyer so the trouble passed quickly.

Based on our firewall logs, Comcast actually pings Port 80
frequently, presumably to see if we are running a web server
in violation of their ToS.

Frankly, with as much congestion as we now see on our
segment of their network, I'd be *IN FAVOR* of them
doing something to rein in the bandwidth hogs.

Tesha

they hear 'pay for use' and freak out. fact is, other people, paying the same amount as you, are reducing your quality of experience. Comcast doesn't want to lose you as a customer, they want to make money off you.

Think of it as an all-you-can-eat buffet restaurant. You set your price based on what an average person eats and deal with a few outliers as the price of doing business. what do you do, though, when Shrimp-Over-Eaters Chapter 13 sets up shop in your place, eating all your shrimp? therefore denying your other customers shrimp, and making you raise your prices for everyone to get more shrimp? do you deny them access? do you charge them more? or do you charge everyone more, so that everyone still pays the same price, it's just higher? tough call, no?

It's currently like an all-you-can-eat-buffet. In buffets, prices are higher to accommodate those who eat the most. It's the same with bandwidth.

I'm happy to pay less now that I'm not paying for John the Freeper's porn stash.

on the grounds that we are subversive to the dictatorship

which we are

and then they all move to Canada, the Bahamas and other places with less stringent regulatory environments. There is no practical way to control internet traffic across geographic borders at this point, the net is too organic and alive to allow such control.

I've heard that Internet architecture makes it a bit easier to restrict international traffic than domestic, which is supposed to be damn near impossible.

I have this vision of a giant Cisco router the size of the UN building sitting on top of the transatlantic cables and acting as a possible filtration point to skim off unapproved thoughts and ideas. Same for traffic crossing the Pacific to Asia, I suppose, and to Central and South America as well unless it's all landlines south of the Rio Grande. Canada I would think is another matter entirely.

So is this even remotely possible? Could the evil doers restrict international traffic with some degree of success? Or is the Internet just too big, well-engineered, redundant, out of control and organic to deal with?

All assurances of continued access to actual conscious minds much appreciated.


wp

yes, you could conceivably mess with the major trans-atlantic and trans-pacific cables, but how would you deal with traffic that routes through Canada? through Mexico, down to Argentina and across? satellite traffic? pirate microwave traffic? there are just too many entry points at this point (heck, even China, which has been restricting the net from the start, can't keep a 100% lock down, and they control every legal entry and exit point)

So if physical/technical control of the net isn't practical or even possible, that gets us back to the original point of the post: using money to restrict access. I would guess that not a lot of rich republicans spend much time on DU. If they spend their days online, they're more likely to be connected to some brokerage house or etrade site.

Or maybe to Larry Craig's private gallery, featuring Senator Diaper Fetishist and Little Tina, the salacious underaged Pampers girl. But I digress...

But they can afford pretty much anything Time Warner and the rest throw at them. Not so the cross-section of people who frequent progressive sites. And for those at the bottom of the economic shitpile, access rate increases could well force them off the net. And all of us lose their input, their ideas, their wit and their ability to frame issues in ways we never thought of.

That's what really worries me. Obviously, Internet censorship has been a goal of these repressive bastards for a long time now. The fact that it hasn't happened suggests that you're right about the technical hurdles. So they go after the demand side and start to limit access by bank account.

And the other part of the mix, of course, is totalitarian legislation like HR 1955/S 1959, for which you can find links to articles and cautionary tales http://www.opencongress.org/bill/110-h1955/show">here.

That may be the worst of all since it carries potentially harsh penalties for thinking certain thoughts and advocating certain positions.

Anyway, thanks for your take on the difficulty of pulling the plug on international IP traffic. I know just enough about Internet design and architecture to be dangerous.


wp

They keep technophobic people cocooned up with, basically, the same technique the government uses: terra terra terra. "Stay with us and we will protect you from the Evil Internet"

Free market my ass.

I've, suddenly, been forced not to stream internet radio day and night

but pick only my most favorite shows

for fear Verizon will shut me off for using too much bandwidth

as they are doing much more often now.

I had been up over 5 million megs a month, now I'm down below 3

Before dec 29, I didn't worry because I paid my ex for one of her employee lines

(She works for Verizon) so I didn't worry too much (although she did)

But they have cut their employees from 5 lines to 4

So I had to change the acct. over to me, your standard retail customer.

(I went from paying $30/mo to $60/mo )

I wish I had someone tell me how much I can use before I use too much

But, Verizon won't even tell you.

I'm afraid to stream video at all, except for outstanding Olberman special comments

I haven't owned a tv since 11/03/04

(I smashed it when Kerry conceded )

and haven't watched very much tv in 10 years

Congratulations on smashing the TV, btw. I think that's become the single most important act of personal defiance these days. Thanks to the intertubes, by 6:30 or so every morning I've learned more than an average CNN viewer is going to learn in a year. And most of what they learn will be wrong.

Good luck with Verizon. I hear they're just some of the very nicest people you could ever want to meet. :sarcasm:


wp

She has a few times when she can be nice, sweet and helpful

and a bunch of times when she can be mean, selfish, vindictive and underhanded

but that, I think, is common among people's exes

I was married to a trial lawyer for several years back in the late '80s and the dissolution was epic in the true sense of the word. For every scrap of a concession, there were hoops to jump through, performance criteria to be met, and more gotchas than a medical insurance policy. Many friends have had similar experiences, although they had the good sense not to marry lawyers.

So yeah, I think your experience is pretty normal. Nothing personal; it's just business.


wp

and build a wireless user based data-share system.

It won't be pretty but it may be the only way we can by-pass the BIG BELLS.

Is that most of my utilities are actually cooperatives, where the people actually have a stake in the coop. Our utility rates rise much slower, and bullshit like this AOL move will never fly with the coop.

The market is no fool.

For instance, even here in Portland there are only a couple of ways to get broadband access: Comcast cable or Quest DSL. DSL has last-mile limitations, so if you're not pretty close to the DSL switch, your performance will suffer. The farther away, the lousier your speed.

So I stick with Comcast, not because they're so cheap or their service is so outstanding, but because in this regulated market that promotes monopolistic practices (the myth of free market deregulation notwithstanding), Comcast is the only choice.

So you get the illusion of consumer-based market control but without the messy reality.


wp

and much of the area still has none, the further upriver you go.

If we cut 'em off, there goes the phone.

So they get people to buy their movies from an online delivery service then hit them again for the "delivery" charge. Pretty clever.