They Are Still At It
“Want a Smart Network or Dumb Pipe?”
That’s the new scam by the telcos and cable companies. From them you want a “dumb pipe”, because that’s their function in the Internet, already a very smart network.
The Internet is all about open standards; it doesn’t care if you have a Mac, a Wintel box, some flavor of Linux, whatever; it works. Everything is sliced into packets with “to” and “from” addresses and a sequence number. The packets flow to their destination by any path available and are reassembled at the other end. A simple, but elegant, solution that doesn’t get hung up when a hurricane rips up part of the network.
What the telcos and cable companies want to do is reserve part of the Internet and make it into a toll road. If you pay the toll you get preferential treatment.
The ‘Net started as a technocracy, connecting research institutions over a government financed network. It was then opened up to the general public and became a meritocracy, the best and the brightest rose to the top and prospered based on ability and luck.
Now the telcos and cable companies want to make it a plutocracy, only those with wads of money can prosper because becoming popular will wipe out the little guy before the idea can become profitable. You have to have and maintain an audience for an extended time period to make decent money from advertising. Most start-ups would go broke before they could begin to make money
I have a pretty inexpensive host, but I pay a dollar for every gigabyte of data transferred. If I put up a 10-megabyte video clip that was noticed and linked to by one of the major blogs, we would be into some serious money very quickly. You’ve seen it happen every year during the Koufax’s.
They talk about “market solutions”, but there is no market. How many real choices do you have for DSL service? For most of us, one, the local telephone company. How about cable broadband? Again, one, the local cable company.
The Internet should return to the reasonable regulations that allowed it to prosper for years before the telcos and cable companies decided to mess around with the system.
3 comments
A plutocracy? surely not a Pluto-cracy, since the owner of Mickey’s big dumb dog is a content provider, and is presumably on the other side of the debate from the telcos. But yes, absent internet neutrality, the internet will be ruled by the wealthiest of its interested parties, surely to the detriment of the rest of us who put up web sites.
My internet provider (not my web host), also my phone provider, was SBC. SBC was recently acquired by AT&T, which sent me a letter reassuring me that nothing about the service would change. They were almost right: the service is the same, but the price promptly increased by about 10 percent or so. Don’t ever assume that anything AT&T does with the internet has anything to do with the public good; it’s all about the corporation’s short-term self-interest. “Money, money, money mo-ney… Mo-ney…”
(Aside: I’m seriously considering switching my blog to your web host, where I already have an account I’ve used for photo storage for quite a while, and very likely to the same blogging platform you’re using. Any words of wisdom, if I should decide to do so?)
They need some time to turn on a mySQL process for you in advance of starting up WordPress and you a blank .htaccess file in the root directory. Other than that the blogroll conversion to an .opml file to transfer it is the most time consuming.
You could just transfer your current system without switching to WordPress, but it does make a lot of things easier.
If you want to customize the template I can probably still locate the filenames to change, all .php files.
The newest version 2.03 was just released and it hasn’t hiccuped.
Thanks, Bryan. This won’t happen instantly, but I need to be thinking about it. I have a domain name I registered (but haven’t used) some time back that comes up for renewal in late July; that seems possibly a good time to make other changes as well.
I may miss some aspects of my manual system, but I’ve been reading about the concept of Web 2.0, in which blogs (among many other things) are primary data sources that can be packaged and distributed in a variety of ways. The idea of full-text syndication in a more modern format appeals to me; I’m certainly willing for any not-for-profit org to syndicate what I write if it gains me an extended readership. I don’t care a lot about credit (beyond keeping my name on my posts) or hit counts; I don’t even count hits right now… that’s not why I write, and never has been.
Beyond that, I want to be able to blog from a variety of places without hassle. The public library is great for that, but for some reason unknown to me, they block FTP upfront; I can’t do it from there. (Yes, I’ve discussed it with them; they really do block it. Go figure. I don’t see it as a bigger security risk than HTTP.) I use an FTP wrapper web site when I’m there, but that has its own inconveniences. I want to be able to blog with no significant annoyances from anywhere my laptop has a net connection.
And there are things that my pile-of-web-pages approach cannot conveniently do. For example, I don’t have categories; it’s too messy to do that. And posts are attached permanently to a page; I can’t easily allow things gradually to “scroll off the bottom” of the blog as they age.
As to the blogroll, no matter where I go, I’ll have to do some of that manually. Originally it was a Bloglines blogroll; that proved to be too slow to load. I consider that an inconvenience, but nothing more than that. All in good time. If I decide to cut over, I’ll leave the old blog up as an archive, blogroll included. This is still in the pre-planning stage. Unlike Mr. Bush, I don’t go to war when the idea first enters my mind. 🙂
Again, thanks for the info.