Web inventor warns of ‘dark’ net – BBC.co.uk
“Recent attempts in the US to try to charge for different levels of online access web were not ‘part of the internet model,’ [Sir Tim] said in Edinburgh”
“‘What’s very important from my point of view is that there is one web.'”
“‘Anyone that tries to chop it into two will find that their piece looks very boring.'”
I can’t believe (well actually I can) companies would even conceive of such an idea, but apparently there are telecom companies within the US who desire this to become a reality. This would essentially involve a split in the internet where there would be two separate networks, one called the “open web” and the other known as the “private, stifled web” (as I call it). Sir Tim, the inventor of the concept of the web, highly advises companies against such a notion, and states this was never “part of the internet model”.
If this concept becomes a reality, it would make it to where telecom companies providing internet access to consumers would charge their customers a fee for access to certain sites (such as streaming video sites), thus limiting what you can access. The reason for this thinking is because of the massive proliferation of streaming media on the net such as TV shows and other high-bandwidth video streams. If there are a ton of people streaming shows at the same time, this can cause excess strain on the backbone of the access providers networks. And so to limit the amount of data being downloaded, they are considering making customers pay for access to certain sites as well as certain types of media. I really hope it does not come to that, mainly because it will stifle any further evolution of the internet into something even better than what it is now. There is legislation currently being introduced to keep this from ever happening (man I hope it passes), but for the sake of profit, there will always be forces attempting to stifle progress.
Maybe the telecom companies need to catch up with the times and either create larger backbone pipes or install more pipes than they currently have in order to diversify the traffic so that it is not all coming down the same few pipes? I don’t know, it seems like they could work out some better kind of data-flow architecture instead of making people pay for access to certain sites and certain types of media. It’s so frustrating that there are always people trying to make the internet, as well as software, solely proprietary in nature instead of allowing it all to be open-source. Seriously, figure out some other way to make money besides stifling the progress of the web …
Leave a Reply