Coming Soon: The Web Toll

Okay, so I was looking on CNN.com, and I saw this story in their techolocy section about how some of the large telcom companies want to create a two-tiered internet.Coming Soon: The Web Toll (Cnn.com link)

As things stand now, the telecoms provide the lines -- copper, cable or fiber-optic -- and the other hardware that connects Web sites to consumers.

But they don't influence, or profit from, the content that flows to you from, say, cinemanow.com; they simply supply the pipelines. In effect, they are impartial middlemen, leaving you free to browse the entire Internet without worrying about connection speeds to your favorite sites.

That looks set to change. In April a House subcommittee rejected a measure by Rep. Edward Markey of Massachusetts (D) that would have prevented telecoms from charging Web sites extra fees based on bandwidth usage.

The telecom industry sees such remuneration as fair compensation for the substantial cost of maintaining and upgrading the infrastructure that makes high-bandwidth services, such as streaming video, possible.

So the big companies are wanting to create a fast lane and charge us for it, sounds ok, right?

What does this mean for the rest of us? A stealth Web tax, for one thing.

"Google and Amazon and Yahoo are not going to slice those payments out of their profit margins and eat them," says Ben Scott, policy director for Free Press, a nonprofit group that monitors media-related legislation. "They're going to pass them on to the consumer. So I'll end up paying twice. I'm going to pay my $29.99 a month for access, and then I'm going to pay higher prices for consumer goods all across the economy because these Internet companies will charge more for online advertising."

Worse still, Scott argues, the plan stands to sour your Web experience. If, for instance, your favorite blogger refused to ante up, her pages would load more slowly on your computer than would content from Web sites that had paid the fees.

This could be interesting, the article also says that it would make it harder for companies to start up.

So, what does everyone think about this? Would you pay for it? Is there anything we can do to stop this from happening?


[edit on 5/28/2006 by Sir Solomon]

Yes, yes, yes.

Mighty interesting. We may find ourselves seriously devided by routers with taxi like meters on it.

Don´t be fooled, this is just another effort by the Wizard of Oz to control the free flowing information over the internet. The last Bastion which cannot be touched....Yet.

Dam, I'll never pay that garbage. I hope the "slow lane" users won't have too slow a connection.

Originally posted by specter_smoke
Dam, I'll never pay that garbage. I hope the "slow lane" users won't have too slow a connection.

I actually imagine that this will be a stepping stone for the big companies to wring whatever cash they can from the Internet.

If there is a slow lane, it won't last long because everyone will want to travel the fast lane.

It'll be like cable/satillite over just the normal antenna for television. Sure you could probably get something without cable, but you will only get what the big companies can afford.

Man this steams me!

it'll never happen.

bill gates thought it was a good idea in 2004, and it still hasn't happened.

external link to gates story

The fact that it is even a proposed idea should be a concern for people.

The Internet right now is ok. I mean, the telecom companies get money for their connection fees, that should be enough for them. They don't need to charge for access to higher bandwith sites (that only large companies can afford).

At least that is how I think on it...

This to me is quite disturbing indeed.

Being that as of now the internet is the only bastion of true news left-after sifting through the tons of disinfo- We have to write en-masse to our political leadership and strongly urge they reconsider this position before it is too late. That being said..its going to happen...maybe not today; maybe not tomorrow; but soon come.
And it is with great regret that this has to happen, as we topple hopelessly faster towards the inevitability of an all encompassing police state.


"When they douse the internet, with the water of over-regulation: the last fires of free speech will be extinguished; and the flames of liberty will burn no more"- quote by: tone23 - 5-29-2006

If this were to happen, do you think ATS would be able to pay, or would they start charging and taking donations?

Originally posted by The_Time_is_now
If this were to happen, do you think ATS would be able to pay, or would they start charging and taking donations?

Thats a darn good question.. maybe we could get a response from one of the Three Amigos on this one? or at least a MOD as to how that would happen.

I'd donate to them they deserve it!!
hows ten bucks...Im alittle strapped right now..lol

I honestly think that if this comes to pass, the charge for the higher bandwidth will be artificially high in order to keep the masses buried with their dis-information.

Honestly, if this does pass, I think we are going to see the end to anything near free speech.

I like what was said earlier that the Internet is the last bastion of free speech, because it is true. Sadly true

Exactly just how slow is the slow lane going to be? I'm sorry, but I already see a fast lane and a slow lane. The slow lane is called modem, and the fast lane is called DSL and your wireless. I'm already paying to be in the fast lane.

Many people are only on the net because they can get on the net through a modem for around $10.00 a month. If modems become any slower, then I suspect alot of people who either can't afford more or who don't want to pay more just dropping the net completely.

If modems stay at the same rate of speed because they are in the slow lane anyhow, and they put my DSL in at the same speed as a modem, then why am I paying $30.00 a month? I would go back to paying $10.00 a month on a modem.


Personally I do feel many if not most people are asleep at the wheel dealing with what some of these companies want to do. If they ever are able to make a fast lane, they will be dealing with alot of angry and beligerant people who are going to fight back in various ways. I can see repeals being filed for, lawsuits being created, and one big PR nightmare for the ISP's charging more to pay for a fast lane.

If companies had to pay more to get their information packets to people or go in the slow lane, I hate to be working in the ISP customer care department when they get flooded with angry calls from their customers about their modem, DSL, or net isn't working properly. Not to mention the poor techies working in tech support with I would think at least half the customers thinking there is a problem with their hookups.

From the advertising I have noticed, People PC has advertised faster connection, a long list of features being offered, and all for $10.99 a month why pay more. I bet there eventually there will be a company who wants to gain more customers and will advertise surf anywhere you want and download anything you want for $30.00 a month, why pay more?

Hey, there you go an very good business idea of this law passes. A new DSL company that offers todays rates for full no-restriction access to the fast lane. They would practically steal all existing customers from everyone else, and practically be accused of becoming a monopoly.

In another thread here on ats one of our other members, mixvio, had posted with a link to save the internet sign the petition if you want to TRY to stop this before it becomes reality:

save the internet

original thread: Bush 'planted fake news on american tv

We the people have to make our voices heard, lest they be forever silenced

(tl;dr version at the bottom)

What people need to understand about the propsals to do away with Network Neutrality is that this isn't a toll that the carriers are suggesting they be able to charge to home users. Our home connections already have tiered access, and have for a long time. From dialup to rural neighborhoods pitching in and splitting a T1 across several families, we pay more for higher speed right now.

What the carriers want to do, though, is to rewrite the protocols that govern the internet so that certain types of information have priority over other types. Then, the carriers want to be able to charge a premium for people that want their packets to be marked with this priority. The toll won't be to consumers (e.g. posters like you and me) but to the content providers (the crew that built and maintain ATS). They will, in effect, see the outgoing bandwidth for their sites artifically capped.

"So what", you might say, "I own a website and I get charged if too many people go there in a month. What's the difference?" The difference here is that it won't be the hosting company who's charging you, it'll be AT&T, Sprint, MCI, et all. The folks who own the wires that the data moves along between your hosting company's servers and the viewers of your website.

While that may seem like a trivial thing, or even just recompense for using the carrier's lines, it does one important thing: It allows information to be filtered at the backbone of the internet, rather than at the Internet provider, or home computer level. Once we implement a tag for "High" and "low" priority packets, it's a very simple thing to add additional tags, which makes monitoring online communications immeasurably easier. Right now, if you wanted to monitor my e-mail communications and didn't have access to my home computer, you'd need to set up a trace somewhere upstream of my ISP and scan all packets coming from the ISP looking for my e-mail address in the packet info. It's a fairly simple thing to do, technologically, but it means sorting through millions of packets (at least) every hour. Packets are small things, they don't contain a lot of data individually, but are instead gathered and reassembled at the receiving end. Imagine sending your parents a picture of their new grandchild by making it into a jigsaw puzzle and then sending it to them one piece at a time. That's a decent analogy to the way information is sent over the internet.

If, however, packets are marked as "email, low priority" (for example), you can easily eliminate a huge amount of data coming from your ISP. Web site visits, IM conversations, online gaming, hosted websites, etc, all eliminated right there.

Right now the Internet is dumb, and that's a good thing. The internet knows how to move packets of data to wherever it is they say the need to go. This is largely responsible for the level of freedom (and the corresponding difficulty of restraint) online. By adding tiers to the Internet, by making it "smart" you get rid of this equality, and replace it with a forced hierarchy.

[ tl;dr ]
"Fire Bad! Network Neutrality Good!"
[ /tl;dr ]

the actual toll part is not really of consequence here as it is just a veil for what is the real intention...(control over the net)

Of course this is SOP(standard operating procedure) from a govt that wishes to quelch and control all information. IMHO