Quoting Gadi Cohen, from the post of Fri, 21 Apr: > > 1) smallest scale: skype works because its free and you don't pay per minute > 2) medium scale: i can't leave my internet radio playing anymore? > 2) large scale: i pay a content provider for online movies... now i have > to pay my ISP aswell??
well, it's nice that you pay for online multimedia, most people don't. in fact I don't know the latest numbers but well over 50% of the world's IP traffic today are bittorrent streams, mostly of illegally distributed matterials, i.e. not by any official content vendors that the ISP's can have an agreement with. how are you going to settle that? Yes, on the one hand there are the ads that tell you to get a "WOW" line and watch all the cool content there is out there. an averge joe user in this country has an ADSL or cables line, and other than Email and a little surfing the only streaming he will get are Eretz Nehederet skits and some Ynet articles Let's say he uses 3 GiB a month. on the other hand there is a BT big-eyed movie hoarder, downloading DVD5-size rips of movies and such with a constant stream of 100-120KB on average, 24/7. I know several such people, and they get to (I kid you not) 250-300 gigs a month. that's 50-100 times more data the ISP's routers and pipes have to handle for them. Does it make sense that these two users pay the same? should all of us low-usage users subsadize the the line for the bandwidth hog? Now you and the German communications minister think the content providers, wanting to push their content, like Google and iTunes, should be the ones putting the money into infranstructure upgrades so they can sell more to the end users. do you honestly think that that could work? Would you be willing to hook up to a world where the only fast links will be with a payed service but peer-to-peer communications will slow to dialup speeds? I don't. If I was using any peer to peer services, be they Email, access to free servers (like my own server, or kernel.org, or IGLU, or sourceforge, or...), or Skype, or BT - I'd be willing to pay the extra money for unrestricted bandwidth to any and all services. Trusting the content provider to manage bandwidth charges for you is foolish, as any civil rights minded person will tell you - Liberty and freedom are nice, but they cost money to maintain. That has been true for any democracy in the world - the best way to save government money is take away freedoms and social services from the citizens. I am willing to pay the tax to stay with a democratic government and an anarchistic internet. If it wasn't for that, the world would still be hooked up to eachother through the restricted ilks of BBSes like AOL and Compuserve and very little Free Software and IT standards would have flourished. think about that. -- Tantric sex god Ira Abramov http://ira.abramov.org/email/ ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
