As was once true of those wanting to chase opportunity to, “go west young man,” so the Internet has been, as its capitalized name indicates, a new frontier, vast, uncontrolled, almost entirely free of government's encroachment, and certainly filled with every type of individual. Apparently, we all like and want Freedom.
It is no secret that most using the web are simply individuals browsing, listening to music, playing a game, or watching a movie, while many businesses pay for higher amounts of bandwidth for video conferencing and virtual shared workspaces. Obviously I am an old computer person, who may not be up with the latest lingo on these things, but the idea has been there since the beginning. The first software development business I started with 4 other partners, was based on a game editor, and eventually we became the marketers for one of the first games that 2 people could play across their Hayes 300-1200 baud modem from their home (before the Internet existed). And, naturally, I envisioned a potential for a game that can be in every convenience store and people pay a quarter (which was the going rate for a game in a convenience store at that time) to play against other players for 10 minutes, and able to win extensions of play time, knowing we would have to devise a server to do so. Oh, the infancy of the idea of Massively Multi-player Online (MMO technology), though I certainly was not its inventor, just the systems person who drew schematic after schematic for idea after idea before they had a name let alone an acronym. Now I recognize that once a stable (standard) networking environment is established, there are those who will do all they can for their own self-interest as opposed to, instead of in conjunction with, others’ self-interest in the same industry and field, self-interest that includes doing wrong, where the least worthy businesses seek to make government their silent partner because government will solicit them to do so (in one form or another).
I've read the erroneous assumption that Internet Service Providers are a “natural monopoly” and, therefore should be a utility, mostly due to the idea that Internet access is as necessary as sewage disposal. Of course, this assumption included praise of government making its arbitrary and capricious rules, to which businesses like Comcast (but somehow not Netflix) are beholden, http://stratechery.com/2014/netflix-net-neutrality/.
In the end, Net Neutrality is just another layer of anti-Capitalism and a Communist China styled takeover of the Internet. Netflix is portrayed as the victim, Comcast as the villain, and the government as the “neutral arbiter of what is best for the Internet,” a domain not owned by anyone.
One could say, “Well, if it's entirely free then Comcast is the villain.” No, this isn't the case because the Internet, as a domain is something we access for a cost that we volunteer to pay. And just like we have to be willing to pay so, too, must the ISP be willing to pay, with investor money (who they would be a fiduciary to), their own money, or a government program (as was put in the failed stimulus bill to assure broadband to every small town in America). The last of these is where the government, and political parties who believe in government control over the Internet, believe they'll gain public sentiment for Net Neutrality/Government's takeover and control of the Internet.
No one, especially government, cares about the Capitalist (Private Property Rights) component of investors and the businesses that use their money. You see, not long ago Comcast announced a merger with Time Warner, http://corporate.comcast.com/. CNN (I believe associated with Time Warner) explains the blow by blow, but note it is in 2010, 3 years before the Comcast merger announcement http://money.cnn.com/2010/11/30/. I am pleasantly surprised at an article explaining the costs to Comcast, and that helps explain the request by the content deliverer for Netflix to Comcast was 50% more bandwidth, Netflix content bandwidth jumping from 20% to 30%, meaning that other uses by Comcast customers, would be less efficient and have slower delivery, and significantly lag. Comcast would be the one getting beat-up by customers, and therefore would be forced to invest in new equipment with the cost coming out of their pocket because Netflix, a Mark Cuban company, wants a free ride on ISP's dimes.
Understand that cable companies, like anyone else who has to do construction of anything, has to get permits and assure proper legal use of easements, since cable companies are usually given a chartered monopoly by the local City, via an ordinance. This is how they have an easement to work on lines etc. Note that permits required might be required from County, and State as well as the City government agencies, this usually takes a year or more, but can take as many as 3 or more years. And usually the process includes legal fees for attorneys involved, and any environmental impact studies, as well as 3rd party liability insurance, all adding to time-to-live delays and could render the effort a waste – And this is the most important point of everything I've written thus far....
What must be said: Technology gets cheaper over time.
There are regular contests to determine the highest prime number, http://www.mersenne.org/.
Why is the highest prime number important? It is prime numbers that are used to encrypt and decrypt all those bits in our computers and throughout the Internet, and, therefore, are the ways we end up with faster processors, faster memory access times, higher and higher storage on hard drives, to name a few uses (I remember when a 5 Megabyte drive was insanely expensive, and today we're talking 3+ Terabyte drives). Primes are how we squeeze larger amounts of information into smaller spaces, how IBM has regularly broken record after record in bits it can write to 1 inch square of hard drive substrate. This same tech is why we can go from MFM (8 bit tech) to today’s Serial ATA (SATA 64 bit) drives, and why we have keychain “thumb drive” device storage of 256 gigabytes and more.
And it is this same prime number encryption that will increase the speed of the Internet, so long as we get a modem that can process the encryption and decryption fast enough to not diminish returns, explaining ADSL, ADSL2, etc. (A very detailed explanation getting into the decryption and encryption, http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1277268)
This, also, is why your encrypted files on your computer are decryptable by ANY government agency, as they can use the much higher prime number key that the drive was originally formatted in to decrypt all data, as the higher prime would control.
All of this is to exploit binary (bit) exponential mathematics.
The Binary for 32,768 is 0000000000000001,
and for 65,535, 11111111||11111111 accumulating all 16 bits
The 24th bit represents 8,388,608” for a total of 16,711,680.
The 32nd bit represents 2,147,483,248, for a total of 4,278,190,080.
The 64th bit represents 9,223,372,036,854,780,000.
Large-scale base encryptions are 2048 bits, done in ways well beyond my mathematical education and/or comprehension. But to have 64 1s represent 18,374,686,479,671,600,000 is far more efficient for a processor to calculate than the original base 10 value.
I wrote much more than I expected to illustrate this because it helps understand how the highest prime number that can be decrypted and encrypted by a machine at speeds faster than the blink of an eye is how computers have more storage, more speed, and more bandwidth on the Internet – They are “computers” after all.
One may think that the sooner someone employs a higher prime number in the technology we'll have an instant increase, they'd be right except for the speed of the technology has outpaced, until recently, the return on investment on the hardware that a business like Comcast has invested in. They may find creative ways to deal with that but the fact is it'll still take that wonderful permit time to get the new hardware installed, so the company may have to wait for 2 or 3 iterations of a new higher prime number before making the investment, so they can assure paying for what they had (not wasting the customer or their investor's money) and buy something that will outlast its cost when deployed in their network, including customer modem and street level device upgrades.
The base value for communications across a wire is the basic “Tariff” value telephone companies must guarantee, 2400 baud. In the days of “56k modems” we were using compression (prime numbers) to put more data through, encrypted-to-decrypted, to get higher bandwidth. Until Digital Subscriber Lines (DSL) there were no higher speeds on a copper wire, and even now the much higher 20 megabit speeds are a challenge, as opposed to all fiber optic cable (synthetic polar bear hair), which naturally has a higher base baud rate, and therefore, a greater benefit from higher prime numbers.
Moot is what all this renders Net Neutrality, as the prime number encryption technology is being used wired and wireless, and there is no longer a local ISP monopoly on access, or soon the ones granted by Cities will be meaningless, however, let us hope the businesses jump 4 or 5 iterations, I'll explain...
I am no fan of Comcast, though you might have thought I am. If I recall correctly Comcast was the first American company to seek foreign “cap” models, and put a cap on bandwidth use, and I don't believe in that because there are “aggregation” methods similar to telephone aggregation which is how we ended up with the old 5 cent a minute calling cards. How it works is a company can sell the non-peak excess bandwidth they have here cheaply to a company elsewhere, say in Australia, New Zealand, or another more broadband limited country. These sales would offset any used “excess bandwidth” built into their system during peak time. The idea of any ISP having bandwidth caps seems more like they are coming up with a way to assure business customers bandwidth that may never be used and is therefore just wasted and is just plain wrong. A company like Comcast could exchange bandwidth with a company elsewhere for their unused bandwidth as well making each have to spend less on infrastructure until the investment is most advantageous for their company. So, to me, Comcast brought this on themselves by having bandwidth caps, however, that doesn't grant Netflix a license to exacerbate the situation, so I write.
God Bless you and thank you for reading and sharing this,
Toddy Littman
