In article ,
"Katey Didd" wrote:

Persephone wrote in message
...
On Sat, 14 Jun 2008 11:39:37 -0500, "R. & J. Willingham"
wrote:


"J. Clarke" wrote in message
...
One suspects that the "broadband providers" are just using it to pull
the plug on a service that's bringing in no income.

They aren't "curbing USENET", they're turning off or reducing coverage
on their own servers.

I was thinking the exact same thing. Not to mention the all the
complaints
they must get about spammers and trolls using the service that must be
dealt
with in some way.

Help! Will someone please explain what I am supposed to do now?
My current Internet provider is Time-Warner cable (tfui!). If they're
going to discontinue Usenet, I will want to discontinue *them*. But
what should I do next? Go to another cable provider? Or? I'm
not sophisticated about this stuff, so really don't know where to
turn.

Sign up with a free Usenet provider. There are more than a few out there.
The one I'm using is free. There is also news.aioe.org that doesn't even
require you to sign up. Just put it in the server window and download the
list of groups he has listed.



Also, how soon is this supposed to take effect?

And do we have any recourse with elected officials?

TIA

Persephone

It's not just Usenet. It seems all the corporations are worried
that they are going to lose their chance to skin us. The ISPs
already charge to connect us. This surcharge is obscene. The
habitat for game is removed, we have to by our meat. Ownership
of seeds is concentrated, we have to buy our seed. The oceans are
despoiled and fish are becoming dangerous to eat. If there is a
natural disaster, residences aren't helped to return to their
homes. Media is manipulated so that the populace is given a false
view of the world. Our local paper, a subsidiary of the N. Y. Times
didn't even cover the articles of impeachment for Cheney that were
introduced into the House on the 12th of June.
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/petit...6666&s_kwcid=k
ucinich%20impeachment|1395328440

More appropriate for this newsgroup is:
Bad Cow Disease
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: June 13, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/op...13krugman.html

But first, the internet abuse

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/te...r=1&oref=slogi
n

"Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic".

Some people use the Internet simply to check e-mail and look up phone
numbers. Others are online all day, downloading big video and music
files.

For years, both kinds of Web surfers have paid the same price for
access. But now three of the country¹s largest Internet service
providers are threatening to clamp down on their most active subscribers
by placing monthly limits on their online activity.

One of them, Time Warner Cable, began a trial of ³Internet metering² in
one Texas city early this month, asking customers to select a monthly
plan and pay surcharges when they exceed their bandwidth limit. The idea
is that people who use the network more heavily should pay more, the way
they do for water, electricity, or, in many cases, cellphone minutes.

That same week, Comcast said that it would expand on a strategy it uses
to manage Internet traffic: slowing down the connections of the heaviest
users, so-called bandwidth hogs, at peak times.

AT&T also said Thursday that limits on heavy use were inevitable and
that it was considering pricing based on data volume. ³Based on current
trends, total bandwidth in the AT&T network will increase by four times
over the next three years,² the company said in a statement.

All three companies say that placing caps on broadband use will ensure
fair access for all users.

Internet metering is a throwback to the days of dial-up service, but at
a time when video and interactive games are becoming popular, the
experiments could have huge implications for the future of the Web.

Millions of people are moving online to watch movies and television
shows, play multiplayer video games and talk over videoconference with
family and friends. And media companies are trying to get people to
spend more time online: the Disneys and NBCs of the world keep adding
television shows and movies to their Web sites, giving consumers
convenient entertainment that soaks up a lot of bandwidth.

Moreover, companies with physical storefronts, like Blockbuster, are
moving toward digital delivery of entertainment. And new distributors of
online content ‹ think YouTube ‹ are relying on an open data spigot to
make their business plans work.

Critics of the bandwidth limits say that metering and capping network
use could hold back the inevitable convergence of television, computers
and the Internet.

The Internet ³is how we deliver our shows,² said Jim Louderback, chief
executive of Revision3, a three-year-old media company that runs what it
calls a television network on the Web. ³If all of a sudden our viewers
are worried about some sort of a broadband cap, they may think twice
about downloading or watching our shows.²

Even if the caps are far above the average users¹ consumption, their
mere existence could cause users to reduce their time online. Just ask
people who carefully monitor their monthly allotments of cellphone
minutes and text messages.

³As soon as you put serious uncertainty as to cost on the table,
people¹s feeling of freedom to predict cost dries up and so does
innovation and trying new applications,² Vint Cerf, the chief Internet
evangelist for Google who is often called the ³father of the Internet,²
said in an e-mail message.

But the companies imposing the caps say that their actions are only
fair. People who use more network capacity should pay more, Time Warner
argues. And Comcast says that people who use too much ‹ like those who
engage in file-sharing ‹ should be forced to slow down.

Time Warner also frames the issue in financial terms: the broadband
infrastructure needs to be improved, it says, and maybe metering could
pay for the upgrades. So far its trial is limited to new subscribers in
Beaumont, Tex., a city of roughly 110,000.

In that trial, new customers can buy plans with a 5-gigabyte cap, a
20-gigabyte cap or a 40-gigabyte cap. Prices for those plans range from
$30 to $50. Above the cap, customers pay $1 a gigabyte. Plans with
higher caps come with faster service.

³Average customers are way below the caps,² said Kevin Leddy, executive
vice president for advanced technology at Time Warner Cable. ³These caps
give them years¹ worth of growth before they¹d ever pay any surcharges.²

Casual Internet users who merely send e-mail messages, check movie times
and read the news are not likely to exceed the caps. But people who
watch television shows on Hulu.com, rent movies on iTunes or play the
multiplayer game Halo on Xbox may start to exceed the limits ‹ and
millions of people are already doing those things.

Streaming an hour of video on Hulu, which shows programs like ³Saturday
Night Live,² ³Family Guy² and ³The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,²
consumes about 200 megabytes, or one-fifth of a gigabyte. A
higher-quality hour of the same content bought through Apple¹s iTunes
store can use about 500 megabytes, or half a gigabyte.

A high-definition episode of ³Survivor² on CBS.com can use up to a
gigabyte, and a DVD-quality movie through Netflix¹s new online service
can eat up about five gigabytes. One Netflix download alone, in fact,
could bring a user to the limit on the cheapest plan in Time Warner¹s
trial in Beaumont.

Even services like Skype and Vonage that use the Internet to transmit
phone calls could help put users over the monthly limits.

Time Warner would not reveal how many gigabytes an average customer
uses, saying only that 95 percent of customers use under 40 gigabytes
each in a month.

That means that 5 percent of customers use more than 50 percent of the
network¹s overall capacity, the company said, and many of those people
are assumed to be sharing copyrighted video and music files illegally.

The Time Warner plan has the potential to bring Internet use full
circle, back to the days when pay-as-you-go pricing held back the Web¹s
popularity. In the early days of dial-up access, America Online and
other providers offered tiered pricing, in part because audio and video
were barely viable online. Consumers feared going over their allotted
time and bristled at the idea that access to cyberspace was billed by
the hour.

In 1996, when AOL started offering unlimited access plans, Internet use
took off and the online world started moving to the center of people¹s
daily lives. Today most Internet packages provide a seemingly unlimited
amount of capacity, at least from the consumer¹s perspective.

But like water and electricity, even digital resources are finite. Last
year Comcast disclosed that it was temporarily turning off the
connections of customers who used file-sharing services like BitTorrent,
arguing that they were slowing things down for everyone else. The people
who got cut off complained and asked how much broadband use was too
much; the company did not have a ready answer.

Thus, like Time Warner, Comcast is considering a form of Internet
metering that would apply to all online activity.

The goal, says Mitch Bowling, a senior vice president at Comcast, is
³ensuring that a small number of users don¹t impact the experience for
everyone else.²

Last year Comcast was sued when it was disclosed that the company had
singled out BitTorrent users.

In February, Comcast departed from that approach and started
collaborating with the company that runs BitTorrent. Now it has shifted
to what it calls a ³platform agnostic² approach to managing its network,
meaning that it slows down the connection of any customer who uses too
much bandwidth at congested times.

Mr. Bowling said that ³typical Internet usage² would not be affected.
But on the Internet, ³typical² use is constantly being redefined.

³The definitions of low and high usage today are meaningless, because
the Internet¹s going to grow, and nothing¹s going to stop that,² said
Eric Klinker, the chief technology officer of BitTorrent.

As the technology company Cisco put it in a recent report, ³today¹s
Œbandwidth hog¹ is tomorrow¹s average user.²

One result of these experiments is a tug-of-war between the Internet
providers and media companies, which are monitoring the Time Warner
experiment with trepidation.

³We hate it,² said a senior executive at a major media company, who
requested anonymity because his company, like all broadcasters, must
play nice with the same cable operators that are imposing the limits.
Now that some television shows are viewed millions of times online, the
executive said, any impediment would hurt the advertising model for
online video streaming.

Mr. Leddy of Time Warner said that the media companies¹ fears were
overblown. If the company were to try to stop Web video, ³we would not
succeed,² he said. ³We know how much capacity they¹re going to need in
the future, and we know what it¹s going to cost. And today¹s business
model doesn¹t pay for it very well.²
--

Billy
Bush and Pelosi Behind Bars
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KVTf...ef=patrick.net
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0aEo...eature=related

In article
,
Billy wrote:

In article ,
"Katey Didd" wrote:

Persephone wrote in message
...
On Sat, 14 Jun 2008 11:39:37 -0500, "R. & J. Willingham"
wrote:


"J. Clarke" wrote in message
...
One suspects that the "broadband providers" are just using it to pull
the plug on a service that's bringing in no income.

They aren't "curbing USENET", they're turning off or reducing coverage
on their own servers.

I was thinking the exact same thing. Not to mention the all the
complaints
they must get about spammers and trolls using the service that must be
dealt
with in some way.

Help! Will someone please explain what I am supposed to do now?
My current Internet provider is Time-Warner cable (tfui!). If they're
going to discontinue Usenet, I will want to discontinue *them*. But
what should I do next? Go to another cable provider? Or? I'm
not sophisticated about this stuff, so really don't know where to
turn.

Sign up with a free Usenet provider. There are more than a few out there.
The one I'm using is free. There is also news.aioe.org that doesn't even
require you to sign up. Just put it in the server window and download the
list of groups he has listed.



Also, how soon is this supposed to take effect?

And do we have any recourse with elected officials?

TIA

Persephone

It's not just Usenet. It seems all the corporations are worried
that they are going to lose their chance to skin us. The ISPs
already charge to connect us. This surcharge is obscene. The
habitat for game is removed, we have to by our meat. Ownership
of seeds is concentrated, we have to buy our seed. The oceans are
despoiled and fish are becoming dangerous to eat. If there is a
natural disaster, residences aren't helped to return to their
homes. Media is manipulated so that the populace is given a false
view of the world. Our local paper, a subsidiary of the N. Y. Times
didn't even cover the articles of impeachment for Cheney that were
introduced into the House on the 12th of June.
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/petit...6666&s_kwcid=k
ucinich%20impeachment|1395328440

More appropriate for this newsgroup is:
Bad Cow Disease
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: June 13, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/op...13krugman.html

But first, the internet abuse

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/te...r=1&oref=slogi
n

"Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic".

Some people use the Internet simply to check e-mail and look up phone
numbers. Others are online all day, downloading big video and music
files.

For years, both kinds of Web surfers have paid the same price for
access. But now three of the country¹s largest Internet service
providers are threatening to clamp down on their most active subscribers
by placing monthly limits on their online activity.

One of them, Time Warner Cable, began a trial of ³Internet metering² in
one Texas city early this month, asking customers to select a monthly
plan and pay surcharges when they exceed their bandwidth limit. The idea
is that people who use the network more heavily should pay more, the way
they do for water, electricity, or, in many cases, cellphone minutes.

That same week, Comcast said that it would expand on a strategy it uses
to manage Internet traffic: slowing down the connections of the heaviest
users, so-called bandwidth hogs, at peak times.

AT&T also said Thursday that limits on heavy use were inevitable and
that it was considering pricing based on data volume. ³Based on current
trends, total bandwidth in the AT&T network will increase by four times
over the next three years,² the company said in a statement.

All three companies say that placing caps on broadband use will ensure
fair access for all users.

Internet metering is a throwback to the days of dial-up service, but at
a time when video and interactive games are becoming popular, the
experiments could have huge implications for the future of the Web.

Millions of people are moving online to watch movies and television
shows, play multiplayer video games and talk over videoconference with
family and friends. And media companies are trying to get people to
spend more time online: the Disneys and NBCs of the world keep adding
television shows and movies to their Web sites, giving consumers
convenient entertainment that soaks up a lot of bandwidth.

Moreover, companies with physical storefronts, like Blockbuster, are
moving toward digital delivery of entertainment. And new distributors of
online content ‹ think YouTube ‹ are relying on an open data spigot to
make their business plans work.

Critics of the bandwidth limits say that metering and capping network
use could hold back the inevitable convergence of television, computers
and the Internet.

The Internet ³is how we deliver our shows,² said Jim Louderback, chief
executive of Revision3, a three-year-old media company that runs what it
calls a television network on the Web. ³If all of a sudden our viewers
are worried about some sort of a broadband cap, they may think twice
about downloading or watching our shows.²

Even if the caps are far above the average users¹ consumption, their
mere existence could cause users to reduce their time online. Just ask
people who carefully monitor their monthly allotments of cellphone
minutes and text messages.

³As soon as you put serious uncertainty as to cost on the table,
people¹s feeling of freedom to predict cost dries up and so does
innovation and trying new applications,² Vint Cerf, the chief Internet
evangelist for Google who is often called the ³father of the Internet,²
said in an e-mail message.

But the companies imposing the caps say that their actions are only
fair. People who use more network capacity should pay more, Time Warner
argues. And Comcast says that people who use too much ‹ like those who
engage in file-sharing ‹ should be forced to slow down.

Time Warner also frames the issue in financial terms: the broadband
infrastructure needs to be improved, it says, and maybe metering could
pay for the upgrades. So far its trial is limited to new subscribers in
Beaumont, Tex., a city of roughly 110,000.

In that trial, new customers can buy plans with a 5-gigabyte cap, a
20-gigabyte cap or a 40-gigabyte cap. Prices for those plans range from
$30 to $50. Above the cap, customers pay $1 a gigabyte. Plans with
higher caps come with faster service.

³Average customers are way below the caps,² said Kevin Leddy, executive
vice president for advanced technology at Time Warner Cable. ³These caps
give them years¹ worth of growth before they¹d ever pay any surcharges.²

Casual Internet users who merely send e-mail messages, check movie times
and read the news are not likely to exceed the caps. But people who
watch television shows on Hulu.com, rent movies on iTunes or play the
multiplayer game Halo on Xbox may start to exceed the limits ‹ and
millions of people are already doing those things.

Streaming an hour of video on Hulu, which shows programs like ³Saturday
Night Live,² ³Family Guy² and ³The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,²
consumes about 200 megabytes, or one-fifth of a gigabyte. A
higher-quality hour of the same content bought through Apple¹s iTunes
store can use about 500 megabytes, or half a gigabyte.

A high-definition episode of ³Survivor² on CBS.com can use up to a
gigabyte, and a DVD-quality movie through Netflix¹s new online service
can eat up about five gigabytes. One Netflix download alone, in fact,
could bring a user to the limit on the cheapest plan in Time Warner¹s
trial in Beaumont.

Even services like Skype and Vonage that use the Internet to transmit
phone calls could help put users over the monthly limits.

Time Warner would not reveal how many gigabytes an average customer
uses, saying only that 95 percent of customers use under 40 gigabytes
each in a month.

That means that 5 percent of customers use more than 50 percent of the
network¹s overall capacity, the company said, and many of those people
are assumed to be sharing copyrighted video and music files illegally.

The Time Warner plan has the potential to bring Internet use full
circle, back to the days when pay-as-you-go pricing held back the Web¹s
popularity. In the early days of dial-up access, America Online and
other providers offered tiered pricing, in part because audio and video
were barely viable online. Consumers feared going over their allotted
time and bristled at the idea that access to cyberspace was billed by
the hour.

In 1996, when AOL started offering unlimited access plans, Internet use
took off and the online world started moving to the center of people¹s
daily lives. Today most Internet packages provide a seemingly unlimited
amount of capacity, at least from the consumer¹s perspective.

But like water and electricity, even digital resources are finite. Last
year Comcast disclosed that it was temporarily turning off the
connections of customers who used file-sharing services like BitTorrent,
arguing that they were slowing things down for everyone else. The people
who got cut off complained and asked how much broadband use was too
much; the company did not have a ready answer.

Thus, like Time Warner, Comcast is considering a form of Internet
metering that would apply to all online activity.

The goal, says Mitch Bowling, a senior vice president at Comcast, is
³ensuring that a small number of users don¹t impact the experience for
everyone else.²

Last year Comcast was sued when it was disclosed that the company had
singled out BitTorrent users.

In February, Comcast departed from that approach and started
collaborating with the company that runs BitTorrent. Now it has shifted
to what it calls a ³platform agnostic² approach to managing its network,
meaning that it slows down the connection of any customer who uses too
much bandwidth at congested times.

Mr. Bowling said that ³typical Internet usage² would not be affected.
But on the Internet, ³typical² use is constantly being redefined.

³The definitions of low and high usage today are meaningless, because
the Internet¹s going to grow, and nothing¹s going to stop that,² said
Eric Klinker, the chief technology officer of BitTorrent.

As the technology company Cisco put it in a recent report, ³today¹s
Œbandwidth hog¹ is tomorrow¹s average user.²

One result of these experiments is a tug-of-war between the Internet
providers and media companies, which are monitoring the Time Warner
experiment with trepidation.

³We hate it,² said a senior executive at a major media company, who
requested anonymity because his company, like all broadcasters, must
play nice with the same cable operators that are imposing the limits.
Now that some television shows are viewed millions of times online, the
executive said, any impediment would hurt the advertising model for
online video streaming.

Mr. Leddy of Time Warner said that the media companies¹ fears were
overblown. If the company were to try to stop Web video, ³we would not
succeed,² he said. ³We know how much capacity they¹re going to need in
the future, and we know what it¹s going to cost. And today¹s business
model doesn¹t pay for it very well.²

http://www.eff.org/

Nuff said.

Bill

--
Garden in shade zone 5 S Jersey USA
Book "Our Media Not Theirs" Many Stars

*snip*

It's SO-O-O-O easy!.....geeeeeeeeeez!

Val

"Bill" wrote in message
...
In article
,
Billy wrote:

In article ,
"Katey Didd" wrote:

Persephone wrote in message
...
On Sat, 14 Jun 2008 11:39:37 -0500, "R. & J. Willingham"
wrote:


"J. Clarke" wrote in message
...
One suspects that the "broadband providers" are just using it to
pull
the plug on a service that's bringing in no income.

They aren't "curbing USENET", they're turning off or reducing
coverage
on their own servers.

I was thinking the exact same thing. Not to mention the all the
complaints
they must get about spammers and trolls using the service that must
be
dealt
with in some way.

Help! Will someone please explain what I am supposed to do now?
My current Internet provider is Time-Warner cable (tfui!). If
they're
going to discontinue Usenet, I will want to discontinue *them*. But
what should I do next? Go to another cable provider? Or? I'm
not sophisticated about this stuff, so really don't know where to
turn.

Sign up with a free Usenet provider. There are more than a few out
there.
The one I'm using is free. There is also news.aioe.org that doesn't
even
require you to sign up. Just put it in the server window and download
the
list of groups he has listed.



Also, how soon is this supposed to take effect?

And do we have any recourse with elected officials?

TIA

Persephone

It's not just Usenet. It seems all the corporations are worried
that they are going to lose their chance to skin us. The ISPs
already charge to connect us. This surcharge is obscene. The
habitat for game is removed, we have to by our meat. Ownership
of seeds is concentrated, we have to buy our seed. The oceans are
despoiled and fish are becoming dangerous to eat. If there is a
natural disaster, residences aren't helped to return to their
homes. Media is manipulated so that the populace is given a false
view of the world. Our local paper, a subsidiary of the N. Y. Times
didn't even cover the articles of impeachment for Cheney that were
introduced into the House on the 12th of June.
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/petit...6666&s_kwcid=k
ucinich%20impeachment|1395328440

More appropriate for this newsgroup is:
Bad Cow Disease
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: June 13, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/op...13krugman.html

But first, the internet abuse

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/te...r=1&oref=slogi
n

"Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic".

Some people use the Internet simply to check e-mail and look up phone
numbers. Others are online all day, downloading big video and music
files.

For years, both kinds of Web surfers have paid the same price for
access. But now three of the country¹s largest Internet service
providers are threatening to clamp down on their most active subscribers
by placing monthly limits on their online activity.

One of them, Time Warner Cable, began a trial of ³Internet metering² in
one Texas city early this month, asking customers to select a monthly
plan and pay surcharges when they exceed their bandwidth limit. The idea
is that people who use the network more heavily should pay more, the way
they do for water, electricity, or, in many cases, cellphone minutes.

That same week, Comcast said that it would expand on a strategy it uses
to manage Internet traffic: slowing down the connections of the heaviest
users, so-called bandwidth hogs, at peak times.

AT&T also said Thursday that limits on heavy use were inevitable and
that it was considering pricing based on data volume. ³Based on current
trends, total bandwidth in the AT&T network will increase by four times
over the next three years,² the company said in a statement.

All three companies say that placing caps on broadband use will ensure
fair access for all users.

Internet metering is a throwback to the days of dial-up service, but at
a time when video and interactive games are becoming popular, the
experiments could have huge implications for the future of the Web.

Millions of people are moving online to watch movies and television
shows, play multiplayer video games and talk over videoconference with
family and friends. And media companies are trying to get people to
spend more time online: the Disneys and NBCs of the world keep adding
television shows and movies to their Web sites, giving consumers
convenient entertainment that soaks up a lot of bandwidth.

Moreover, companies with physical storefronts, like Blockbuster, are
moving toward digital delivery of entertainment. And new distributors of
online content think YouTube are relying on an open data spigot to
make their business plans work.

Critics of the bandwidth limits say that metering and capping network
use could hold back the inevitable convergence of television, computers
and the Internet.

The Internet ³is how we deliver our shows,² said Jim Louderback, chief
executive of Revision3, a three-year-old media company that runs what it
calls a television network on the Web. ³If all of a sudden our viewers
are worried about some sort of a broadband cap, they may think twice
about downloading or watching our shows.²

Even if the caps are far above the average users¹ consumption, their
mere existence could cause users to reduce their time online. Just ask
people who carefully monitor their monthly allotments of cellphone
minutes and text messages.

³As soon as you put serious uncertainty as to cost on the table,
people¹s feeling of freedom to predict cost dries up and so does
innovation and trying new applications,² Vint Cerf, the chief Internet
evangelist for Google who is often called the ³father of the Internet,²
said in an e-mail message.

But the companies imposing the caps say that their actions are only
fair. People who use more network capacity should pay more, Time Warner
argues. And Comcast says that people who use too much like those who
engage in file-sharing should be forced to slow down.

Time Warner also frames the issue in financial terms: the broadband
infrastructure needs to be improved, it says, and maybe metering could
pay for the upgrades. So far its trial is limited to new subscribers in
Beaumont, Tex., a city of roughly 110,000.

In that trial, new customers can buy plans with a 5-gigabyte cap, a
20-gigabyte cap or a 40-gigabyte cap. Prices for those plans range from
$30 to $50. Above the cap, customers pay $1 a gigabyte. Plans with
higher caps come with faster service.

³Average customers are way below the caps,² said Kevin Leddy, executive
vice president for advanced technology at Time Warner Cable. ³These caps
give them years¹ worth of growth before they¹d ever pay any surcharges.²

Casual Internet users who merely send e-mail messages, check movie times
and read the news are not likely to exceed the caps. But people who
watch television shows on Hulu.com, rent movies on iTunes or play the
multiplayer game Halo on Xbox may start to exceed the limits and
millions of people are already doing those things.

Streaming an hour of video on Hulu, which shows programs like ³Saturday
Night Live,² ³Family Guy² and ³The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,²
consumes about 200 megabytes, or one-fifth of a gigabyte. A
higher-quality hour of the same content bought through Apple¹s iTunes
store can use about 500 megabytes, or half a gigabyte.

A high-definition episode of ³Survivor² on CBS.com can use up to a
gigabyte, and a DVD-quality movie through Netflix¹s new online service
can eat up about five gigabytes. One Netflix download alone, in fact,
could bring a user to the limit on the cheapest plan in Time Warner¹s
trial in Beaumont.

Even services like Skype and Vonage that use the Internet to transmit
phone calls could help put users over the monthly limits.

Time Warner would not reveal how many gigabytes an average customer
uses, saying only that 95 percent of customers use under 40 gigabytes
each in a month.

That means that 5 percent of customers use more than 50 percent of the
network¹s overall capacity, the company said, and many of those people
are assumed to be sharing copyrighted video and music files illegally.

The Time Warner plan has the potential to bring Internet use full
circle, back to the days when pay-as-you-go pricing held back the Web¹s
popularity. In the early days of dial-up access, America Online and
other providers offered tiered pricing, in part because audio and video
were barely viable online. Consumers feared going over their allotted
time and bristled at the idea that access to cyberspace was billed by
the hour.

In 1996, when AOL started offering unlimited access plans, Internet use
took off and the online world started moving to the center of people¹s
daily lives. Today most Internet packages provide a seemingly unlimited
amount of capacity, at least from the consumer¹s perspective.

But like water and electricity, even digital resources are finite. Last
year Comcast disclosed that it was temporarily turning off the
connections of customers who used file-sharing services like BitTorrent,
arguing that they were slowing things down for everyone else. The people
who got cut off complained and asked how much broadband use was too
much; the company did not have a ready answer.

Thus, like Time Warner, Comcast is considering a form of Internet
metering that would apply to all online activity.

The goal, says Mitch Bowling, a senior vice president at Comcast, is
³ensuring that a small number of users don¹t impact the experience for
everyone else.²

Last year Comcast was sued when it was disclosed that the company had
singled out BitTorrent users.

In February, Comcast departed from that approach and started
collaborating with the company that runs BitTorrent. Now it has shifted
to what it calls a ³platform agnostic² approach to managing its network,
meaning that it slows down the connection of any customer who uses too
much bandwidth at congested times.

Mr. Bowling said that ³typical Internet usage² would not be affected.
But on the Internet, ³typical² use is constantly being redefined.

³The definitions of low and high usage today are meaningless, because
the Internet¹s going to grow, and nothing¹s going to stop that,² said
Eric Klinker, the chief technology officer of BitTorrent.

As the technology company Cisco put it in a recent report, ³today¹s
Obandwidth hog¹ is tomorrow¹s average user.²

One result of these experiments is a tug-of-war between the Internet
providers and media companies, which are monitoring the Time Warner
experiment with trepidation.

³We hate it,² said a senior executive at a major media company, who
requested anonymity because his company, like all broadcasters, must
play nice with the same cable operators that are imposing the limits.
Now that some television shows are viewed millions of times online, the
executive said, any impediment would hurt the advertising model for
online video streaming.

Mr. Leddy of Time Warner said that the media companies¹ fears were
overblown. If the company were to try to stop Web video, ³we would not
succeed,² he said. ³We know how much capacity they¹re going to need in
the future, and we know what it¹s going to cost. And today¹s business
model doesn¹t pay for it very well.²

http://www.eff.org/

Nuff said.

Bill

--
Garden in shade zone 5 S Jersey USA
Book "Our Media Not Theirs" Many Stars

I agree.

And I wanted to show just how silly it is to post hundreds of lines of spew
and add a one line response.

Steve ;-)

In article ,
"SteveB" toquerville@zionvistas wrote:

Our local paper, a subsidiary of the N. Y. Times
didn't even cover the articles of impeachment for Cheney that were
introduced into the House on the 12th of June.
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/petit...6666&s_kwcid=k
ucinich%20impeachment|1395328440

More appropriate for this newsgroup is:
Bad Cow Disease
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: June 13, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/op...13krugman.html

But first, the internet abuse

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/te...r=1&oref=slogi
n

"Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic".

Some people use the Internet simply to check e-mail and look up phone
numbers. Others are online all day, downloading big video and music
files.

For years, both kinds of Web surfers have paid the same price for
access. But now three of the country¹s largest Internet service
providers are threatening to clamp down on their most active subscribers
by placing monthly limits on their online activity.

One of them, Time Warner Cable, began a trial of ³Internet metering² in
one Texas city early this month, asking customers to select a monthly
plan and pay surcharges when they exceed their bandwidth limit. The idea
is that people who use the network more heavily should pay more, the way
they do for water, electricity, or, in many cases, cellphone minutes.

That same week, Comcast said that it would expand on a strategy it uses
to manage Internet traffic: slowing down the connections of the heaviest
users, so-called bandwidth hogs, at peak times.

AT&T also said Thursday that limits on heavy use were inevitable and
that it was considering pricing based on data volume. ³Based on current
trends, total bandwidth in the AT&T network will increase by four times
over the next three years,² the company said in a statement.

All three companies say that placing caps on broadband use will ensure
fair access for all users.

Internet metering is a throwback to the days of dial-up service, but at
a time when video and interactive games are becoming popular, the
experiments could have huge implications for the future of the Web.

Millions of people are moving online to watch movies and television
shows, play multiplayer video games and talk over videoconference with
family and friends. And media companies are trying to get people to
spend more time online: the Disneys and NBCs of the world keep adding
television shows and movies to their Web sites, giving consumers
convenient entertainment that soaks up a lot of bandwidth.

Moreover, companies with physical storefronts, like Blockbuster, are
moving toward digital delivery of entertainment. And new distributors of
online content think YouTube are relying on an open data spigot to
make their business plans work.

Critics of the bandwidth limits say that metering and capping network
use could hold back the inevitable convergence of television, computers
and the Internet.

The Internet ³is how we deliver our shows,² said Jim Louderback, chief
executive of Revision3, a three-year-old media company that runs what it
calls a television network on the Web. ³If all of a sudden our viewers
are worried about some sort of a broadband cap, they may think twice
about downloading or watching our shows.²

Even if the caps are far above the average users¹ consumption, their
mere existence could cause users to reduce their time online. Just ask
people who carefully monitor their monthly allotments of cellphone
minutes and text messages.

³As soon as you put serious uncertainty as to cost on the table,
people¹s feeling of freedom to predict cost dries up and so does
innovation and trying new applications,² Vint Cerf, the chief Internet
evangelist for Google who is often called the ³father of the Internet,²
said in an e-mail message.

But the companies imposing the caps say that their actions are only
fair. People who use more network capacity should pay more, Time Warner
argues. And Comcast says that people who use too much like those who
engage in file-sharing should be forced to slow down.

Time Warner also frames the issue in financial terms: the broadband
infrastructure needs to be improved, it says, and maybe metering could
pay for the upgrades. So far its trial is limited to new subscribers in
Beaumont, Tex., a city of roughly 110,000.

In that trial, new customers can buy plans with a 5-gigabyte cap, a
20-gigabyte cap or a 40-gigabyte cap. Prices for those plans range from
$30 to $50. Above the cap, customers pay $1 a gigabyte. Plans with
higher caps come with faster service.

³Average customers are way below the caps,² said Kevin Leddy, executive
vice president for advanced technology at Time Warner Cable. ³These caps
give them years¹ worth of growth before they¹d ever pay any surcharges.²

Casual Internet users who merely send e-mail messages, check movie times
and read the news are not likely to exceed the caps. But people who
watch television shows on Hulu.com, rent movies on iTunes or play the
multiplayer game Halo on Xbox may start to exceed the limits and
millions of people are already doing those things.

Streaming an hour of video on Hulu, which shows programs like ³Saturday
Night Live,² ³Family Guy² and ³The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,²
consumes about 200 megabytes, or one-fifth of a gigabyte. A
higher-quality hour of the same content bought through Apple¹s iTunes
store can use about 500 megabytes, or half a gigabyte.

A high-definition episode of ³Survivor² on CBS.com can use up to a
gigabyte, and a DVD-quality movie through Netflix¹s new online service
can eat up about five gigabytes. One Netflix download alone, in fact,
could bring a user to the limit on the cheapest plan in Time Warner¹s
trial in Beaumont.

Even services like Skype and Vonage that use the Internet to transmit
phone calls could help put users over the monthly limits.

Time Warner would not reveal how many gigabytes an average customer
uses, saying only that 95 percent of customers use under 40 gigabytes
each in a month.

That means that 5 percent of customers use more than 50 percent of the
network¹s overall capacity, the company said, and many of those people
are assumed to be sharing copyrighted video and music files illegally.

The Time Warner plan has the potential to bring Internet use full
circle, back to the days when pay-as-you-go pricing held back the Web¹s
popularity. In the early days of dial-up access, America Online and
other providers offered tiered pricing, in part because audio and video
were barely viable online. Consumers feared going over their allotted
time and bristled at the idea that access to cyberspace was billed by
the hour.

In 1996, when AOL started offering unlimited access plans, Internet use
took off and the online world started moving to the center of people¹s
daily lives. Today most Internet packages provide a seemingly unlimited
amount of capacity, at least from the consumer¹s perspective.

But like water and electricity, even digital resources are finite. Last
year Comcast disclosed that it was temporarily turning off the
connections of customers who used file-sharing services like BitTorrent,
arguing that they were slowing things down for everyone else. The people
who got cut off complained and asked how much broadband use was too
much; the company did not have a ready answer.

Thus, like Time Warner, Comcast is considering a form of Internet
metering that would apply to all online activity.

The goal, says Mitch Bowling, a senior vice president at Comcast, is
³ensuring that a small number of users don¹t impact the experience for
everyone else.²

Last year Comcast was sued when it was disclosed that the company had
singled out BitTorrent users.

In February, Comcast departed from that approach and started
collaborating with the company that runs BitTorrent. Now it has shifted
to what it calls a ³platform agnostic² approach to managing its network,
meaning that it slows down the connection of any customer who uses too
much bandwidth at congested times.

Mr. Bowling said that ³typical Internet usage² would not be affected.
But on the Internet, ³typical² use is constantly being redefined.

³The definitions of low and high usage today are meaningless, because
the Internet¹s going to grow, and nothing¹s going to stop that,² said
Eric Klinker, the chief technology officer of BitTorrent.

As the technology company Cisco put it in a recent report, ³today¹s
Obandwidth hog¹ is tomorrow¹s average user.²

One result of these experiments is a tug-of-war between the Internet
providers and media companies, which are monitoring the Time Warner
experiment with trepidation.

³We hate it,² said a senior executive at a major media company, who
requested anonymity because his company, like all broadcasters, must
play nice with the same cable operators that are imposing the limits.
Now that some television shows are viewed millions of times online, the
executive said, any impediment would hurt the advertising model for
online video streaming.

Mr. Leddy of Time Warner said that the media companies¹ fears were
overblown. If the company were to try to stop Web video, ³we would not
succeed,² he said. ³We know how much capacity they¹re going to need in
the future, and we know what it¹s going to cost. And today¹s business
model doesn¹t pay for it very well.²

http://www.eff.org/

Nuff said.

Bill

--
Garden in shade zone 5 S Jersey USA
Book "Our Media Not Theirs" Many Stars

I agree.

And I wanted to show just how silly it is to post hundreds of lines of spew
and add a one line response.

Steve ;-)
No. The hundreds of lines were actually reasoned thought and
important to emphasize. Silly is not to have recognized that. When
something is important, it is necessary to repeat it. Teachers
will do it three (3) times, so that even the slowest student will
be aware of it;o))
--

Billy
Bush and Pelosi Behind Bars
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KVTf...ef=patrick.net
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0aEo...eature=related

In article , Persephone wrote:

On Sun, 15 Jun 2008 13:29:50 -0700, Billy
wrote:

In article ,
"Katey Didd" wrote:

Persephone wrote in message
...
On Sat, 14 Jun 2008 11:39:37 -0500, "R. & J. Willingham"
wrote:


"J. Clarke" wrote in message
...
One suspects that the "broadband providers" are just using it to pull
the plug on a service that's bringing in no income.

They aren't "curbing USENET", they're turning off or reducing coverage
on their own servers.

I was thinking the exact same thing. Not to mention the all the
complaints
they must get about spammers and trolls using the service that must be
dealt
with in some way.

Help! Will someone please explain what I am supposed to do now?
My current Internet provider is Time-Warner cable (tfui!). If they're
going to discontinue Usenet, I will want to discontinue *them*. But
what should I do next? Go to another cable provider? Or? I'm
not sophisticated about this stuff, so really don't know where to
turn.

Sign up with a free Usenet provider. There are more than a few out there.
The one I'm using is free. There is also news.aioe.org that doesn't even
require you to sign up. Just put it in the server window and download the
list of groups he has listed.



Also, how soon is this supposed to take effect?

And do we have any recourse with elected officials?

TIA

Persephone

It's not just Usenet. It seems all the corporations are worried
that they are going to lose their chance to skin us. The ISPs
already charge to connect us. This surcharge is obscene. The
habitat for game is removed, we have to by our meat. Ownership
of seeds is concentrated, we have to buy our seed. The oceans are
despoiled and fish are becoming dangerous to eat. If there is a
natural disaster, residences aren't helped to return to their
homes. Media is manipulated so that the populace is given a false
view of the world. Our local paper, a subsidiary of the N. Y. Times
didn't even cover the articles of impeachment for Cheney that were
introduced into the House on the 12th of June.
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/petit...6666&s_kwcid=k
ucinich%20impeachment|1395328440

Hardly any pop media covered this. I just happened upon Kucinich
reading the whole megilla one day on C-Span, and sat there,
transfixed, despite the repetitive language. It was just tabled
or something, wasn't it? by our brave Congress-whores.


More appropriate for this newsgroup is:
Bad Cow Disease
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: June 13, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/op...13krugman.html

Yes, isn't he absolutely terrific! I always look for his columns in
the NYTimes on-line, Mon and Fri. Click on Opinion and it will take
you to the columnists of the day. NYT (though deteriorating like all
formerly great papers) still has some distinguished columnists,
inter alia, Frank Rich and Nicholas Kristof. Thomas Friedman also has
a column but I don't like him very much. Maureen Dowd shocked me
by her virulent, hate-filled columns about Hillary Clinton.

Persephone

But first, the internet abuse

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/te...r=1&oref=slogi
n

"Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic".

Some people use the Internet simply to check e-mail and look up phone
numbers. Others are online all day, downloading big video and music
files.

For years, both kinds of Web surfers have paid the same price for
access. But now three of the country¹s largest Internet service
providers are threatening to clamp down on their most active subscribers
by placing monthly limits on their online activity.

One of them, Time Warner Cable, began a trial of ³Internet metering² in
one Texas city early this month, asking customers to select a monthly
plan and pay surcharges when they exceed their bandwidth limit. The idea
is that people who use the network more heavily should pay more, the way
they do for water, electricity, or, in many cases, cellphone minutes.

That same week, Comcast said that it would expand on a strategy it uses
to manage Internet traffic: slowing down the connections of the heaviest
users, so-called bandwidth hogs, at peak times.

AT&T also said Thursday that limits on heavy use were inevitable and
that it was considering pricing based on data volume. ³Based on current
trends, total bandwidth in the AT&T network will increase by four times
over the next three years,² the company said in a statement.

All three companies say that placing caps on broadband use will ensure
fair access for all users.

Internet metering is a throwback to the days of dial-up service, but at
a time when video and interactive games are becoming popular, the
experiments could have huge implications for the future of the Web.

Millions of people are moving online to watch movies and television
shows, play multiplayer video games and talk over videoconference with
family and friends. And media companies are trying to get people to
spend more time online: the Disneys and NBCs of the world keep adding
television shows and movies to their Web sites, giving consumers
convenient entertainment that soaks up a lot of bandwidth.

Moreover, companies with physical storefronts, like Blockbuster, are
moving toward digital delivery of entertainment. And new distributors of
online content ‹ think YouTube ‹ are relying on an open data spigot to
make their business plans work.

Critics of the bandwidth limits say that metering and capping network
use could hold back the inevitable convergence of television, computers
and the Internet.

The Internet ³is how we deliver our shows,² said Jim Louderback, chief
executive of Revision3, a three-year-old media company that runs what it
calls a television network on the Web. ³If all of a sudden our viewers
are worried about some sort of a broadband cap, they may think twice
about downloading or watching our shows.²

Even if the caps are far above the average users¹ consumption, their
mere existence could cause users to reduce their time online. Just ask
people who carefully monitor their monthly allotments of cellphone
minutes and text messages.

³As soon as you put serious uncertainty as to cost on the table,
people¹s feeling of freedom to predict cost dries up and so does
innovation and trying new applications,² Vint Cerf, the chief Internet
evangelist for Google who is often called the ³father of the Internet,²
said in an e-mail message.

But the companies imposing the caps say that their actions are only
fair. People who use more network capacity should pay more, Time Warner
argues. And Comcast says that people who use too much ‹ like those who
engage in file-sharing ‹ should be forced to slow down.

Time Warner also frames the issue in financial terms: the broadband
infrastructure needs to be improved, it says, and maybe metering could
pay for the upgrades. So far its trial is limited to new subscribers in
Beaumont, Tex., a city of roughly 110,000.

In that trial, new customers can buy plans with a 5-gigabyte cap, a
20-gigabyte cap or a 40-gigabyte cap. Prices for those plans range from
$30 to $50. Above the cap, customers pay $1 a gigabyte. Plans with
higher caps come with faster service.

³Average customers are way below the caps,² said Kevin Leddy, executive
vice president for advanced technology at Time Warner Cable. ³These caps
give them years¹ worth of growth before they¹d ever pay any surcharges.²

Casual Internet users who merely send e-mail messages, check movie times
and read the news are not likely to exceed the caps. But people who
watch television shows on Hulu.com, rent movies on iTunes or play the
multiplayer game Halo on Xbox may start to exceed the limits ‹ and
millions of people are already doing those things.

Streaming an hour of video on Hulu, which shows programs like ³Saturday
Night Live,² ³Family Guy² and ³The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,²
consumes about 200 megabytes, or one-fifth of a gigabyte. A
higher-quality hour of the same content bought through Apple¹s iTunes
store can use about 500 megabytes, or half a gigabyte.

A high-definition episode of ³Survivor² on CBS.com can use up to a
gigabyte, and a DVD-quality movie through Netflix¹s new online service
can eat up about five gigabytes. One Netflix download alone, in fact,
could bring a user to the limit on the cheapest plan in Time Warner¹s
trial in Beaumont.

Even services like Skype and Vonage that use the Internet to transmit
phone calls could help put users over the monthly limits.

Time Warner would not reveal how many gigabytes an average customer
uses, saying only that 95 percent of customers use under 40 gigabytes
each in a month.

That means that 5 percent of customers use more than 50 percent of the
network¹s overall capacity, the company said, and many of those people
are assumed to be sharing copyrighted video and music files illegally.

The Time Warner plan has the potential to bring Internet use full
circle, back to the days when pay-as-you-go pricing held back the Web¹s
popularity. In the early days of dial-up access, America Online and
other providers offered tiered pricing, in part because audio and video
were barely viable online. Consumers feared going over their allotted
time and bristled at the idea that access to cyberspace was billed by
the hour.

In 1996, when AOL started offering unlimited access plans, Internet use
took off and the online world started moving to the center of people¹s
daily lives. Today most Internet packages provide a seemingly unlimited
amount of capacity, at least from the consumer¹s perspective.

But like water and electricity, even digital resources are finite. Last
year Comcast disclosed that it was temporarily turning off the
connections of customers who used file-sharing services like BitTorrent,
arguing that they were slowing things down for everyone else. The people
who got cut off complained and asked how much broadband use was too
much; the company did not have a ready answer.

Thus, like Time Warner, Comcast is considering a form of Internet
metering that would apply to all online activity.

The goal, says Mitch Bowling, a senior vice president at Comcast, is
³ensuring that a small number of users don¹t impact the experience for
everyone else.²

Last year Comcast was sued when it was disclosed that the company had
singled out BitTorrent users.

In February, Comcast departed from that approach and started
collaborating with the company that runs BitTorrent. Now it has shifted
to what it calls a ³platform agnostic² approach to managing its network,
meaning that it slows down the connection of any customer who uses too
much bandwidth at congested times.

Mr. Bowling said that ³typical Internet usage² would not be affected.
But on the Internet, ³typical² use is constantly being redefined.

³The definitions of low and high usage today are meaningless, because
the Internet¹s going to grow, and nothing¹s going to stop that,² said
Eric Klinker, the chief technology officer of BitTorrent.

As the technology company Cisco put it in a recent report, ³today¹s
Œbandwidth hog¹ is tomorrow¹s average user.²

One result of these experiments is a tug-of-war between the Internet
providers and media companies, which are monitoring the Time Warner
experiment with trepidation.

³We hate it,² said a senior executive at a major media company, who
requested anonymity because his company, like all broadcasters, must
play nice with the same cable operators that are imposing the limits.
Now that some television shows are viewed millions of times online, the
executive said, any impediment would hurt the advertising model for
online video streaming.

Mr. Leddy of Time Warner said that the media companies¹ fears were
overblown. If the company were to try to stop Web video, ³we would not
succeed,² he said. ³We know how much capacity they¹re going to need in
the future, and we know what it¹s going to cost. And today¹s business
model doesn¹t pay for it very well.²

If you have arrived here all "glassy eyed", it is well that you return
to the top and read for comprehension for we are talking of the
overthrow of the republic by a corporate cabal. Your freedom is
in peril.
--

Billy
Bush and Pelosi Behind Bars
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KVTf...ef=patrick.net
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0aEo...eature=related