A Budding War Over Internet Economics
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
FTA "The concept—known as “sender pays”—would radically alter today’s Internet economics. Some countries say their networks are groaning under video and other content provided in large part by U.S. companies such as Facebook, Netflix, and Google. These countries suggest that fees on content providers would help defray local infrastructure costs."
This is exactly why ITU and other agencies should stay out of the way. They have no clue how the internet works. Content providers do pay Bandwidth fees at their edges. If the networks are having a hard time with this content they should have not signed deals at the edges of their networks that put them in these positions. What they really want is to dig their hands into the deeper pockets of content providers and create a sort of "Tax" to improve their "groaning" networks. What would really happen is they would get the money and continue running their inefficient networks and magically the extra money would just disappear in a flash of "operating expenses".
Note: this may be the goal of the totalitarian regimes all along. They could not be accused of censorship when Twitter, Facebook & the like pull out.
Media - music, news, movies - from the West (Western Europe, US) is one of the many things that sparked discontent in Soviet-bloc countries. It countered much of the propaganda put out by the "workers paradises."
In more current times, putting out video, images, and information has shed light on atrocities that are going on around the world. Some of it drives people to action.
Anything the regimes can do to cut off communications is a win for them.
P2P basically nullifies the sender pays argument. If the sender pays economic model prevails and I were netflix, I would immediately invest in a netflix client that is P2P, so that I am only really paying more for less popular content and any sufficiently popular content is self-sustaining.
I'm generally all for any regulation that ends up spurring more P2P solution, but the problem we then end up with, and is a serious one, is that less popular (or simply not-yet-popular) content becomes too expense to be sustainable and we end up with less content to choose from. The long tail will either cost more or be discontinued.
I think this part works a lot better than what you must be thinking - that we'll keep escaping governments through technical stuff, such as building darknets and whatnot. The problem with that is that while we may succeed in creating such solutions, it still ends up ultimately worse for us. Because now everyone has to become more technical to use these darknets, or to become anonymous, or to share stuff with each other, which will all be much harder than it is now on the Internet.
This is why the solution should always be a political one, and not a technical one, because if we lose on the politics side, it means things will get worse for us from a user experience point of view, and it will only be a short-to-medium term solution anyway, until they come after that solution, too. So instead of trying to always be one step ahead through technical means, we should try and stand up for our rights from the beginning, when it's all starting, and make sure that the political solution lasts for decades until they try again.
Here's an example. Instead of letting them pass laws that allow for warrantless monitoring of e-mails, which would then mean we'd all have to learn to use encrypted anonymous e-mail messages (which sounds like a pain), we should protest to create a law that demands warrants for that. And that's pretty much what we've achieved with the new ECPA now. While not always possible, the political solution is so much better than the technical one, and we should always strive to solve these problems through politics first.
Of course, we'd need a cheap-transceiver-project too. Hm.
Plan b) Use a standard missile to destroy your ground station.
I think that the anti-satellite weapons were tested only against decoys. I don't remember a case were there was a rogue satellite and someone destroy it or the owners, but it's very difficult to argue with missile owners.
And ground station? How about hundreds of thousands of ground stations, shared by people worldwide.
To you. Not necessarily to various governments around the world or the telecom companies that provide services they would like to get paid more for.
The only reason there is no need to debate is that the ITU will make whatever decision it's members allow it to, giving feedback from outside the ITU is somewhat a pointless action.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Counc...
The fact that is most likely to prevent this from being an issue is that the decisions of this ITU body are probably not binding, and the content providers will just ignore them unless governments actually try to enforce this.
If it doesn't have a military angle to it the Security Council has nothing to do with it. This is an action by the ITU, the US's veto power in the Security Council means nothing here.
edit: the comment below about 'lower body' in the UN (I believe he is referring to the General Assembly) also has nothing to do with the ITU
for the ITU to adopt a resolution it needs to be approved by a simple majority of present members (while meeting quorum, which is half of the 172 members).
This isn't the first time they have debated silly proposals. previous ideas that didn't pass include requiring all internet users to register, allowing governments to filter the internet and to be able to implement a 'kill switch'. none passed.