> > i donut know if I agree ... do you really think, say, the
bianca guys could
> > truly have done it with a $30 account.
> >
> > I do not know.
>
> I do: the answer is basically no. ISPs who have thought this
through for
> more than 5 minutes will make you sign something saying you
can't put up
> something that gets lots and lots of server hits (I've seen the
contract
> language); the ones who haven't will make up similar rules on
the fly the
> first time it happens to them. Universities can afford to be a
bit more
> loose about this (or maybe not, but at least in the early days
of the web
> they were), since they've got bandwidth for 30,000 users
anyway, but your
> basic ISP buying bandwidth for its 1000 customers will not sit
still and
> take 5000 hits to your page each day (and neither will
penny-pinching
> megacorps like AOL).
> It takes the same amount of bandwidth to "hit in" or
> "hit out", and they aren't going to double their line-leasing
fees out of
> the goodness of their hearts (or more than double, if say more
than one
> user decides to put up a popular webzine).
Of course, this may change as bandwidth becomes cheaper.
I read something either on this list or in _Wired_ (how's that
for confusion?), probably...oh, about a year ago, arguing that if
bandwidth goes the way of transistors, then it will be virtually
free in the next few decades. I.e., 50 years ago a single
transistor (or, really, a vacuum tube at that point) cost a
couple bucks. Prices fell as we moved from vacuum tubes to
transistors and fell even more as we moved from transistors to
silicon circuits Today a single transistor (i.e. one switch in a
microprocessor) costs so little that it's virtually free. Of
course, as "transistor price" plummeted we found ways to make use
of thousands of those cheap "transistors" working together
(microprocessors). But, what "cheap transistors" really mean is
that we now have little computers in things like watches, CD
players, dishwashers, lamps, etc etc, little computers which
outperform the room-sized behemoths of the fifties.
The point? If bandwidth availability advances on a curve remotely
similar to transistor availability we can assume that somewhere
in the next few decades no ISP is going to bitch about a website
getting a measly 10,000 hits a day.
So while bandwidth limitations *today* may encourage ISPs to
prevent someone from self-publishing a webzine that takes
thousands of hits a day, the development of higher bandwidth in
the *future* might mean that ISPs won't start groaning and
bitching and cutting off your service until your site starts
taking millions of hits per day.
Of course the response to this is (as Evan said):
> "OK, that's true now, but at some point
> in the future it has to scale better, as cheap bandwidth and
computer
> space/power will increase". But to repeat JP, I don't know.
There's no
> obvious reason why the required bandwidth of the evolving web
medium
> won't keep on chasing the bandwidth of the Internet forever,
just as
> entertainment software has spent the last 7-8 years chasing the
$3000
> computers purchased in the previous 6 months from any time t.
Which I totally agree with. We always seem to create software
that strains the limits of our hardware. No matter how quickly we
improve the hardware, we always find a way to make it
insufficient.
However, to bring us back to the IP issue, how efficient do you
all think we have to make digital networked means of reproduction
and distribution before it starts to endanger the "efficiency" of
"normal", physical means of reproduction and distribution.
If bandwidth increases to a point where *anyone's* $30/month
website can easily handle 10,000 hits a day, would that be
enough? 50,000? 100,000?
I think at some point we may reach a stage where bandwidth (&
processor speed & storage capacity) is so cheap that it's more
economical to reproduce a CD (or a book or a video or whatever)
digitally and distribute it over a network than it is to make a
physical copy, ship it by truck to a store, and sell it there.
And that's the stage at which I think the ability to control IP
is history. Because if it's that easy for the "owner" of the
creative work to reproduce & distribute, then it's that easy for
*anyone* to do it.
Caveat: perhaps before we hit that stage we reach some kind of
"harware plateau" where the limitations of our tools prevent us
from engineering more complex hardware that would allow us to
reach the stage where mass digital reproduction & distribution is
cheaper than physical digital reproduction & distribution. (Which
is also one of the arguments used against the "technological
singularity").
-- Greg Ritter gritter@saturn.vcu.edu <--NEW E-MAIL ADDRESS! ritter@urvax.urich.edu http://www.urich.edu/~ritter-- CompLink (a comprehensive resources for Rhetoric & Composition teachers) http://www.urich.edu/~ritter/CompLink.html