::scr Paying for It

[Simon Wistow]

On Thu, May 02, 2002 at 01:38:49PM +0100, David Cantrell said:
> DANGER WILL ROBINSON!  What central authority?  How are they funded?  Who
> controls them?  Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Well we already have the root servers, NetSol and ICANN ... oh wait,
that's not a glowing reccomendation is it.
 
> That's a very big handwave.  I think that to do this we need to involve the
> Alien Space Bats.

Yes. Very much so. Or a different infrastructure but we're talking at
least 7.5 SBUs (Space Bat Units)

Although it did occur to me that there may be an alternative.

I imagine in some sort of nightmarish but very probably future most
netaccess will controlled by large conglomerates - cabal companies
probably - dolling out dynamic ip addresses from huge IPv6 blocks and
controlling content (probably) - massaging it from the nasty web into a
lovely, coherently branded, targeted and sparingly interspersed with
adverts walled garden.

The proles will lap it up. 

In fact it will be very like AOL. But there will be more.

Content providers (everyone from Salon to Penny Arcade to ...)  will
have scripts that will check their logs. If too much traffic is coming
from a particular blog they will make a request to $block_provider who
will send them some money. Either that or Content provider will block
access from that block. $block_provider will then pass costs onto
subscribers.

In fact it could be automated ... the content providers will be checking
their own logs and as soon as they see that they're approaching a limit
a script will check a page or access some sort of protocol on the
content provider which will return information about the limits that are
acceptable to it and the pricing structure thereafter. A little script
on the $block_provider's servers will then work out whether it's worth
it based on percentage of subscribers (and possibly content as
derived from some heuristic) etc etc. and then either electronically
transfer cash or not. 

For those of us not getting our spoon fed propaganda and carefully
massaged information placebos from the keiretsus won't make up enough
traffic to really make a difference so we get it all for free and
without that nasty popups, banner ads and spyware.

...


In my fucking dreams.

...


By the way. If anybody's wondering why we're babbling about Space Bats
it's from this ...  http://www.faqs.org/faqs/history/what-if/

"8. What are the Alien Space Bats?

Newsgroup shorthand for complete disbelief in some suggested historical
reasoning: "alien space bats would be a more believable explanation."

For a while, they were being pressed into service for questions about
the effects of impossible events actually happening, but their primary
use remains for attacks on unrealism in timelines (Alison Brooks' page,
see Question 19, gives the canonical example). They are still
occasionally invoked as a quirky deus ex machina for impossible AHs,
because no one has come up with anything better."

See also

http://www.alternatehistory.com/Discussion/messages/40/40.html?1020746555




-- 
: it's not the heat, it's the humanity