Abundance and Scarcity are awesome ;)

What should be the goal:
– Identify users
– Keep historic usage of identified users
– Identified users can audit their historic usage at any time
– Non-identified users get the available bandwidth AFTER ALL of the identified users
– Businesses are treated as organizational units
– If there needs to be a hierarchy of organizational units, it can evolve
– If demographic groups of individuals need stimulus or assistance, it can evolve
– Corruption of the system will occur, how wide-spread it will be is the real concern

At the local access provider level: bullies shouldn’t be allowed to hog unless everyone else is engaged in a collective meat-space event and isn’t on-line.

At the Equinix.com exchange level: bullies are great customers and changes are made all the time to accommodate their needs.

The thing that I keep coming back to: Internet usage is a one-to-many relationship. Fundamentally, if I provide content, I have to find a way to get my content to users in a timely fashion, otherwise they go somewhere else. The properties of abundance dictate behavior, unless some political property (repression, censorship, civil liberties, etc) appears to be interfering with the properties of abundance.

Having big Internet pipes has always been an economic problem. (Well, maybe it wasn’t back in the days of DARPA funded research/educational focused Internet…)

I get that the carriers don’t like being in “a race to the bottom”, and no one wants their bread-n-butter business to become completely commoditized and irrelevant. Carriers-as-distributors, maybe learning from record companies, broadcast tv, and newspapers, that the distribution layer is susceptible to disruption.

As access (the network parts) and content (any producer) clusters and feedback on each other, a perceived scarcity starts occurring?

It all seems so diametrically opposed to what it appears to be trying to accomplish. Protecting the commons is fundamentally broken, unless you want to live in Singapore.

The place where control does the most good and is the most successful is at the end points of the network. The place where the most harm can be done, and where the most economies of scale can be accomplished is trying to do the control in the center of each network…

This will be hard to do. There will many missed steps. There will be much hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth.

Will “free market” bandwidth limiting algorithms emerge as business products? Crazier things could happen.

I’m sure someone else has said all of this much better than I just attempted… Point it out and I’ll be happy to acknowledge it.