I have a cunning... oh...

Do you remmeber when the internet was supposed to become the great leveller? Heck, even big business was throwing around 'words' like 'empowerment'

You do remember right. The days when you would log on, and likely post as much as you read?

When you were contributing to something, not just passively having stuff forced down your throat.

Well, let's pretend you do. I'll never be able to convince you what it was like if you don't anyway - and I only really got online for the tail end of it anyway.

Right. This is the way it is going to be. Hope I am proved wrong (given that crystal ball predictions always go wrong, maybe you can take this rant as an attempt to abort this course)

You will be charged for creating things. You will be charged to receive things. You will be charged by every step of the chain. It will be possible to create content and own it, but it will be very difficult. The ease of plagirism is nothing compared to the difficulty of getting things authored under new systems.

Your charging will happen at many different levels, and it will become very hard to keep track of what tiny amount you owe to whom. Tiny amounts of fraud against billions of people will make a few criminals very rich. The threat of this will be one of the driving forces (the other being sheer convenience) behind the next step.

Monolithic entities that bring the charging models together. "Let AOL do the hard stuff for you" "MSN is your friend"

Whee. Back to portal sites. It will remain possible to do anything you want, it will just be very difficult.

So what's stopping this?

Depressingly little. There aren't many reasons why this hasn't happened yet. One of the main ones its the immaturity of the technology - it's still mostly geeks who have it, and geeks tend to be generous when it means they can show off.

Another big one is search engines. As long as they remain neutral, independant sites have some hope. They already target adverts based on keywords. Not much of a step from there to giving top billing ot the site that pays most.

A third one is that big corporations are slow. How many years did it take microsoft to stop denying that the internet existed?

The final one I can think of is market penetration. Until now ther was little pressure - the internet was infinite, so no-one could grab a decent share and start to eat others. With the recent pressures of ad banners...

About time for some numbers

Gigabit-ethernet.linx went live recently.

This is the central backbone linking (most) uk ISPs together - and it just massively upgraded.

This upgrade cost money, big whacking chunks of it.

Linx has a simple charging model. Each packet that goes through it costs money. Every packet that goes in goes out, so they decide to only charge once.

They charge for every packet that goes in. This means that it costs your ISP money when you send stuff - but not half as much when you download stuff. This is one of the reasons for NTLs recent 'clarification' - and the other big one is being scared of getting sued for stuff you do.

I don't know how much linx charges - but as an example, superjanet (the UK academic backbone) charges 1p per megabyte that goes over the transatlantic link. And from this (and some grants) they fund the internal network too.

These charges are not unreasonable. Include a sensible amount (say 80MB a month) in the basic package, and chage beyond that.

But no. Instead they realise they can gouge business customers, and force residential customers to upgrade to business accounts.

Wake up gubberment - broadband britain is rapidly becoming a joke

Even where it does exist it's shoddy and ill maintained (guess who lost cable connectivity last night)

Yes, you can rapidly force it to become 'semi-interactive crud' an uber-TV in every home. Whoop de fecking do. But then, you don't seem to want a well educated and active populous, who take an interest in current affairs...

Solutions: Technical

It is fairly possible to hide upload traffic from your ISP. You could make it look like you established the connection - but they can still simply count packets in each direction.

You could put the web over a peer-peer system, caching pages everywhere - that would slow the information right down again though, and we'd finally got practically instant penetration of juicy gossip.

You could run your own segment of backbone. Charge others to use it, and add any content you liked. This is certainly financially viable - but the entrance barrier is huge - and once too many do it, it stops being viable.

Solutions: Social

Look. The internet is at least as important to me as clean air. Force your MPs to acknowledge this. Be clear that you want forceful action. Persuade business leaders that they want cheaper connections, and a populous who is able to read their guff easily.

Secede. Forget that stupid island place, there are plenty of countries out there that would love an influx of technical workers. Let's all pick one, and make it clear we only want one thing.

When we do this - pick a sunny one ffs.