<videovortex> How streaming video changed the shape of the internet — Quartz

[Dr. Strangelove]

Thanks Andreas, I am writing about this sort of issue in my forthcoming 
text on the future of the Internet. I doubt that the future of the 
Internet will amount to a revision to the "gated communities" similar to 
the Prodigy/Compuserve era. China, for example, demonstrates that the 
nature of network and digital technology, combined with the subversive 
will of the user, renders the network of networks inherently 
interconnected. Connections between states, markets, platforms and 
networks will continue to defy attempts to corral and control users and 
content.

"You can imagine a future where content bandwidth demands are so great 
that only ISPs hooked up to content owners’ private networks can deliver 
the seamless experience users expect." We can also imagine a future were 
compression algorithms render size a negligible consideration.

I suspect that every attempt to reduce communicative and productive 
freedoms within the Net will be met with sufficient resistance and 
creativity from users as well as competition from the market itself.

You can imagine a future where the designs and intents of corporations 
and states are continually frustrated by competition within the market, 
between states, and a user-generated future of networking. There is more 
at work in the design of networks than the will of corporations and states.

Dr. Strangelove



On 07/11/2016 3:17 PM, Andreas Treske wrote:
>
>> http://qz.com/742474/how-streaming-video-changed-the-shape-of-the-internet/
>
> "As video grows in importance, text, for so long the de facto means of 
> internet communication, will shrink in significance. Facebook’s Mark 
> Zuckerberg has already said as much, proclaiming that the future of 
> his social network lies with video, and increasingly more immersive 
> forms, such as virtual reality. Facebook paid $2 billion for Oculus 
> Rift to push that process along. Facebook executives talk 
> about the end of the written word as part of the business plan.
> Facebook and Google continue to tread dangerously close to the line 
> where they will start controlling the last-mile of internet access for 
> their users. Facebook has several irons in the fire, including 
> Free Basics, which gives 25 million users free or subsidized access to 
> the internet but also restricts those users to a narrow range of 
> accessible content. It is also working on Aquila, its plan to beam 
> wireless internet access to people using a giant airborne drone, and 
> it’s laying a transatlantic cablewith Microsoft.
> Google has its consumer ISP division, Google Fiber, which provides 
> over 450,000 internet connections in nine cities. Like Facebook, it 
> has a quixotic wireless internet access project, this one 
> called Project Loon, which substitutes Facebook’s drone for a hot-air 
> balloon. The goal is the same, to be the final link between a user and 
> the online world.
> As Big Tech gobbles up more infrastructure and accounts for more 
> internet traffic, it poses questions for the future of the network’s 
> openness, says Farrell, the former ICANN executive. “It means the 
> internet is evolving from being a peer-to-peer open standards network 
> to being a proprietary set of, effectively, VPNs [virtual private 
> networks],” she says. “Which users are not quite aware of—they think 
> they’re on the open internet and they’re not.”
> You can imagine a future where content bandwidth demands are so great 
> that only ISPs hooked up to content owners’ private networks can 
> deliver the seamless experience users expect. That means if a major 
> ISP isn’t in your town or part of the world, you might not have the 
> benefit of that connection. That means you’re going to be left waiting 
> as Facebook Live, or an equivalent VR stream, buffers. “It has huge 
> implications for how the internet can grow. There are nearly 4 billion 
> people who are not connected to the internet,” says Sastry. “How do we 
> make it economically viable for them to connect to the internet, and 
> have the same experiences as we have here?”
> For now, internet users, infrastructure providers, and the 
> increasingly vertically integrated tech companies are happy to keep 
> the video streams flowing."
>
> Andreas Treske
> treske at bilkent.edu.tr <mailto:treske at bilkent.edu.tr>
>
>
>
>
>
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