Re: [SLUG] Ximian, microsoft and .nyet

From: Russell Hires (rhires@earthlink.net)
Date: Tue Jul 17 2001 - 22:46:48 EDT


> While I agree with everything you said in your message, this bit here is
> a statement that I see repeated over and over when people talk about
> Microsoft "owning" the Internet.
>

I think the concept is really about media concetration. Comcast, the number 3
cable provider, has been threatening to buy AT&T, the number 1 cable
provider. AOL/Time Warner, well....Let's talk about a conglomeration. What if
M$ decides to buy Comcast after they buy AT&T? Earthlink has an agreement
with AOL/Time Warner to get access to "the last mile" -- Cable Modems for
Earthlink instead of TW. The problem becomes control of the overall
infrastructure. These few really large companies can bully the people that
own the infrastructure into allowing the stuff that requires the highest
speed/largest amount of bandwidth to move their data first, while my email
from Aunt Sally takes as long as snail mail -- and perhaps because I'm using
Linux, it takes even longer...It isn't the internet that the Big Few would
own, but they could make life for us non-conformists miserable.

Russell

> The way I see it, unless they purchase the physical lines, or the actual
> transport layer that drives the Internet (concievable, but highly
> unlikely, I think) the Internet at large will still remain free as a
> whole. The difference being there will effectively be two "Internets"
> running in parallel: the one that all the Microsoft people can see and
> use, and the one the rest of us can see and use which will still be
> powered by things like Sendmail, Apache, BIND, Mozilla and so on.
>
> I'm not so concerned about The Internet being owned by Microsoft any
> time soon. I lived without CNN.com for many years, and I'm sure I can
> survive without it in the future if I have to.
>
> And if the day comes where Microsoft also owns Cisco, AT&T, Sprint, C&W,
> UUNET, Verizon and everyone in between your desktop and the server
> you're trying to contact, and only allows Microsoft protocols to be
> transmitted, well, I was on FidoNET for a few years quite some time
> back, and I can always do that again, and lets not forget that every
> Linux distro also includes PPP and UUCP... (Maybe I should set up a
> Citadel again... :)



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