[at-l] OT - Or Maybe NOt

[janl2 at mindspring.com (Jan Leitschuh)]

Good lord boys, and it has been the boys chewing on this one, this was info thrown out to discuss  the internet, not polarizing stuff. 
Can we stick to the technological and economic aspects?  
 I really wanted to know about this, whether such a thing is possible. 

Lee is the only one who addressed the technical issues cleanly, although I'm still not clear why, if it's impossible, why white papers are circulating in the cable, telephone and telecommunications
industries, and why Google, Amazon et all is worried about it - if it's impossible.
Just the facts, please. No snide asides.
This issue of control is of interest to anyone who uses the net. So, I'm interested in hearing more without polarization. 
If it can't happen, why are some big players concerned? 

L. Parker l_parker at cacaphony.net

>t simply wouldn't work. There are too many people with vested interests in
>keeping it free and open to allow it to happen. The other governments in the
>world will simply refuse to let "American" companies dictate to them how the
>Internet is going to be used. The attempt would cause the Internet to
fragment into smaller sub-nets which would virtually guarantee the demise of
the phone companies' net. Even assuming they managed it, someone would put
up a blackmarket Internet using stolen bandwidth or unlicensed
airspace...which everyone would flock to. So the for-fee version would most
likely die aborning from lack of users.

>Second of all, the database you describe is simply impossible to build. Lets
look at this for a moment. The internet is a vast collection of data, a
veritable sea of it. At this very moment data is adding to the internet at a
rate per minute, per second even, that exceeds all the information stored in
the Library of Congress. In order to track everyone's access to every piece
of information out there would require a database equivalent in size to the
total amount of data out there right now, multiplied by the number of people
who access it, multiplied by every time they access it....there simply isn't
enough storage capacity in existence to do that. The best they can hope for
is what they are doing already, counting page hits.

Lee I Joe