ISPs and the music industry

In this article, Ars takes a stab at point out why an ISP would want to get into bed with a media company.
Of course, it's all about the money. In this case the money comes from one place -- subscribers. The ISPs want to put music on their networks exclusively, and charge through the nose for it. This is one of the things that could destroy the idea of a neutral Internet. For a neutral Internet to happen ISPs have to become dumb pipes. There really is no exception. For true network neutrality, one ISP cannot receive exclusive deals that another does not have similar access to. A similar comparison would be the iPhone's exclusivity on AT&Ts network. If you want an iPhone, you have to go to AT&T, no (legal under the DMCA) exceptions. There's no problem with that, really, it's just circumstance. However the problem that can arise is that to get that iPhone, you have to plan to sacrifice either 2 years or $200 to AT&T. View that through the lens of media and it becomes clear that an exclusive deal between an ISP and a movie or music company could turn out to be more nefarious than an early termination fee, or having your entire DRM'd collection of media suddenly not work.
The big thing with ISPs these days is to try and get into your head so that they can force and replace advertisements on the websites that you visit. Falling revenue streams are forcing ISPs to concern themselves less and less with legalities, privacy, customer concerns and worst of all, the Internet itself. Where then would exclusive media deals lead?
Imagine a world where competing ISPs who have competing media distribution deals are forced to come up with new ways to generate profits. Aside from raising subscription fees, which is easy to imagine, will soon happen every quarter, the only other option is to tighten the reigns on what the users of the ISPs are allowed to do. ISPs, cocooned in the idea that exclusive deals are the way to go will start down the road to the past, forcing themselves to look more and more like the AOL of the early 90's. (Meanwhile, those 'exclusive partnerships' between ISPs and media companies simply become 'branded deals' as the media companies realize ISPs are on a sinking ship.)
It won't take long for ISPs to realize that users are finding ways around the walled garden Internet provided them. The ISPs will suggest, then force, then petition Congress to allow ISPs to deny access to the Internet and their services unless users install software that cripples the Internet to the ISPs will, prevents media piracy, and reports all activity for monitoring, and Ad targeting.
If this sounds like a "Slippery Slope", that's because it is. But this one doesn't suffer from the fallacy of lack of truth. ISPs are gearing up to only allow access to authorized services already (they say that its only packet shaping and bandwidth management, but also hint at piracy prevention). Simply imagine what they would implement when profit motives and losses can't be measured by simple numbers like bandwidth, but instead rely on the notoriously devious "loss" numbers from the likes of the RIAA, MPAA and BSA.
For further proof, here is a link to exactly what I'm talking about. Entire sections of the Internet being blocked by ISPs. Of course, that is being done to "protect the children." How long before the proposed "G-rated" internet becomes law -- to protect the children?
So, here's the deal -- loosely. ISPs should only be able to enter into non-exclusive deals with any media, or advertising company. If one ISP gets a deal, they all get the option to sign up. This could create some complications, but no one ever said business was easy. The "Perfect Storm" is brewing just off the coast of Internet Neutrality, and we need to brace for impact.

Thinking about a non-smug way to talk about a MAC switch.

I'm high on coffee. I think I like it. I miss it, I believe. Somehow though, I'm fighting something. I keep visualizing spirals and circles.

I'm slowly realizing that an Apple computer is really worth it. The MAC Book Pro that I have is really kicking it for me. The software, and things that I have are coming down, and I'm finding exactly what I need. I'm finding exactly what I want. At first I was worried that I wouldn't be able to find enough software to support exactly what I had done on my Windows box. Images, video, all of the things that I did on a daily basis, would I be able to do them on a Mac? I knew that there were plenty of things that were media-centric on the Mac, but what about the FLAC, MKV and other strange file formats that people love to post on the Internet?

Well, much like Windows, the MAC comes with some basic apps that allow you do things that are perfectly O.K. But if you want to do some things that are just great, you have to sniff around. I was worried before my main computer became a MAC because I hadn't seen any of the things that I used on the MAC. I was soon to find that I simply wasn't looking for them. Let's go down this road systematically. From acquisition to execution.

Finding files, for me, was mostly done on Usenet. With Windows I used XNews. It is a great program. It enables you to search, find and get exactly what you are looking for. I used it and was happy. Once I jumped over I looked for a Usenet program, and found Unison. I had to pay for it but, holy crap, did I ever get what I paid for! As I started to use it, I found that like XNews it was easy and really put every thing together. But with Unison, it was so much easier. The program segregated file types and made finding everything so much easier. It worked exactly the way I worked. Intuitive, graceful and beautiful. In many ways it was the single best piece of software that I had ever used. I'll have to digress to get to my next point and I hope you'll forgive me.

The digression I promised is this: once I have the files from Usenet, I have to compile and extract them. On Windows I was using a few different programs to do this. Quick Par put all of the files together in whatever format the poster chose to compress them in and from that, I needed to extract. I needed two, sometimes three programs to do that. Here, on the Mac, I found a single solution. There may well be a single solution on Windows but I haven't found it. After being mired in simply finding a solution to extracting rar files on Windows without having to pirate or pay I was done looking for things. On the Mac, it took less time to find what needed than it did to download it. Now, with one program that could handle everything I could possible throw at it I was ready to rock.

So, back to the main conversation. I had an easy solution, and things were good. Then something happened. From within Unison I started to see a new type of file that it recognized. The NZB. I'd never seen (or paid attention) to the mighty NZB. I did a quick search in Unison's help file for it and discovered what amounted to the holy Grail of Usenet. Things were about to get real easy. So now, because I had been able to relax when using the program, because it had been so easy to find what I was looking for, I had found an even easier way to get what I was looking for. I didn't even need to open the Newsgroups file any more. I could find or create an NZB, click on it, and Unison did the rest. MACPAR then took the files from Usenet and performed every single operation needed to translate them into something I could use. It was at this point that I began looking at my ISPs download caps.

The next part was the one that I was most worried about. Once I had all of these files, and including all of the files that I already had, would I be able to use them. I'd messed with open source video viewers, image viewers and whatnot, but I was worried. Would there be a dry river bed on the Mac where there had been a steady flow of software on Windows? (Even if wading through it could sometimes be toxic.) Aside from a true, excellent replacement for AcdSee, the answer was a resounding YES! VLC took care of the video and works just as well on the Mac as it does on Windows; stripped down versions of the crap-ware Quicktime and Realplayer were readily available and plug in to VLC perfectly. And even though I haven't broken free of the chains completely, I am playing with some really good alternatives to iTunes.

So there I was. My main media worries were abated. Five Nines across the board. Video, audio, image etc. The things on my hard drive, old CDs, DVDs -- it all worked. Next, I had to find native tools to work with text and web pages, editing and creating. Finding those tools was a bit more difficult.