Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Birth of a Net slum-lord..

I have a Net non-neutrality money making idea, meaning, a way to make money if we give up further neutrality on information transmissions through the net.  Not sure about legal ground, except I have a suspicion that the assumption this plan would violate is not yet protected by law.  For instance we already know that ISPs can and do snoop to find what protocols users are exercising, and ISPs even make unwelcome use of the addressing information we ask them to operate upon.  By combining those data, some ISPs identify traffic they wish to discourage or limit by artificially dialing-down bandwidth.  In the mean-time they may encourage other traffic by giving an open pipe.  To their own services, for example.

I am ready to take this one step further if it will make me rich.  I am thinking, if Google can sell ads, I am sure I can hire some business grads to sell ads, too.  But web authors like to put the links in to embed Google ads to their pages..  how could I convince those authors to use my own ad service instead?  Especially the scores and scores of them that would be needed to turn a profit from the pennies gathered from click-through?  Note, this is already a completely fair, reasonable, and even commendable idea.  But it would be really, really hard.  Worth doing, I expect, in the end, but better minds than mine have engaged and finally departed for more fertile ground.

Hmm..  At work I develop products that allow cable operators to splice local ads over the national ads that content providers distribute.  Of course they negotiate permission from their providers, but let's leave that aside for the moment (or forever!).  Got it!!  Web pages have those embedded links to Google.  The links direct browsers to query Google for ads.  Those queries can be detected by non-neutral snooping.  Interrupt the delivery to Google, and inject *MY* ads back to the browser!  Viola!

But doesn't the user have a right to ask for ads from a specific service?  A right that is pretty much universally delegated to web page authors?  Isn't that really just the user's right to have an HTTP query delivered to whatever destination they specify, and to receive the data that might be sent back in reply?  Who cares!?  I'll show them my ads and I don't care!

Hmm.  Couple more issues to work out.  Need to get access to the data flow.  Need back room deals with Verizon, Comcast, all the infrastructure families.  Wow,  that's a lot of golf.  And damn, they are going to hold all the cards..

Was a nice dream while it lasted.  I don't really want to busy my ass to hand the profits over to the ISPs..  Oooh, I just realized I don't want anyone else to do this if I don't get rich!  Don't tell the families!  Don't tell anyone!

Or else, think about your rights and who you delegate them to, and net neutrality.

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