Thesis - Paragraph I:

Since it's beginnings in 1969 as ARPANET, the internet has continued to grow and evolve in profound ways. The stucture of the internet is a reflection of internet culuture. In its early days the internet was primarily used for educational collaboration, and it's topology reflected this. Now, however the internet is increasilying used by large multinational corporations for commerce. The culture of the internet is about content restriction and protection of secrets, and this culture change is influencing the topology just as the collaborative culture did at the beginning. The end result is that, the internet is physically chaing into a network designed to support the publisher/subscriber paradigm.

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Non Symetric Links.
   * Integration with Legacy Publisher/Subscriber Networks

As broadband internet access became more commonplace, one logical way to bring high bandwidth to the home was the use of existing networks. Millions of homes where already connected to a highspeed data network, cable television. It made logical sense to try and integrate internet service with this network. In order to try and gain from revenue from the internet boom, nearly all cable companies did just this. Unfortunately this was a terrible thing for the health internet, and more importantly for the culture of the inetnet. A community based upon share and share a like, instatantiously found itself with a group of people unwilling to share at all. Not because they where brought up wrong by their parrents and wanted to grab all the toys in the sand box, but because the very structure of their connectivity would not allow them to share. The physical network, the actual copper or fiber, just was not there.

The cable network was designed by corporations to distirbute copyrighted and protented content to people after they paid a very hefty fee. It would have been very costly, and even against their very own corporate interests to build out the other have of the cable network. The half of the cable network that would have allowed people, their customers, to become producers rather than just consumers.

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Oversold bandwith and upload limits
   *  Symetric Links with out back bone access

Internet service providers found that they could sell highspeed access to customers which not maintaining a 1:1 ratio with the amount of network access they had. This resulted in ISPs having a vested interest in prventing people from becomming publishers. If an ISP only needed 64kb of upstream for every 10mb of downstream they could save tremendously on their costs.

Contrast this with the historical origins of the internet, education. In education it is in everyones best intrests if all are producers rather than just consumers and the network is appropriately strucutred. After all, the primary goal of research oriented higher educational insututions that spawned the internet is to produce people who can advance the state of the art in the sciences which they had specialized.

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Firewalled Networks at School and Work.

For these reasons, many organizations and insitutions have taken to firewalling their networks preventing anyone from making incomming connections to their users. This is the most rigid enforcement of the publisher subscriber model and prevents users from becoming a content provider. As the number of users firewalled increases, the demand for upstream bandwidth will decrease and applications which use the upstream bandwidth of clients to drive network content provision will begin to wither.

It is in MicroSoft's corporate interest to produce a horribly insecure oprating system. Had this not been so, MicroSoft would have licensed or adopoted any of the multidute of program and sever securing techniques circulating the internet and already imployed on the Linux platfrom. This is not to say that MicroSoft manevolently produces insecure code, it is only to say that MicroSoft has no profit motive to procude software with any level of security at all.

Conclusion Paragraph V:

Broadband users must choose providers who offer network connections which are not firewalled and are as symmetric as possible. Content publishers must work with technologies which allow for decentralized transmission.

It is critically important that internet broadband customers who wish to consume free software and low cost or free content make connectivity purchasing decision that will support and facilitate that desire.