Watching Episode 212 of the Tek today, Logan mentioned that the government should intervene and get rid of bandwidth caps. This clicked a thing in my head.
The government is FOR bandwidth caps.
If they are logging everything we transmit across the internet, that takes hard drive space. Hard drives ARE a finite resource and cost money.
Consider that there are probably algorithms that it doesn't need to log all 2 gigabytes of a movie someone streamed off of a movie sharing service (why those companies find them exempt from data caps) but if someone transmits a home movie from one computer to another, that entire movie needs to be logged.
It would also make it easier to search through the otherwise considerably larger heaps of data to find what they're looking for (note the recent development of quantum computers that are very good for this exact purpose).
Further, what difference, fundamentally, is a home movie from todayish, compared to the concept of one's security from government in "papers and property" that the US gov't established in the late 18th century as a basic human right?
Granted, this is quite possibly one reason, but it's just as unacceptable to those of us dealing with the existence of data caps already.
If you were monitoring people's communication you would want them to communicate as much as possible in order to maximise the information you could gather on them. So I don't think governments would be for data caps for that reason.
Also, data storage and processing has never been cheaper.
I'm still just blowing smoke, I would say that they would want caps just to keep otherwise garbage traffic at a minimum. Only to allow that which was truly intentional.
For example: Wendell has a bot that surfs the internet just to confuse people who are watching.
2nd point. 250 gigs of data per person, times 300 million people, every month. Even with American government spending that's still quite huge. 17 trillion debt last time I checked?
As to why the government would need your movies, it's because they could pin a crime on you. Linkability, metadata, anything they can use to connect you to a crime. Maybe not even you, it could be someone that was in the background.
Metadata is only a small part of the total traffic, I doubt that anyone is collecting all internet traffic. I read somewhere that the cost to store metadata for all traffic in the US was something like $11 million per year. That's practically nothing when compared to the defence budget.
I'm not going to pretend I know what the government is or is not doing, but the hypothesis is that they are using an algorithm to analyse metadata for the purpose of building profiles and timelines on individuals and groups. For that to work more data (even garbage) is better. It is more electronic warfare than them trying to read messages.
Well I cant make any other sense from that US data cap media shittery than it covers something else like NSA bill. @DeusQain said it too that its just stupid to say those things they say, and I cant imagine them to actually be that stupid.
Just cant help myself these days to see hype as anything except fishy cover because it happens a lot, and ironically people are like goldfishes with these 2 week cycle news, then bounce from topic to topic without remembering that last one. OR whats even worse, they cant remember how that 2 week hype started.
I really believe it has less to do with making it easier for the government agency's to spy and more to do with monetizing every bit and byte of traffic for the sake of profits, the government has no issue with them doing this as long as they get their portion of the profits in the form of brides, kickbacks, and taxes. Granted in some markets the ISPs may need to impose caps because of saturation of their infrastructure but that is again from them creating a situation then capitalizing on their lack of upgrading infrastructure when it was getting close to capacity or from over selling a area that didn't have the infrastructure to begin with..... bottom line it's all about profits and figuring out ways to extract money from the customer base.
There's a ton of smart experienced professionals in government. A lot of the time, just like in corporations. Upper management doesn't listen. Case in point, the US Congress House Science Committee....
Money, nothing else. Infrastructure costs money, and instead of paying for it by using current monthly fees they continue to inflate prices on "excessive" data. I'd wager the average American uses under 100gb a month(and most probably even lower), but those of us who stream, game, etc get the proverbial kick in the junk for laziness. If power users were like the average user, telecoms would only have to increase infrastructure every 5-10 years.
The FCC made them use a set percentage of fees on infrastructure if they were to continue getting tax breaks, but the percentage wasn't high enough to keep up with increasing data usage due to the popularity of streaming. Now with zero-report usage increasing, they are pinching harder on those that use other services(especially true for Comcast, who doesn't want their users using Netflix when they could be using their OnDemand services).
It is a way to get you to pay for cable and internet as opposed to just internet. Cable companies are protected by law from competition and have been since the 70's or 80's. It is what happens when people stay in the congress for 8 terms or more and pretend to be an outsider.......like that guy from Vermont:)
