Been asked by a commenter about net neutrality, but I’ll come to that later.
Harley Davidson, for much of it’s history, up until the Evo engine at least, you didn’t need to have owned one or ridden one to get what they were about, so the chances are you had quite a few years of exposure before you owned one, and very few people regretted that decision, because the more exposure you had, the less delusions you had.
I say up until the Evo motor, because everything changed after that.
With the advent of the twinkie and now the m8te Harley changed, they used to build and sell motorcycles, and that was pretty much that.
Maybe it was because some bean counter looked at the size of the aftermarket, I dunno, I wasn’t in the boardroom, but there was a shift at Harley, where once they used to build and sell motorcycles, they started building motorcycles that were crippled before they sold them, and then started selling all sorts of upgrade kits, and if you went for the very expensive top upgrade kit, you ended up with the motorcycle they should have sold in the first fucking place.
What Harley did wasn’t just moving in to new market segments or breaking new ground, they literally walked away from everything they had ever been, that old deal was no longer on offer.
For a long time I said that my last no longer with me shovel was the last Harley I’d ever own, unless maybe one day I got another old bike, then one day I came across a one owner from new twinkie where the previous owner had gone the whole stage 4 plus route, effectively building the bike Harley should have, and being one owner low mileage it was also the right price for what it was, so I was back on HD, but no thanks to the factory, the factory as we all knew it creased to exist when they shifted to the new business model of crippling everything and then selling upgrade kits to return it to what it should be.
This is a fundamental and important point, Harley stopped being just a bike builder and seller, it is not true to say they added new things to the business model, they killed the old one first, and some of us, well, we will never forgive them, new Harley has as much in common with old Harley as new Triumph has in common with old Triumph, the name and the badge is the same, but nothing else is.
This guy could never have made this video about anything the original triumph brand made. He ain’t my kinda guy or anything else, so I’m not loving it because I dig him, but I laughed my ass off at everything he said, because he fucking nailed it.
Don’t get me wrong, I have seen everything from 1% patch wearers to retired farts riding the new HD, but that doesn’t change the fact that the new HD ain’t the old HD, and nobody ON a new HD has much in common with anyone on an old HD, we were old school, and just to be clear, an ’02 twinkie softail like I have, even when you make it back to the way they should have at the factory, it’s not old school, it’s more of an exhibit to prove that after Harley stopped being Harley and became new Harley, they could still have been old Harley if they wanted to.
My bike is just proof that new Harley is pre-medidated malice aforethought, because it is what they would have just built and sold if their hearts were pure, the way it used to be.
That lot may not sound like it has anything even remotely to do with net neutrality, but, it does.
Back in the day there was a thing called peering, your network in region A and my network in region B, and of course there were many, many, many other regions.
Peering was an agreement between you and me, A and B, we’d basically open a pipe between ourselves, so everyone in your region could get to stuff from my region, and everyone in my region could get to stuff from your region, and the pipe was pretty much just a pipe, whether it was a T1 or T3 or whatever, and of course access to each end of the pipe was an internal routing issue for A and B.
A & B would split the cost, it was a joint venture, if region A was small and region B was big then most of the data would be going one way so the cost split might reflect that, but generally speaking peering meant just that, peers, equals, sharing stuff, including sharing the cost of sharing stuff, because A and B with a peering agreement were both individually better than A and B without one.
What killed this was streaming video, be it early youtube or whatever, sure, there had been many earlier grumbles, paypal and google and msn and so on, because THEIR only bills were their own local network traffic into for example region G, the problem was when everyone in regions A through F wanted to access them, regions A through F were getting “their” bandwidth used, but they weren’t getting the hosting fees or last mile to the server bandwidth fees…. but still, it was all good, it was all peering, one way or another individual customers paid regions A through F so it worked.
What fucked it was some of the new big content boys.
Region A has it’s own internal content, region G has it’s own internal content, everyone in between has their own regional internal content, and peering agreements to share data.
Why should region G get all the ad revenue when most of the ads are viewed by users of regions A to F?
Worse still, why should regions A to F get “free” peered access to the primo content supplied by region G?
Enter “net neutrality”.
Peering was engineers and nerds and enterpreneurs working for the common good, I have 6 parking spaces at my workshop, technically I am only open Monday to Friday, and technically I’m rarely likely to use more than 3 even with customers, but the fact is I pay the ground rent and they are mine.
Saturdays and sundays when I am closed it doesn’t actually hurt me if people use those spaces for a few hours while they go to a sports centre 100 yards down the road, provided there is no cost to me such as litter etc, it doesn’t cost me any extra, it’s good neighbourly, and it stops my front yard being an abandoned place with no eyes or ears should anyone have non neighbourly ideas.
“Net neutrality” is what happens to “peering” when beancounters and lawyers get involved, and it has an awful lot of similarities to what happened to Harley, instead of looking at the huge aftermarket and thinking I’d like summa dat, and competing with it, they shifted the entire business model away from what it was in an attempt to corner the market.
“Net neutrality” is not peering, it’s trying to squeeze revenue out of every byte that flows, and pretty much by definition and the business concept of externalisation, you can get more profit by freeloading or taxing something that someone else does.
YouTube is primo content, want access to it? Well, you better not promote your own competing product, and you better not charge or traffic shape your customers so they can get to it, and you better pay us for most of the bandwidth used in what was once a peering agreement, and while you are at it, you can pay us for the content too.
Don’t want to agree to our rules, fine, we will make sure your users get videos freezing and not found and all the other shit, we are big so your users will blame you.
“Net neutrality” is all that.
Net neutrality is if region A and B both end up paying region G $5 million a year for access to region G content, then both regions A and B get treated equally, neutrally, no preference, of course it is also a cancer, it eats peering as the host, so today in late 2017 effectively peering as it was has ceased to exist…. even though there are some things out there that are called peering, it is not peering as we once knew it.
To get back to my car park analogy it’s like me charging everyone a buck an hour to park, my actual paying customers can get that credited against their bills, and the people who park there are perfectly free to charge me a buck an hour to park in their driveways, not that I am ever going to want to, but they are free to, and everyone who does park pays the same, so, it is all fair, it is all “neutral”… it’s park neutrality.
BTW, sports centre, give me 500 a year and I’ll allow you to put a sign up saying parking at a buck an hour on saturdays and sundays is permitted in my yard…. anyone else can have the same deal, so it’s neutral.
The poor stiff just looking for somewhere to park is already paying gas money and motor insurance and entrance to the sports centre, he is driving himself there, maintaining his own vehicle, providing his own sports kit, he’s basically doing all the fucking work, now he has to pay even more fucking money… but thanks to parking neutrality he can be assured that he is treated the same as anyone else.
None of the parking neutrality buck an hour fees ever goes anywhere near maintaining or providing my car park or the sports centre, for fucks sake, signage and pay by phone gateways and enforcement all costs money. Fucking freeloaders.