Call up CNN and offer to demonstrate how BIOTRONIC is so evil that they refuse to fix their pacemakers. Hook it up to an ECG and use your phone to make it flatline. Then turn to the camera and tell the audience, "because BIOTRONIC doesn't want to pay to fix their product, I can now kill your grandmother just by walking past her on the street."

Watch how long it takes them to fix it then, and watch how reactive they become to responsible disclosure next time.

Also, short their stock before you go on TV. A little something for your troubles.

>If Netflix is 35% of global internet traffic at peak capacity (as per the Akamai CEO's comments at a number of events), is it really fair to treat them like every other company?

I don't see why not. I think it might make more sense to think of it as streaming video, the category of goods, rather than Netflix, the company. So 35% of global internet traffic is people streaming videos. And who cares that it's video; from Comcast's or Verizon's perspective, it's just an awful lot of bytes. So if the issue is the amount of traffic, it's just Verizon complaining that we're using too much bandwidth (yes, us; we're the ones watching Netflix). I get that's expensive to deliver all those bytes to my home, but that's what precisely what I'm paying for. That a huge number of those bytes comes from the same originator shouldn't enter into it. It's just a site on the internet.

EDIT: Also, I wanted to add, that all of the traffic comes from the same source actually helps Verizon from a practical standpoint, since it can solve a lot of it with only a small number of interconnects. Compare to a more fragmented market, where Verizon might have to make specific peering provisions for a bunch of different 5%-market-share content providers to fulfill its customer obligations.

> Guilt tripping Verizon into adding more routers is a major net positive to Netflix's business.

All sorts of businesses benefit from the ecosystem of other businesses around them. If I run a store in rural Iowa and Acme Co opens a huge factory there, then I stand to make a bunch of money from all these newly employed customers. Should I subsidize Acme? [1] After all, hiring people is expensive. If I open a hardware store near a bunch of planned construction, should I pay those real estate developers? You can expand this to the whole economy being basically just a set of interdependent positive externalities. Maybe Verizon should pay Netflix for making their service more valuable?

Or we can use the simpler model, in which you get to charge your customers. Verizon charges us for delivering the content we request. Netflix charges us for the content itself. Cogent (or whomever) charges Netflix for its bandwidth. Everything works.

> They're not utilities and have a profit motive, right?

They could charge more, and they could even charge per unit bandwidth (or tiered bandwidth) if they wanted. "My business isn't working that well" is not a good excuse to hold your subscribers hostage. You could equally use "Wall Street demands growth!" to defend Comcast's new practice of robbing banks.

Imagine I bought a popular TV set in 1980 to watch broadcast content, but after I got it home, the TV maker remotely activated a previously undisclosed filter that would only show certain channels. Then they went to ABC, NBC, and FOX and said, "So guys, you want your content seen? My margins on these TVs keep going down, so somebody's gotta pay." Not cool, right?

EDIT: Another point, probably the most important. The "problem" here is ridiculous: it's that demand for Verizon's product (i.e. internet access for end-users) is increasing a lot because it is becoming more useful to its customers. That's what every business wants! "We sell internet access and everyone is now using so much more internet! Whatever shall we do?" The idea that Verizon is up against some sort of profitability wall because of how popular its product is becoming and thus needs to charge the companies responsible for that increased popularity...it's simply not credible. Not sure why I didn't think of this point earlier.

Edit: s/Comcast/Verizon, since that's specifically who we're talking about.

[1] This actually does happen in the form of tax incentives for companies opening factories. It's a bit messed up.

And there went any shred of respect I might have had for Andreessen.

Not just because of his characterisation of Snowden, but because he's clearly more annoyed at the economic cost of the revelations to Silicon Valley businesses than about the contents of the revelations, which says a lot about his world view.

To the confused HNers:

Xanadu is a project by Ted Nelson.

Ted Nelson is a fundamental figure of early computing (despite not being a computer scientist himself). His work (recommended: Dream Machines/Computer Lib, 1974; Literary Machines, 1981; Geeks Bearing Gifts, 2008) is about how computers touch us as humans, and how they affect our future, especially when it comes to communicating and using them to spread+build knowledge and ideas. When Nelson wrote his first essays, very few people had the insight or knowledge to really understand what he was going on about. Nelson came from a movie acting/storywriting/literary background, and this allowed him to establish parallels and formulate ideas that no one at the time could have done. I would argue that even today, some of his finer points still hold deep relevance and are yet unknown from the general computing crowd.

Ted Nelson remains a fairly unknown figure in computing, partly because he never wrote much code/developed products/worked in traditional research groups himself (a major misstep in a field where you tend to be mostly recognized for the projects you ship or papers you publish), and because a lot of his ideas were replaced by ideas that are much more simple to implement and make viable. A lot of hackers do like to ridicule him for those reasons, which I think is a mistake - despite those shortcomings, his body of work is still full of ideas and theories that you won't find anywhere else. You can almost see a second, parallel path that computing could have taken in the 70s. (Nelson was respected by many more famous computer scientists, including for example Alan Kay)

That's where Xanadu comes in: Xanadu is an implementation for Nelson's vision for hypertext (which predates the hypertext we know by more than a decade or so). His hypertext is much deeper than Berners-Lee's: notably, it is based on 2-way links (so not only can a page link to other pages, but you can also see which pages link to that page), a deep version system (so that you can access past versions of webpages), stronger "linking" (no such thing as "broken links" in Xanadu), etc. Of course one can see why this is much harder to implement at scale than the web we have now. Nonetheless, Nelson has been working on it through the years, as evidenced by this release.

PS: if you do start searching the web for material about Ted Nelson, do not start with the Wired article about him from a decade or so ago. It is terrible. I quite like his YouTube videos, but they require to be familiar with his work (or at least his rhetoric style) already. I think "Geeks Bearing Gifts" is the best foray into Nelson's style - and it is short enough that one can read it quickly. Then, if you want to really get into the meat of his stuff, dive into his other books.