We all remember in the early days of the Internet when we had to use a dial-up modem to connect to the modem. Opening one single web-page could often take several minutes and being able to use the Internet, the modem had to call a specific phone number which created a sound, which is what we associate with this time (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgqEIp2YmtE). It was in the good old days. Most people used Windows 98 with Internet Explorer and using the internet was expensive since we had to pay for how long our connection was open and how much data was transferred. 

Today we sit on a far far faster connection and we do not have to pay for how much data we send/receive. Most people are using ADSL or cable modems and some users luckily got a fiber connection to the Internet. All the money is on the speed to the Internet. The most speed you have, the faster you can download data. Schools and companies often have a faster connection since more users are using the net at the same time than private internet users. 

Some people often pay a lot of money in order to have the fastest Internet connection available. Sure, a connection around 50Mbit in download rate would fit well if you have 5 kids that download movies and streamed music at the same time. Otherwise, a fast connection is more or less useless. 

My ISP called me a few weeks ago and asked if I wanted to upgrade my current fiber connection on 25/25Mbit to a 50/50Mbit since they where having an offer on this plan. Amazingly, I said no. Neither me or my parents need that kind of speed. I sure do download and stream music and videos, but a faster connection is actually useless. In fact, I even rarely use my maximum capacity. Last time when I was downloading content to Halo 4 on my xbox, I had a connection capable of receiving ca. 100Mbit/second (in theory it is 10Gigabit but it is shared among others), and the download speed was around 550KB/s (4.4Mbit/sec). Microsoft's server did not have the capacity to push out data on my super-fast connection. When downloading content from sites such as download.com, the download speed rarely peeks 1MB/s.

A faster Internet connection would of course have an impact on how fast websites loads. The faster your connection is, the faster the site would load. A lot of this is wrong. If we say we have the fastest computer in the world with the fastest browser there is running through a 20Mbit connection, we would not see much difference if we compare it with a normal computer today. A normal web-page is rarely above 1 megabyte, so it should load instantly. In many cases this is wrong. Popular websites such as xbox.com, Paypal.com and Netflix.com can often take up to half a minute regardless of my internet connection speed. Why is it so slow? We have a "fast" connection, our computer is fast, so what is wrong?

There are a lot of factors involved in how fast a webpage loads. DNS resolving, connection handshaking and SSL are all causing overhead and causing the page to load a bit slower. In most cases, these are not to blame when it comes to loading webpages. There are in general two "main causes". The first one is that the web-server is too far away from its visitors. If you test your internet connection to a server in China, you would have a totally different speed if you connect to a server that is close to you on speedtest.net. (Given that you are far away from China) The other one is slow web-servers. This can be the cause of poor dynamic page programming, a slow database-server, or a web-server that is poorly maintained. Many people would blame the platform which the websites dynamic page language is written in, however this is not the case. A slow PHP forum is around as slow as the Xbox homepage written in ASP.NET. 

The point of this post is that more and more users are getting faster internet connections than the servers' internet connection around the world. However, it does not only apply to the internet connection, also slow websites are affected. Sure, a 1Gbit connection from Google would be nice, but it is actually useless unless you have some special needs (eg. if you are some institution with hundreds of employees or hosting a website-cluster). Here is how fast some of the websites I often visit loads. Please not I am on a 25/25Mbit connection through wireless connection and a mid-end laptop running SSD with Window 8 and Chrome (Ordered by loading time, fastest first):

The Internet was built for sharing data and communication. In its early days, normal people did not have access to the large knowledge base which this network of computers where holding. However, security was not something it was designed for which later on became a growing issue. However, when people gained access to the internet through their hardcore dial-up connections, a revolution started. This was the revolution of information access. Today we can get the latest and hottest news in a matter of seconds by going to BBC. If you need to know how tall Mount Everest is, Wikipedia will easily provide that information for you, or whoever the president in any country is. The social revolution made us able to share moments of our life, and we are more accessible than ever before. However, because of the easy access to information, file-sharing is becoming a headache for film and record companies. By "paying" governments to add new laws in order to protect and make their own industry more profitable, the internet is under a great threat. 

We have heard it before, many many times: "You wouldn't steal a car, you wouldn't steal a handbag, you wouldn't steal a television, you wouldn't steal a movie." before watching a movie. It makes people who download look bad. Ironically enough, it is fun to watch if it is on the beginning of a pirated movie. The movie and music industry has raged as the piracy over the past few years has exploded. They claim to have lost several billions of dollars, if not more, because of piracy. Yes, it might be so if everyone would have to pay for what they saw. However, if they had to purchase the media, they would have never seen or heard what they downloaded. Why does so many download it pirated then, if it is illegal? Isn't it? They do it simply because they can. (Yes we can, Obama) It is so much more simpler to download a movie than having to find it on the right store, or the right streaming provider which has that movie in order to watch it. Many people download episodes of their favorite series hours after the latest episode has aired in the US from Norway. Why? First of all, they have to wait several months, maybe years for it to come on DVD in Norway. It may even take years for it to come on TV in Norway. But why limit it so much when you can watch it whenever you want it - for free?

A large part of youth is downloading movies and music illegally. A large reason of this is because they do not want to spend money on something they can get for free. Kids does not want to spend a lot of money on having to buy a movie they may not even like. They can simply download almost any episode, song or movie they want for free through the Internet. The propaganda movie above says you wouldn't steal a car, and therefore you wouldn't steal a movie, or download it illegally from the net. Put it from another perspective, what if you could download a car? What if you could download the house of your dreams, download the greatest computer, smartphone, your dream vacation and maybe even a few PhDs to your brain. Why not? You can! And it is free! 

The Internet is not made for distributing copyrighted material. It was made for sharing information. Large record and movie companies wants to change this by enforcing governments around the world to block and control parts of the net which provides access to copyrighted material. So what? Removing these sites from the net would be good right? The answer is no. And we have already started to see examples of this.

Megaupload was the largest file-sharing websites in the world. It simply removed one problem. When you are sending your 1.3GB large vacation video to a friend, the video file simply will not fit in an email, and you need to upload it somewhere. Megaupload solved this problem by allowing users to upload their files to their sites which could later on be downloaded through a link to your file on Megaupload. There where other providers as well. Mediafire, Skydrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, Rapidshare for just to mention a few served the exact same service. However, pirates also uploaded illegal copies of movies and music to Megaupload. Even so, these files where normally removed because of copyright claims from record companies. Nevertheless, 19th January 2012 it was shut down by the US Government since they claimed it violated copyright laws. This incident caused a lot of attention throughout the Internet, since Megaupload where not doing anything wrong. What they where left with was innocent people put in jail as well as destroying a company making a lot of money through file-sharing. The owner of Megaupload, Kim Dotcom was later let out of jail. However, the servers are still seized as the case is still ongoing and Megaupload remains offline. 

The Pirate Bay, which is the most popular Torrent site on the Internet has also been feeling the powers of the record companies. The owner and creators of this site was arrested and put in court in 2009 because of copyright infringement. These people where set responsible for all the action of their users. On The Pirate Bay, you could search for anything you want, then download a torrent link to it which would let you download it from a peer to peer network. In other words, it worked as a search engine, just like Google. Even though, these men where accused for copyright. Why Google is not shut down shows us how much the people who claimed people like Kim Dotcom for copyright infringement really knows about how the systems really works: Nothing. 

We live in a world where companies wants to have full control over what we see and listen to. I hope that this will change in a few years. Spotify allowed me to listen to whatever music I wanted to listen to, for around 20$ a month. Even though I'm able to listen to almost every song there is, there are a lot that does not exist on Spotify. Songs are also sometimes removed from there, destroying my playlists. The same thing is with Netflix. It is a wonderful solution for watching whatever content you want, but the content is fairly limited. The cause of why content is limited on services on Spotify and Netflix is because of licenses. It is one of the few horrible things that is stuck from the past when people want to make services like Spotify and Netflix. And because of this, information is easier accessible through less legal ways. 

Today, many countries are blocking access to sites such as The Pirate Bay. Why isn't Youtube blocked? Piracy exists on Youtube as well. Norway is considering blocking sites such as The Pirate Bay and other sites which the government claims is violating copyright laws. This is where the fun begins. TPB does not violate any copyright laws, this is because of the magic of peer to peer networks. It is the users themselves who upload illegal content to others. Then why not charge all the people who downloads and uploads the illegal content? That would cause a ridiculous amount of work as almost everyone that uses the net have at some point downloaded something illegally. 

Then comes the mayhem around logging IP addresses and charging the owner behind the IP address for copyright violation. By allowing a law like that would show large the lack of knowledge in the government of how the Internet works really is. If such a law is applied, cafees providing free internet could be scared and would remove their open network in fright of being accused for illegally downloading a movie. Hotels might not want to provide open internet for their visitors any more because of the same reason. Companies would suffer, because the government wants to play cat and mouse with pirates.

I would say it is too late for the government to try and gain control over the net. If they start logging IP addresses and block websites, people will simply use VPN connections to download this. The piracy would go down, for a while, but it will later rise up again as people learn about the VPN technology. Later on, the government would start banning these services as well, in addition to other services. And in the end, we would have a Internet where people would decide what you would be allowed to see, and what you are not allowed to see.