Apparently, some hot shot corporate execs. think that the internet should be less free than it already is. check this link out to see exactly how much these people suck.
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It is true that some ISP's are looking for ways to/have tried charging more for and/or blocking access to competitor's services (I think BellSouth went after their DSL customers using Vonage a while ago). The law from the site seems plausible enough.
Somehow this doesn't bother me. Don't sites already pay more for higher bandwidth and fast connections?
I don't see the problem.
What it is is that ISP's like Fidelity or SBC or Comcast or whatever say things like "Hey, Vonage, since your service competes with ours, pay us money or we'll degrade/prohibit your service to customers on our internet connection", or "Hey gil-galad, if you're going to use Vonage, you'll have to pay us extra money".
Joined: Sun 09-12-2004 8:22PM Posts: 657 Location: somewhere
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gil-galad wrote:
Somehow this doesn't bother me. Don't sites already pay more for higher bandwidth and fast connections?
I don't see the problem.
Yes and no. Sites already pay more for higher bandwidth and faster connections, but those fees have to do with how much bandwidth they acutally use, and has nothing to do with what Internet Service Provider (ISP) the site's user has.
What this is saying is that sites would have to pay ISPs in order to get users from that ISP, as well as pay for the bandwidth that those people use.
So in other words, a site would have to pay the compay that hosts their site for their bandwidth useage (like they do now), but they would then have to pay an additional fee to AOL if they wanted AOL users to be able to connect to them quickly, and an additional one to Time-Warner (Roadrunner), and an additional one to AT&T, and so on. And if they decided not to pay the fee, the company they didn't pay could simply say "we're not letting our users see your site until you pay us."
And while this isn't a problem for a big site like Google or eBay, it would be for a site like seek that has pretty much no revenue. (assuming that seek had a wider audience than basically just UMR)
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Joined: Thu 02-13-2003 4:01PM Posts: 533 Location: dem hills
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If this comes to pass, the cost for entering into any e-commerce market would sky-rocket. Right now, big companies and "John Doe down the street" can enter the same market for about the same cost, increasing competition and innovation. If sites have to pay ISPs, it would automatically give advantages to large companies that can afford to pay. This would give the customers of the ISP limited options of purchasing not based on quality or price, but whether or not the merchant can cover the costs.
This is reflective of the "physical" world, but I don't think it should be allowed in the "virtual" or internet world. The internet should be kept as a place for free exchange of ideas, goods, and services. Or at least as close as possible to it.
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Joined: Thu 05-10-2001 7:23PM Posts: 826 Location: USS Santa Fe (SSN 763)
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I didn't read all of the possible ideas floating around, but it looks like a lot of it centers around constructing higher bandwidth, more reliable paths for data to travel and then charging sites that want access to it. To me, that seems a lot like charging people more for DSL than they pay for dialup. You can do anything you want to with dialup, if you want to do it faster you have to pay more.
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