2006-01-17

It's worse than I thought!

Basically, to sum up the above (assuming the bit about needing more bandwidth is true), they want to charge people that they aren't accountable to (if a content provider doesn't pay up, and this idea catches on, they are screwed) and can therefore charge insane rates, rather than charge their customers more (if I decide my ISP's rates are too high, i just switch). So rather than competition among ISPs for customers (the way it should be), it's every "content provider" paying every ISP that wants any amount of money. Sure one might charge more than another, but that's not competition, since you may need to pay all of them to keep your buisness.

For you and me, it's a question of which is easier to switch: your ISP, or "content provider"s. For me it would definetely by ISP; if mine pulls this crap, i'll just drop them. So I guess if "content providers" stick up for their rights, the ISP's customers will drop those ISPs, since their friend down the block can use iTunes with another ISP that costs the same. On the other hand, maybe the FCC will do something right for a change and stop this bullcrap before it starts. I suppose that goes against my general favoring of small government, but since they are there, might as well do something useful.

OK first off, they are really evil with donations: Free Wi-fi Prompts BellSouth to Withdraw Donation (well, many telcos have been fighting municipal wifi)

and here's a link to a slashdot version of my last post: BellSouth Will Charge Providers For Performance

by the way, their delivery analogy sucks, since in physical delivery, it's usually just that one company (USPS, FedEx, UPS, etc) delivering it door-to-door, for everything domestic, and some international. As I pointed out, the Internet is nothing like that.

I think I'm gonna ask my dad about this stuff. I'll also make sure my ISP isn't engaging in this crap. Hopefully Verizon isn't, since hopefully I'm getting FttP/FiOS here soon anyway.

Now back to my reason for this post, which I only touched on with the donation thing: there is a real evil to all of this. This isn't an ISP issue, but a telephone company misusing it's power as an ISP (please not verizon). Back before the 1984 AT&T breakup, one company controlled just about all telecommunications in this country. Unless you were calling local within GTE territory, AT&T got a cut of your phone call. I'm pretty sure they got pretty involved with running lines for Intarweb type stuff around the country....

Oh man, I got to go (chainsaw action!), but here's the other 2 links: BellSouth Wants to Rig the Internet and Telcos Propose 2-Tier Internet

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