Executive Wants to Charge for Web Speed

Washington Post ^ | Thursday, December 1, 2005 | Jonathan Krim

[antiRepublicrat]

A senior telecommunications executive said yesterday that Internet service providers should be allowed to strike deals to give certain Web sites or services priority in reaching computer users, a controversial system that would significantly change how the Internet operates.

William L. Smith, chief technology officer for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., told reporters and analysts that an Internet service provider such as his firm should be able, for example, to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc.

[antiRepublicrat]

Modern-day corporate-level extortion. "You wouldn't want your customers to have a hard time reaching you, would you?"

[peyton randolph]

This proposal will be about as popular as spam and pop-ups.

[goodnesswins]

HHMMMMM....don't they already get charged, i.e. via the technology they purchase/lease/develop???

[dead]

"You can have it fast, or you can have it cheap. You can't have it both."

[Izzy Dunne]

But Smith was quick to say that Internet service providers should not be able to block or discriminate against Web content or services by degrading their performance.

So how do you "give certain Web sites or services priority in reaching computer users" without "degrading performance" of some OTHER sites?

[fooman]

we can and do. this would be a tax . They used tar and feather clowns like this.

[TChris]

They already pay for that speed. It's called "bandwidth". If you don't buy enough, your pages will load slowly, if at all.

That said, they can try and charge what ever they like. It's their business. But the competition may just not be so stupid.

[Mike Darancette]

"You wouldn't want your customers to have a hard time reaching you, would you?"

You might want to change to an ISP that wasn't in thrall to a large customer.

[antiRepublicrat]

You might want to change to an ISP that wasn't in thrall to a large customer.

This is happening at the other end, where the consumer is getting the content. If BellSouth, Verizon, Sprint and AOL/RoadRunner all started doing this, a company would have to pay a lot extra for the majority of broadband users in the US to visit their site without having to wait. IOW, pay to keep the status quo.

Read the whole article to also see they want to degrade others' VOIP offerings over their network so they can push their own. So in my case if I buy Vonage it won't work very well in comparison to TWC's digital phone service, which costs more.

I pay for a pipe of a certain bandwidth, and I expect that pipe to be neutral, not to care what packets I push and pull through it (well, unless they get a complaint that one of my computers is part of a DDOS botnet, then I could understand).

[dead]

I was just reiterating the line I've heard from a few companies I used to use.

If you hear that line, it's time to find a new provider of that particular service.

[fooman]

agree

[antiRepublicrat]

They already pay for that speed. It's called "bandwidth". If you don't buy enough, your pages will load slowly, if at all.

That's on their end with their provider, and I'm sure Google already pays plenty. With this they'll also have to pay the major consumer ISPs so the content will get to consumers as fast as it does now.

[Erik Latranyi]

Free market. Let these idiots try and watch them lose market share.

[JoJo Gunn]

ping

[TChris]

That's on their end with their provider, and I'm sure Google already pays plenty. With this they'll also have to pay the major consumer ISPs so the content will get to consumers as fast as it does now.

Yeah, but the local ISPs are already paying the major ISPs for their bandwidth. Expecting their customers customers to pay them too is just insane!

Imagine Ford selling a tow truck to a mechanic, only to come back a couple of years later and demand payment from his customers too.

Once the end-user ISPs pay for their bandwidth, that should be the end of the transaction. If they aren't charging enough for the bandwidth then they should raise their prices, if they can.

[Tin Man Tex]

This is NOTHING compared to the extortion of the web search engines. When you do a search for a product, the web pages listed are ranked by how much the company is willing to pay for a high position on the list you receive. If you show up 100th on the list, no one will find you, so you HAVE to pay big bucks to get a position at the beginning of the list. To get that highly-desired position on the listings, the web sites have to bid. The search engines collect every time someone clicks on the listing to a web site. I have seen bids as high as $35 per click on the keywords we have to use to get our product listed. We typically pay $8 to $10 just to get on the first page of the list. The whole thing has becoming a scam. So a search doesn't return a list of the best sites that most closely match your search. It just returns a list of those sites most willing to be extorted.

[dfwgator]

Modern-day corporate-level extortion.

"Mention extortion again and I'll have your legs broken."

[Bogey78O]

Easy, reduce the amount of hops needed.

A lot of sites are completely distorting what this is about. Anyone who maxes out their connection on bitTorrents know that their VOIP and HTTP suffers. What this does is propose letting content providers pay more to make sure their packets don't get bogged down and get priority.

[Bogey78O]

'With this they'll also have to pay the major consumer ISPs so the content will get to consumers as fast as it does now.'

Nothing in the article even suggests that.

[JoeSixPack1]

William L. Smith, chief technology officer for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp.

He must sit around day after day dreaming, scheming and praying he can come up with something new to screw a consumer with and earn himself a bonus check, or maybe just to retain his standard paycheck?

EIther way, when a tech starts plotting new billing procedures, software barriers are the first things created.