Re: U.S. Finance Sector Weighs In on Net Neutrality

[Drsolly <drsollyp () drsolly com>]

On Wed, 3 May 2006, Greg Poirier wrote:

> On Wed, 2006-05-03 at 08:20 -0400, Dude VanWinkle wrote:
> > Question: What would a normal day of browsing the divided internet
> > look like, assuming sourceforge doesnt pony up the extra bucks? Will
> > you have timeouts to their page? Will your downloads slow down
> > considerably?
>
> Transferring data from news.google.com...
> *makes pot of coffee*
> Transferring data from news.google.com...
> *does laundry*
> ... You get the picture.
>
> Realistically, though, it would just mean that the cost of doing
> business for large content providers goes up... probably to the point
> that the buck's passed on to the consumer.  Suddenly, Yahoo will start
> bundling all of their services into a single sign-on pay-for service for
> something like $25 a year or more.
>
> The frightening picture that could be painted is that these costs are
> levied on not only the large content providers, but _any_ content
> provider.  For instance, web hosting companies: there'd be a sort of
> trickle effect down from the carriers to the colo facilities and then
> they pass that on to the people renting bandwidth from them.  Hopefully
> these costs aren't enough to start putting smaller web sites out of
> business.

Web hosting already costs money. I don't see the difference.
 
> Am I being completely unrealistic or does anyone else think that this is
> what we're looking at?
 
Packets are a commodity, so the price of transfer falls to the marginal
cost. The government could try to change that via a packet tax on hosting,
but that wouldn't affect anyone outside the country with the tax, and it 
would lead to an large amount of outsourcing.

So, if you take Sourceforge, for example. If ATT (or whoever sells them
packets) decide to bump up their hosting cost substantially, they'll look
around for a competing provider, and they'll find one, even if they have
to relocate. And on the internet, relocating isn't difficult.

It makes perfect sense to me, to charge different customers different
amounts, according to whatever you think the market will bear. Every
company does that, as much as they can, in every market. Try buying eggs
for the same price that supermarkets pay.

But this is already in place. What I find hard to fathom, is what *change* 
is proposed.

_______________________________________________
Fun and Misc security discussion for OT posts.
https://linuxbox.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/funsec
Note: funsec is a public and open mailing list.