Re: Some truth about Comcast - WikiLeaks style

[Lamar Owen <lowen () pari edu>]

On Thursday, December 16, 2010 11:20:23 am Justin M. Streiner wrote:
> Personally, I'd like to see any provider (content or otherwise) tell 
> Comcast (as things stand today) to pound sand when asked to enter into 
> such a 'paid peering' arrangement with them.  

It comes down to the business decision of the cost of doing business for those eyeballs versus the loss due to not 
serving (or underserving) those eyeballs.  Hmmm, roughly 16 million eyeballs versus how many million eyeballs in the 
world?  (found a statistic; roughly 300 million broadband eyeballs in the world; 84 million or so in the US alone.  So 
we're talking about only 5% of the world eyeballs and about 20% of the US?  So they could deal with the other 80% of 
just the US eyeballs and probably survive just fine.

After all, if they put up a disclaimer 'you're currently using an Internet Service Provider who is known to provide 
inferior service to our customers; if your video does not play properly, or does not play at all, please contact your 
provider.'  You could even detect it during subscription set up.  There's nothing that says I have to accept 
subscriptions from any given netblock, right?  If it costs me more to serve that netblock than that netblock is worth, 
then I would be remiss in my fiduciary duty if I accepted those customers.

In fact, if a particular netblock had known performance issues, I would be remiss in my duty to my potential and 
present customers if I didn't let them know the issue involved (kind of like a pizza delivery place not delivering over 
30 minutes away for product quality reasons; I could pop up a notice to let my customer know that they can come to a 
WiFi hotspot or use a different ISP, and give them pointers to such, if they want to get full service).

And, of course, this shoe can be worn on the other foot, and any eyeball network would be free to place as many 
bottlenecks as meets their business model...  Simple economics.