Re: Level 3 Communications Issues Statement Concerning Comcast'sActions

["Derek J. Balling" <dredd () megacity org>]

On Nov 29, 2010, at 10:25 PM, William Herrin wrote:
> There are a couple forms of shared billing.

There's a third kind you failed to mention that doesn't require equal footing of the parties. The broker.

I might pay an apartment broker $X to help find me an apartment. In turn the apartment broker might match me up with an 
apartment, and charge the landlord $Y for a successful tenancy.

$Y is frequently much higher than $X, because the value to the landlord is much higher than the value to the tenant.

There's a lot of similarities to the ISP model here. It's not worth "beaucoup cash" to the end-user to pay for all the 
overhead of the bandwidth costs. Their whole "benefit" is getting to watch a movie. Netflix and L3, on the other hand, 
stand to make quite a bit of money on the transaction, and could pay the "broker-ISP" a heftier sum to handle all their 
transactions with their end-users for them.

They do that because it's not cost-effective for them to try and do direct transactions with their end-users, just as 
it's not often not convenient for land-lords to go around trying to actively find tenants.

On Nov 29, 2010, at 11:20 PM, Leo Bicknell wrote:
> Broadband in the US is not in that boat.  Too many consumers have
> a "choice" of a single provider.  The vast majority of the rest
> have the "choice" of two providers. 

I dunno. I've lived in areas where I had two dozen local providers vying for my last-mile residential connectivity 
business. Perhaps this is something for you to bring up with your local municipality, tell them to stop strangling the 
businesses that want to offer service to their residents.

But just because your elected officials aren't doing right by you doesn't mean that it justifies telling Comcast that 
they have to run their network, paid for with their money, according to yours or anyone else's rules.

D