DISQUS

It looks Obvious: Who should protect the Net Neutrality

  • JaneLame · 3 years ago
    BTW, ISPs in Israel ought to charge their customers extra in order to survive. They can't make you pay for content, so they sell you a wide range of idiotic services, such as a super-expensive anti-virus service which controls only your ISP mail box.
  • Rogel · 3 years ago
    I don't care how much the ISP going to charge for the service, Competition and cost structure will regulate it. I don't like being double charged and I don't want my ISP to control the content I consume.
    But more than that I don't want the government doing the same thing while claiming it protect me.
  • Jim Lippard · 3 years ago
    The telco proposal to charge content providers isn't to double-charge (though clearly they want to maximize profits and make money at both ends), it's to have the content providers subsidize the cost of fiber to the home for the consumers, because the consumer isn't going to want to pay the full cost. Frankly, I don't think that even if the telcos get the option to do that that they'll be able to maintain such a regime--consumer demand for services not developed by the telcos will end up giving the providers of those services the upper hand, not the telcos.
  • Jim Lippard · 3 years ago
    Also, BTW, content providers already pay surcharges to get their content to consumers more effectively--but they pay not the telcos, but companies like Akamai and Limelight, which have local cache servers placed all over the Internet as close to the eyeball customers as possible. (Or they pay more to get the effect of Akamai-type services themselves through redundant and diverse providers and servers.)

    Net neutrality advocates need to be careful that their proposals don't prohibit business models like Akamai's.
  • Rogel · 3 years ago
    Jim,
    I basically agreeing with you. Let me just clarify the double billing issue: The content providers already paying for bandwith as well as the content cunsomers, billing for the delivery of the content (simmiliar to charges for usage in your old phone system) is actually a double-billing.