From: Rettke, Brian Sent: Monday, November 29, 2010 2:41 PM To: Patrick W. Gilmore; NANOG list Subject: RE: Level 3 Communications Issues Statement Concerning Comcast'sActions
Essentially, the question is who has to pay for the infrastructure to support the bandwidth requirements of all of these new and booming streaming ventures.
From a cultural standpoint, we in the US are used to a model where the sender pays the postage for unsolicited content and the requestor pays the shipping for requested content. So asking an ad network to pay Comcast for shipping their ads is valid but in a request where the end user specifically asked for a movie, the user should be expected to pay for that. What Comcast appears to be doing is subsidizing "flat rate" customer rates by charging the providers "metered" access (assuming the fee charged the provider isn't also a "flat rate"). If so, that really isn't fair because:
1. The provider has no control over the size of or number of requests that are made. The provider is essentially agreeing to an unknown quantity in advance. 2. There is no way to ensure that a request is legitimate and not a request generated simply to generate revenue (sort of like click fraud ... stream fraud). 3. It opens the provider up to a "denial of sustainability" attack where a bot net requests many copies of various streams, sends them to the equivalent of /dev/null and the provider is presented with a huge bill. 4. The only way a provider could mitigate increases in fees is to meter access causing a sub-optimal user experience. Shouldn't Level3 turn around and charge Comcast for distributing NBC/Universal content? The whole thing is like a movie theater charging the studios to show movies while selling tickets to the public to watch them. Actualy, it is like Universal opening their own movie theaters and charging competing studios to show their movies while still charging the public to see them. Comcast is simply imposing a tariff on competing content. If I were level3, I would have denied the request. Customers on Comcast would then discover they have sub-optimal Internet service and gone to a competitor (AT&T Uverse or Verizon FIOS, for example). As owner of NBC Universal, Comcast is a producer as well as a distributor of content. That puts them in direct competition with other producers regardless of the distributor. Level3 should deny the request and Comcast users will have "Internet" access instead of Internet access. Comcast doesn't have the captive audience they once had in many places and when customers discover their choices are limited when they choose Comcast, they will go elsewhere. I hope Level3's acquiescence is temporary or the FTC puts a stop to it. It is sort of like FedEx owning the freeway and charging UPS to use it.