On Sun, 26 Jan 1997, Jim McManus wrote: |} Or...since the business model of many (but not all) major web sites is |} related to advertising, they should pay isp's for access to their |} audience (client base of isp). It is the audience that makes the web |} site more valuable....not the other way around. Who says the business model won't shift? It has for ISPs. Once everyone (well, almost everyone) was peering or pursuing peering with everyone else, that's no longer the case. Some ISPs are still somewhat reasonable (e.g. you're spending $1M/yr with us for other services so we'll peer with you). What if web site, or content business models change? What if people deem their content so valuable that besides (or rather than) charging the consumer, they want to charge the network provider access to the content? (ala MTV) If you look hard at the economics, it's very hard to make huge revenues on advertising alone. IP makes content, IP sells content to distributor, distributor distributes content to consumer and/or resells content to other distributor for another tier of consumers or re-branding. -jh- IP = Information Provider