if i am a paying sbc or other foopoloy voice customer, and i place a voice call to aunt tillie, does aunt tillie pay sbc to hold up her end of the conversation?
Historically, aunt tillie's residential telephone line was subsidized by charging more for business lines. When you called aunt tillie, a portion of what you paid for the call passed through settlement charges and access fees to compensated both your service provider and aunt tillie's service provider for the call. These were usually implemented for social policy reasons, and its been a slow process to re-allocate the various billing practices to eliminate them. Aunt tillie saw it mostly as her local phone bill increased as she lost the benefit of the subsidy.
if i am a paying sbc or other foopoloy dsl customer and i go to <http://content.provider>, why should content.provider pay to give the sbc paying customer what they're already charged for?
When aunt tillie watches a home shopping channel, the channel usually gives a percentage of everything aunt tillie buys from the channel to the local cable operator. When aunt tillie watches basic cable channels, usually the channel gives the local cable operator several minutes of advertising time every hour, even though aunt tillie already paid for her cable. When aunt tillie calls a toll-free (1-800) number, the business answering the call pays for the call including the settlement and access charges for aunt tillie's service provider in addition to the business' service provider. Google pays compensation to some web sites to include "sponsored" links on their web pages. Why do businesses do this? Some believe it benefits advertisers to subsidize consumers basic cable, toll-free phone access and web sites so more consumers have access to their content, and in turn gives businesses a bigger market to sell too. Why would you want to prevent businesses from paying for part of aunt tillie's Internet access? If a business wants to pay for "better than best effort" access for users coming to its web site or using some other service such as VOIP, shouldn't it have that option?