On Fri, 11 Nov 2005, Sean Donelan wrote:
On Fri, 11 Nov 2005, Christopher L. Morrow wrote:
Actually, thinking about this, does a bit cost more when delivered from china or 'mci' (pick any domestic isp)? I'm asking not about the total cost, but say the cost from (to pick on sbc) SBC's front door to the consumer's front door ? Does a bit from Google (not yahoo since they have a 'relationship' with SBC) cost more than one from playboy.com ? (again, from sbc front door to consumer front door)
If the cost is the same front door to front door, then why would a customer willingly pay more for playboy over google? (or the other way around)
This is an interesting topic :)
Are you suggesting a return to cost-based regulation? At one time airline prices were regulated based on air mile distance.
No, I'm not, actually I think that the answer to my question was: "All bits cost the same to push inside 'my' network" (where 'my' is really any single entities network, and the cost is for that entity).
MCI Friends & Family charged different rates for phone calls depending whether the person you called was also a MCI customer. Was MCI illegally interfering with people calling AT&T customers by charging a different rate? Level 3 charges different rates for "on-net" versus "off-net" traffic. Is Level 3 illegally interfering with people accessing content on other ISPs buy charging more? Many cell phone companies offer "free" minutes when you call other people in your plan. Is Verizon illegally interfering with other cell phone companies by charging more? Or in each of this cases, are they actually charging some people less? How do you decide what is a "discount" or a "surcharge"?
good question, I think all of the examples though have on thing in common: all the 'discount' is on 'local' traffic (local to the network), the cost differential is applied to 'non-local' traffic. This sort of goes to my point that inside a network bits all cost the same, its the external places that cost more... Are the folks advocating making content providers pay for 'access' to their customers willing to stand up competing services locally? (something to keep their customers who lose access to things they really care about)
Not everyone may want to pay for 100Mbps Internet service in their home, but they may want to pay less for only 10Mbps Internet and also watch a bunch of HDTV. HDTV may be advertiser supported, and the advertiser may be willing to subsidize a portion of the bandwidth so the consumer doesn't have to pay as much.
What if folks started switching, where possible, to internet fed TV? What if, for instance, iTunes Video Store got 'all popular TV' and folks started combining TiVO activities with iTunes? (watch Smallville when you want, where you want, and off broadcast) TV-land is already going through some radical changes due to TiVO/Replay/PVR, one wonders what services like iTunes-Video and Yahoo Video (they annnounced a partnership with TiVO recently?) are going to do to the industry?
Or do we want the government to force consumers to buy more than they want?
yes, that always works out well :) I suppose it'd guarantee revenue for 'the evil empire' though :)