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Re: Sunday, January 22, 2006
This is a "pipes" dream from BellSouth. They assert that Google, Yahoo et al, "deliver" their goods over BellSouth's pipes, and thus must pay. So far so good. Of course, as everyone not a Telco knows, things are not delivered to Internet customers, they are *requested* by the customer who pays for that service from BellSouth (substitute your Telco of choice, we have a microcosm of this debacle in NZ at present). Google, or any other website, server, etc. is irrelevant, they make their own arrangements independent of other users of the Internet. It is this decoupling, and the autonomous networks structure of the Internet that is one of its critical advantages. If the customer wants better performance, they pay for it. How was Bellsouth proposing to impair the performance of Yahoo! vs Google anyway? Kneecapping packets as they entered Bellsouth's portion of the Internet? As for that analyst, I agree with your assessment, after all the more bandwidth consuming applications Google and Yahoo! create, the better reason BellSouth's *actual* customers will have to buy/pay more. You'd almost expect BellSouth to encourage producers, but with so much going wrong for the incumbents, you could almost feel sorry for them, almost. Old bloated incumbents in any number of distribution industries are circling the wagons, spinning, and invoking the power of the State to protect their business plans, or in the specific case of legacy "last mile" delivery monopolies, using their market dominance to extort payment from both halves of the transaction, even when one half *isn't* their customer. The other perjorative term I would use for this behaviour is "defection" and the organisations that do it, "defective." They are defecting from the co-operative underpinning of the Internet that supports the competitive efforts of thousands, not a few who benefit from being around for a long time...
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