Quote Originally Posted by Meena
As gagged_louise suggested the common (but false) fear regarding the issue that the small and obscure sites won't get proper usual usage benefits, is just a propaganda of these bigger sites. Its not like ISp will reduce facilities for the common non-beneficial users, it is just that ISPs will try to innovate to give better facilities for the higher or bigger users and hence will demand for higherr price for better facilities.
I really didn't see much point in discussing this with a fervent Randian, they tend to just say "the entrepreneur is the world saviour and should always have the front seat" but I'll comment a bit on what you wrote:

All sites on the internet use the same internet highways for a large part of the journay of their data, and those highways (T3 cables, large switchboards etc) were often built with public money. It's not as if Yahoo and Youtube are using any special cable networks for themselves when their data reach their end users. However, there's been a steady increase in the demand for bandwidth: people are doing more and more data-intensive things on the web - downloading movies, engaging in interactive graphics-intensive gaming all over the world, podcasting. And more and more people are picking up on the web too. In ten years time there will be more computer devices linked up to the www than the number of humans on the planet. So there will be a steady need for building better and faster "highways" both cable and satellite-borne.

The ISPs will likely not be building those facilities on their own, as a truly free-market operation. Everyone can see today that good telecom networks are essential to growing business, education and so on - simply to a country getting in the forefront. So whatever part the ISP take in this, they will have partners and there will be borrowing of billions of dollars to invest in these new cable highways and networks (oincluding high-speed networks for mobile internet). Big site owners like Yahoo and Goofle/Youtube are aware of this already now of course, but I don't see what reason they should have to ty to protect a million smaller and less finacilly muscled companies and sites by insisting on that all website traffic should be handled on equal terms when it travels the web (this is the core principle of net neutrality, right?)

Why would Yahoo defend that kind of flat principle - defending stuff costs both time and lots of money today, for instance if you have to go to court (which everyone has to, over and over, in innovative technologies) They'd be much better off if they could make (secret?) deals with ISPs and cable providers that they should have the fast lane to themselves in reaching us. The benfiuciaries of this would be the big commercial site networks and the ISPs, because nobody wants an internet access that runs at reduced speed and where you are not able to reach the big and well-known sites.


Besides, many ISP companies today are not really paying in full for their own costs; they are not in the red on a realtime basis. They are presenting slash fares for their customers, especilly new ones - on both ends - and tie them in with subscriptions that mean you have to hang on to the same ISP for a year, or three years but you get the cable modem and th first two months of access for free, etc - the idea is simply to corner a big marjket share by being first and hauling in ciustomers playing "the looney salesman who puts everything on bargain". Perfectly legit but it's not as if they are hauling themselves up by their own bootstraps from a start in Dad's garage financially.

This is how it's worked ever since broadband and cheap mobile phones arrived ten years ago. One can't take for granted that the ISPs are doing big profits today, they have to stick to those low lump fares to keep a high profile in this competitive business - but some of them may change that in the future, and there's no guarantee they will stick to prices that match their "real costs" (it's obviously useless to argue exactly what is the 'real cost' of the internet, it's like trying to determine what a music cd should "really" be priced at to match the work effort and quality put into the recorded music).

So the open nature of the web could really be under a kind of silent fire in not too long and it's useful to be aware of this.