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March 23, 2006
Net neutrality v. tiered service
Preston Gralla’s blog entry claiming that FCC Chief Kevin Martin has endorsed AT&T’s (and other ISPs’) ability to extract rent payments from popular web services, and citing it as the end of the open Internet, is getting a ton of play today. But is that really what’s going on?
Gralla points to a news article, also on Networking Pipeline, that directly reports on the Chief’s comments with a bit of much-needed texture. Martin came out strongly against any kind of intentional blocking or degrading of unaffiliated web services, but wavered on, or maybe even endorsed, ISPs’ ability to contract with web businesses to provide preferential bandwidth. Gralla’s point is that this is simply the converse of intentional blocking/degradation, and that small sites won’t have access to these new SuperPipes. But aren’t we already sort of in that position? You can’t serve up serious traffic without some kind of caching/peering system like Akamai, right?
Thinking out loud here… assuming that these “tiering” agreements become part of the landscape, couldn’t Akamai (or an Akamai-like enterprise) enter into such agreements with the ISPs and then share the cost out to the small providers? If that’s the case then the question is: is such an arrangement (in which service providers share some of the infrastructure cost) better or worse than denying the ISPs the ability to “tier” service and requiring them to recover all their costs directly from their subscriber base?
Posted by Rob Courtney at March 23, 2006 09:25 AM
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