On 1/11/17 10:44 AM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
On Wed, 1 Nov 2017 10:28:57 +1300, Simon Green wrote:
An ISP is allowing you unmetered content to a set of sites for a set fee.
Can you say “conflict of interest”?
As the Internet was originally designed, those in control of the network itself only had the job of passing bits around, it was none of their business what those bits represented. All the smarts is at the end points. And in particular, those wanting to create new services do not need permission from the owners of the network to do so. (Think how Facebook, Google, YouTube, Netflix etc got started.)
But once you have these cosy deals between the ISPs and the providers of the existing endpoint services, that puts newcomers, wanting to offer new services, at a disadvantage.
Do you have any evidence of these 'cosy deals'? I ask because the Techdirt article doesn't mention this. The Spanish ISP is simply offering to not count usage of a set of sites for a set fee. They are not discriminating access to those sites based on if you do or don't have the add-on. If you set up the next big thing™, you don't need the permission of the ISP for your users to access your site. While in an ideal world it would be great if all mobile providers offered unmetered data, the fact is the majority of them do not offer this, as it would cause congestion on the network (between the cell tower and the mobile device). Even in New Zealand, Spark's "unlimited" 4G plan puts the breaks on after 22 GB of usage in a month, and bans tethering and hot-spotting. Is this an example of breaking net neutrality since they are restricting how I use the Internet on the plan? -- Simon