A license to do something bad isn’t reason to.
For months, ISPs in Europe have been campaigning to preserve their ‘mere conduit’ status, or in English they have been fighting to prove that they should be able to treat all packets, between customers and the resources that they want to access equally. This means, no content blocking, monitoring, and fundamentally no commercial favouritism – or as it is referred to Network Neutralism.
At the same time, some ISPs in America have been petitioning to abolish the concept of Net-neutrality on their networks. These campaigns have not fallen on deaf ears, the US Department of Justice now consider that without legislation permitting ISPs to charge companies who host content for access to the ISP’s customers shifts the “entire burden of implementing costly network expansions and improvements onto consumers“.
This shows a wanton lack of understanding of the model with which internet connectivity is sold. I, as a consumer, buy connectivity from a company who will try hard to ensure my packets will flow towards their intended recipient. Someone who wants to host content pays another ISP some money to ensure that their packets flow back towards me when I visit their website, online shop, or use their service. That’s the model, and its the only one that works.
If I want to set up a shop online, I should only have to pay the companies that I have a direct connectivity relationship with. It should not be permitted for a company that I do not connect through, to hold their eyeball customers to ransom, demanding money from me, the shopkeeper, to allow me to reach our mutual customers. Particularly if this customer is selling internet connectivity – there is a strong ‘end to end’ implication with that phrase.
The DoJ are wrong – what they think is a burden to consumers is just the fair market price that internet connectivity is sold for today. An ISP should charge their customers enough to make sure that they can pay to support their network. As a consumer, if I want to use MSN, Skype, Hotmail, Google, the BBC, iTunes, or any other online service, I should be able to, because I have paid for my ISP to try their best (without getting in the way) to get data between me and the services I use.
Net-neutrality has been the driving force behind innovation online, and we would not have the wide variety of services online today, if starting to trade online meant you had to pay lots of ransom notes to every ISP in America first.
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