[ NNSquad ] Re: My own take... BitTorrent Inc. + Comcast = Love, Peace, Harmony

[David Ulevitch <david@opendns.com>]

Lauren -- If this is a tangent, apologies.  Just don't approve it for  
the list.

On Mar 27, 2008, at 6:25 PM, Brett Glass wrote:

> Maybe you just don't feel you've gotten your pound of flesh from
> all of those evil ISPs yet. Ego swelled beyond recognition by
> having started a destructive witch hunt, you're hungry for more.

I might be in the minority in thinking this, but the days of  
"unlimited" residential Internet on an oversubscribed line are  
numbered.  As someone who purchases 10's of 1000's of dollars of  
commercial IP transit each month  I would begrudgingly be in support  
of one of two things happening:

1) ISPs sell me committed bandwidth.  The downside to this is that  
they are either dramatically increasing their pipes to match current  
offerings or they are selling me something slower than I have today.   
Some ISPs can fix this with a committed minimum with a substantially  
higher "burst" ability that is available during times of no congestion.

2) ISPs charge me for the number of bits I send on the wire.  This is  
how commercial transit largely works.  There are downsides to this  
model for the consumer but it has lots of positive side effects most  
notably probably being a big helper in stopping P2P-based piracy (or  
at least seeding).  On the plus side, hopefully my mom and dad would  
pay less (like they do on their cell phone) and I'd pay more (since  
I'm a hungry Internet user).

If I had to pick, I'd rather #2 than #1.

-David

   [ But in a #2 scenario, what's to stop the customer from ending
     up paying "per bit" but still having servers prohibited, being
     throttled, being port blocked, etc.?  And obviously if the
     ISP/TV service isn't also charging you per bit for their own
     content offerings, everyone except the ISP itself will be at an
     enormous competitive disadvantage in terms of such content.
     And somehow I suspect that ISPs will fight tooth and nail against
     having their own content treated the same way as outside content.

        -- Lauren Weinstein
           NNSquad Moderator ]