Re: Court Tosses FCC's 'Net Neutrality' Rules

On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 2:55 PM, Graham Leggett <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 15 Jan 2014, at 9:26 AM, dominic <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>   [1]http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB100014240527023040497045793205
>>   00441593462
>>
>>
>>   WASHINGTON--A U.S. appeals court on Tuesday threw out federal rules
>>   requiring broadband providers to treat all Internet traffic equally,
>>   raising the prospect that bandwidth-hungry websites
>>   like [2]Netflix Inc. [3]NFLX +0.34% might have to pay tolls to ensure
>>   quality service.
>
> While I am a strong supporter of net neutrality, I don't think ISPs are in a position to demand tolls to ensure quality service. Having seen how it works from the inside, ISP comes to broadcaster and says "pay extra to cross our network!", broadcaster replies "not paying, no, but we can cut you off completely instead if you like?". ISP backs down mumbling.

This might be the case in SA, but I see the USoA a tad different.

Let me put this in perspective with let's say SABC doing a broadcast
agreement with Telkom/SAIX (two goverment companies) while
MIH/DSTV/MultiChoice are broadcasting via MWeb. Now, SAIX/Telkom gets
money from the SABC broadcasting, and they have a big DSL customer
base. Now their customers prefer DSTV to SABC thus their income from
the SABC feeds dwindle... so they start to make the DSTV
feeds/broadcast slow, so people will have no choice but to either get
an MWeb account (more difficult because they already have a Telkom
bundle) or they just view the SABC channels (which have since include
some pay-for-view and extra channels not
over-the-air-broadcasted)......  thus DSTV are sorta forced to make a
deal with SAIX/Telkom.

In the States, cable TV is the medium to provide internet access for a
sizable chunk of users afaik, and there the cable TV provider will
then be in a position to impact their competitions' bandwidth or to
block anything that smells like P2P which also competes with their
broadcasts. It is not that far fetched that they could control things
the way they want it and still get a way with it given their leverage
on the users.

>
> From the customer's side, when the customer sees poor quality Netflix, they change ISPs. Any ISP attempting to extract a toll or degrade service would be punished by the market.

Customer apathy ...


>
> Regards,
> Graham
> --
>
>
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