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more on : Telco's Arrogant Stand on Content
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sat, 7 Jan 2006 18:52:33 -0500
Begin forwarded message: From: Brad Templeton <btm () templetons com> Date: January 7, 2006 6:48:20 PM EST To: David Farber <dave () farber net> Cc: fritz () fritzmills com Subject: Re: [IP] more on : Telco's Arrogant Stand on Content On Sat, Jan 07, 2006 at 06:25:45PM -0500, David Farber wrote:
To put it in terms that perhaps the telcos can better understand: If I pick up my telephone and make a call to Google, I must pay my telco for my phone line and telephone service, and Google must pay their telco to provide the telephone service that allows them to answer my call, but there is no obligation on the part of Google to pay my telco, too. Nor is it true in that situation that Google has "used [my telco's] pipes for free."
I would agree more than 100% if it were possible. However, bellheads are trained to think a different way. They are used to a regulated world of reciprocal compensation. While it's been dwindling, the norm for some time was that when you made a local call to a competing carrier, your carrier paid some money to the terminating carrier. When a long distance company terminates a call at a local carrier, it used to pay so much that it was the largest chunk of your per-minutefee. For a while there were dial-up ISPs that set up for free or cheap,
knowing they only would receive, and never make calls, and thus be paid for all the calls they got. Globally, it's a well known racket that the cost paid to the national carrier to terminate an LD call could be kicked back to the recipient of the call. This is foreign to the "internet cost contract" which is simply, "I pay for my pipe to the middle, and you pay for yours, and we don't sweat the small stuff." The earlier threat to this contract has come from anti-spammers who wish to claim that e-mail they don't want is somehowstealing bandwidth. (Spam is evil in so many ways, but calling it bandwidth
theft is the wrong precedent.) So to them, traffic is all about who pays. There are dialed calls and 800 calls, but somebody always pays and one carrier compensates another. (The exception is your access out to the LD carriers, which is billed as a fixed rate access change.) Internet connections aren't done that way at all, but the old guard will grasp at any straw, even their obsolete way of thinking, when faced with competition coming over the infrastructure they sell to their customers. ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as lists-ip () insecure org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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