[Foundation-l] Paying for providing data to customers

Wed Jan 18 02:57:19 UTC 2006

GerardM wrote:

>Hoi,
>The American company BellSouth Corp. wants to have organisations pay
>transport fees for the content they deliver over the Internet.
>http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story.asp?guid=%7B02432D2D-1EE0-4037-A15F-54B748D6CF26%7D&siteid=mktw&dist=
>
>They have even the affront to say that the Internet end users should
>welcome this.
>  
>
I don't think this is going to be as bad as it appears.  They are trying 
to charge providers for Quality of Service preferences over other 
internet traffic.  In other words, if you have a time-critical download 
you can pay Bell South extra money to make sure their network pipeline 
will carry your content instead of non-paying customers.  Or for video 
delivery to get an extra boost in reliability when being sent over the net.

If this happens I'm sure the Foundation will get some letters describing 
the services of Bell South, this is not Bell South saying that Wikipedia 
will not be carried on their network unless the Wikimedia Foundation 
pays a delivery charge to Bell South customers.  The Wikipedia will come 
through just fine, although from time to time you may find that your 
connection to Wikipedia content may be still slower than normal from 
time to time, and this time your ISP is to blame, not the Wikimedia servers.

When sites like Wikipedia are completely stopped from service, I 
guarentee this sort of thing will end and get a host of complaints from 
the Bell South customers themselves.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning