ERP Associates, Inc. - The Cost of a Tiered Internet

The Cost of a Tiered Internet

Friday, 26 May 2006

Your company could be looking at shelling out more money for their externally facing portals in the coming years to the telecoms.

CNN has a good article on the Cost of a Tiered Internet that I picked up from Slashdot. Here's what it boils down to:

With a tiered Internet, such routing technology could be used preferentially to deliver either the telecoms' own services or those of companies who had paid the requisite fees.

What does this mean for the rest of us? A stealth Web tax, for one thing.

"Google and Amazon and Yahoo are not going to slice those payments out of their profit margins and eat them," says Ben Scott, policy director for Free Press, a nonprofit group that monitors media-related legislation. "They're going to pass them on to the consumer. So I'll end up paying twice. I'm going to pay my $29.99 a month for access, and then I'm going to pay higher prices for consumer goods all across the economy because these Internet companies will charge more for online advertising."

Worse still, Scott argues, the plan stands to sour your Web experience. If, for instance, your favorite blogger refused to ante up, her pages would load more slowly on your computer than would content from Web sites that had paid the fees.

Which brings up another sticking point: A tiered system would give established companies with deep pockets a huge competitive edge over cash-strapped start-ups consigned to slow lanes.

"We have to remember that some of the companies that we now consider to be titans of the Internet started literally as guys in a garage," Scott says."That's the beauty and the brilliance of the Internet, yet we're cavalierly talking about tossing it out the window."

I couldn't agree more. It seems like everything these days is driven by the internet, and adding a charge for internet use would have the same effect on our economy as increasing taxes on gasoline.

And I have no budget for this blog as I'm sure most independent bloggers don't. I'm not sure I would started it if I had to pay "protection money" to the telecoms so that it would perform well enough to attract an audience. A tiered internet will also cost us valuable innovation and resources.

Now I can understand how telecom companies want to make money on the fiber optic networks they spent years (and many went bankrupt) building. I've worked for a big backbone provider, and I've seen the layoffs, bankruptcies, cost cutting, and buyouts. In fact, a telecom was the first and only company I ever encountered that eliminated all software support on every enterprise application - PeopleSoft included.

But quite literally, the telecoms own the internet. That's why I think a tiered internet is going to be very hard to stop.

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Last Updated ( Friday, 26 May 2006 )

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