[133807] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Some truth about Comcast - WikiLeaks style
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dave Temkin)
Fri Dec 17 11:46:33 2010
Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2010 08:46:22 -0800
From: Dave Temkin <davet1@gmail.com>
To: George Bonser <gbonser@seven.com>
In-Reply-To: <5A6D953473350C4B9995546AFE9939EE0B14CFE3@RWC-EX1.corp.seven.com>
Cc: Steve Schultze <sjs@Princeton.EDU>, nanog@nanog.org
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
George Bonser wrote:
>> What I think George's
>> comment
>> does not completely appreciate is that (ideally) cities are imposing
>> such requirements at the behest of and for the benefit of the (local)
>> public, whereas private constraints on local access are (by design)
>> motivated by profit.
>>
>
> I wasn't really talking about franchise agreements as those are
> different and in many cases stipulate things like there can be no
> monopoly, etc.
>
> What I was talking about was what if a city simply decided to charge an
> Internet provider an "access fee" to the city's people. An "eyeball
> fee". The city says, "hey, you are making millions selling ads that
> these people view and the more eyeballs you have the more money you
> make, so we are going to charge you for those eyeballs". Which is
> basically what Comcast is doing ... charging content networks for access
> to eyeballs. What if they themselves got charged for the same thing.
> Would they think that is "fair"? And what if the city had its own
> community high speed internet that paid no such charge?
>
>
>
>
They do already. It's called HBO, Showtime, HDNet Sports, etc. - they
get charged per eyeball for those networks, and so they pass the charge
on per eyeball to the customer.
Nothing is new here.
