Excite@Home To Change Routing Priorities For $$

chrisd writes "I found this one the SJ Mercury news web site, go and read it. The article in essence says that excite expects to make a lot of money from content providers for giving them "special" access to their networks. This is a troubling problem in my mind because, in essence it means that the web will be better for some sites rather than others based on the ability/desire of sites to pay excite." (Read More)

" I am expecially troubled by this because it would mean that sites and companies that have gobs of cash could in essence pay excite to guarantee a better experience than a competitor. It's not clear from the article, but for excite to specifically give higher priority to one than that would by default reduce the priority of competitors.

The question then becomes, how long until someone can literally pay to make it impossible to reach a competitors site. Say how would cnn reader feel if they could no longer reach cnn , but msnbc always came up super fast?

It's a surprise that the same company that appears to be for open access for cable lines would take this approach to cash for network routing. Excite is definately doing the right thing through it's support of open access (imho), but a very wrong thing in pursuing this line of business. "

Comments

These concerns may be unwarranted

[orpheus]

What is the controversy here? According to the article, "those companies had agreed to pay an undisclosed amount per megabit per second in order to plug into the high-speed network." In other words, they are selling bandwidth. If anything, it is less troubling than the many 'preferred vendor' arrangements that have been on commercial networks (e.g. Compuserve, AOL, Prodigy) since the 80's.

By buying bandwidth directly to a network segment, these providers will get better throughput. If you look at the buyers (Akamai, iBeam and Microcast) in the article, you'd see that they defintely have an interest in eliminating netlag and other delays to cablemodem users (who can make best use of their services). I expect other 'wide pipe' providers to follow suit, and consider it both prudent, and a service to all customers. (The revenue stream is welcome, too: Excite@Home lost $1.5 billion on revenues of $337 mill last year. How long do you think they can afford to keep supplying service at current prices at his rate?)

There is a huge distinction between *providing* service* and *denying* it.

You might as well argue that high-bandwidth users are 'crowding everyone else off the Internet' (which has been argued). Howver, this doesn't have that nice conspiratorial anti-business ring, does it?

Nope! Read the article

[BranMan]

I don't think this has the evil portents - I read the article and what I get is this:

Everyone on Excite has equal access to all sites (through the regular internet backbones) with some latency and bandwidth determined by that pipe.

Excite is getting companies to pay them for the privalege of hooking high-speed pipes directly from their servers to Excite's routers.

Request for them don't go to the internet backbone - they are routed over these new, direct lines. Faster performance to those sites (less latency, more data/sec., etc.)

Noone is given priority over another. No competitor's service is reduced - in fact it would also be enhanced, since some of the traffic is not going to that common backbone (at least a little).

Put away the pitchforks and torches for now.

There is absolutely nothing new here

[phoneboy]

ISPs have been doing this amongst themselves for a long time. Companies like above.net do this every day, albeit they host the servers on their site. On the surface, it simply looks like they're making their routing tables more efficient for customers willing to pay for the privilege. Certain companies that make caching servers employ similiar techniques for streaming media (i.e. cache those who pay the piper for the privilege).

Since it gets the content "closer" to the end user's (albeit of @Home), and doesn't negatively affect everyone else out there, I can't necessarily see this as a bad thing.

-- PhoneBoy