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Macropayments: ISPs pay Content Providers for Access
EssJay writes: "A norwegian newssite (digitoday.no) has a story (norwegian) about a swedish company's filter-system which enable content-delivery sites to differentiate between different ISP's. This means that the ISP has to pay a fee to the site in order to enable the site's content to the ISP's users. Another story (also norwegian) discusses the implications of this. They report that the swedish company (Tric AB) will "act as a third party between ISP's and content-suppliers with the intent to let the content-suppliers get a share of the access-income. It will act as a clearinghouse where the income from the ISP's is distributed to different content-suppliers in relation to size and traffic". According to a swedish newssite (Ekonomi24.se), Tric has already gathered the largest content-suppliers in Sweden and they are already in discussions with the large ISP and telecoms in Sweden (Telia, Tele2 etc.) which are positive to this. The background for this initiative is the problem of financing the content on the Internet. So far it's all been advertising and subsidising from other parts of the companies, now it will be the up to the ISP and telecom-companies to share the income with other actors. This would also be the death of smaller ISP's that feed off the free structure of the net, given that this model is applied to the entire net. And not to forget the new business created: clearinghouses. We were just waiting for another level of complicity." Either your ISP pays a fee to the content provider (raising your access fees, of course), or the provider blocks access to itself from all of your ISP's users and you have to deal with their complaints. We'll probably see this in the U.S. soon, as the next stage in the media consolidation.
This isn't as bad as it sounds, and it's an idea from the mobile internet in Japan...
The dismal failure so far of WAP is in part due to companies providing content but getting nothing in return, consequently none want to do it. The Japenese i-mode mobile internet system already share revenues between network operator and i-mode sites and these guys are making a fortune.
With the number of .coms going down the tubes these days a form of income other than rapidly shrinking advertising pie is actually a good thing.
--
Ministar nepretpostavljenih okolnosti
Get in close for the Bees' eye view.
This may eventually lead to the development of "networks" of mutually cooperating sites. The AOL Time Warner network (inaccessible if you're on Earthlink), the Turner network, etc. It would be like the current UGO/Snowball situation, except with teeth. You'd subscribe to packages of sites, like premium cable.
Gad. Well, now I know what I'll end up nostalgically reminiscing about, when I'm an old geezer. "In my day, it was all free! Free, I tell you! You young sprats today don't know what REAL surfing was like..."
...isn't this the exact same idea I posted some time ago to a different story? (this one). Should have patented it, dammit :P
That would require that the proxy be running on an account at the other ISP (unless I misunderstand you), which someone is paying for, so the ISP still gets money.
It's still all BS. There is no magical pile of money to be made on the Internet alone. Charging for content will simply cause the Internet to revert back to the ways of pre AOL; sites on the net for the sake of being on the net without commercial interference.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
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This is the same business model that content providers (i.e. TV Stations) have been using for years with cable providers. It seems quite good (for the content providers and the cable companies), but the catch is, of course, that instead of having lot's of content, you only get the content approved by the company. If this takes off, we could end up with "10000 sites and nothing's on!", not unlike the current dilemma with TV...
----------------- "I have a bone to pick, and a few to break." - Refused -------------------
It'll never happen. People think that Linux has a chicken and egg problem getting access to commercial applications. Any system that charges ISPs for access to content has a much larger problem. They have to sign up content providers that have content that a significant amount of an ISPs customers are willing to pay for, and then they have to convince that content provider that it is a better idea to sign up with their service (and pay the requisite commission) than to simply charge the end user themselves.
Fat chance of that happening.
Especially since many of the content providers already are access providers. AOL/Time Warner stands out as the best example. They are already using their "special" content as a hook to lure customers. Many of the other "large" ISPs have the same business model. One of their hooks is special proprietary information or tools. There is literally no chance that they are going to pay dues so that their subscribers can view their competitors for-pay sites, as they would rather have their customers see their own commercial sites. And without AOL's customers, and the customers from the non-complying normal ISPs the service will be severely limited in its market.
The fact of the matter is that once a product becomes a commodity, putting it back in the proprietary bag is nearly impossible. I am surprised this particular company isn't trying to charge for air and sunshine while they are at it.
Currently ISPs are running on razor thing margins. They aren't going to pay access fees for their users. Web companies are going to have to find a way to charge their customers directly, or they are going to have to find a way to show advertisers that their advertisements actually work. Micropayments isn't going to work, and macropayments are even less likely to work.
I agree with the sentiment of the previous article. Furthermore this has no impact on P2P exchanges of files and information. My impression is that this proposal just improves the situation both for those who want to purchase their cable TV via the net and those who don't care for that idea.
The company behind this has a homepage in English @ http://www.tric.com/
--
Niklas Nordebo | niklas at nordebo.com
Nice idea, but the infrastructure required would be pretty hefty, I'd imagine.
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If the big guys all want to charge admission, and the little and medium size sites don't charge admission, maybe that'll get more people to check out the free sites before pushing their ISPs to subscribe and raise the monthly rate to cover the cost. This might actually be good for little sites, providing that they actually have content worth bothering with. We might even see an evolution of "broadcast" and "cable" internet channels, free but with ads, and "pay per view, or HBO type".
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Well, unless you mean earlier this year (2001), you are talking about last century (the 20th).
So much of my life occurred in the 20th century that when someone says something like "the (insert superlative here)of this century", it takes me a moment to realise that they're talking about the 21st.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
So instead of looking to the end user, the sites are looking to the ISP. Well, just maybe, some ISPs will pay up. But they will have to raise their charges to the users; and again, the users will be faced with the choice of paying extra for "premium" content, or paying less and having to live without certain sites.
You know what? People will choose not to pay.
What really bothers me about this is that we're getting away from the concept of the location-transparent Internet. Up 'til now, all ISPs have basically been equal, and able to compete with each other on largely fair, equal terms - for instance, how often you get an engaged tone, how polite the helpdesk staff are, etc. But if this idea takes off, you may find yourself stuck with a shitty ISP because they're the only one in your area that pays for access to disney.com. (Not that you would ever be in this situation, which brings me back to my earlier point).
Media consolidation would be impossible in
the USA or Canada. Looking at the recent
purchase of TVA in Québec where they must
sell the network TQS, there is no chance of
stuff like that over there.
Here we have the antitrust laws which forbid
control of everything. It is also impossible
to control news in one area. So tell me how
this so called media consolidation could ever
be possible?
Er, no, it was about communicating between computers and route the information in such a way that if a node was down an alternative route could be found. Very important for Defense, which paid for it. Then, much later, it grew into this commercial beast with little of the (expensive) redundancy required to have good reliability.
If you by Internet mean WWW, then the initial idea wasn't as altruistic either, but was simply to find a way for researchers at CERN to link information together.
If we all got off of our asses and bought some good 802.11 HW, we could create quite a large shared wireless network, free from all of the ISP charges etc. People with cable modems could provide bandwidth to a lot of people, and under the service agreements it would be totally legal. A hack of freenet could get things to be anonymous also. I am working on getting 5 people in my local neighborhood to hook up and see how things go. For $200 you can get the wireless adapter and for another $200 or even $100 you can have a firewall/router to the net. We are going to have 5 wireless nets all connected to ther router out to the internet. Once one of the participants gets their cable modem we are going to have two links to use. Even if the wired net goes away, we can still have local wireless nets. If your on Long Island and want to participate or investigate then let me know. The few who have good bandwidth should share it for everyone.
For the records, France Telecom realized in 1995 that the minitel system was dead and canceled plans to update the terminal. 6 years later, the online business as a whole is still a loss maker.
Maybe on AOL -
People on the internet are too used to the idea that everything can be had for free.
Here in Tokyo, there's a new service called Usen - They're offering 100 megabit connections to the internet. From what I've heard, they offer a lot of micro-payment-type sevices along with that connection.
You've got to put some real value-added services in the mix for micropayments to work. Would you put up with a lot of AOL/Time/Warner type crap to get the fastest possibe connection to what you actually want to see?
Trust me, it's not going to be based on any type of peer-to-peer model - People will always figure out a way to do that stuff for free. When 5 MB is no longer a big amount of data to email to a friend, i.e., when that's the size of your typical Outlook.NET email, it will be impossible to stop the free flow of MP3's and other BLOB data around the net.
Well, as long as there is PGP/GPG, that is...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
MMDC Mobile Media
-- My Weblog.
"2.There are better models under consideration. A better system is settlements. Like the current TelCo model, peers pay each other for the imbalance of traffic across their peering points. The concensus opinion on how to do it is to pass the charge toward the people consuming bandwidth away from the people providing it. This would ultimately drop the cost of being on the Internet for the people who are providing content. One of the chief reasons this hasn't happened yet was PSINet's refusal to go along with it (reason they offered free peering.) Now their failing and turning off peers. "
This idea is good, but just lowering the access cost for content providers may not always be good enough. In addition to access costs, it cost money to run the servers, pay sysadmins, obtain content, and manage a site. Some sites may not be able to stay up unless they can have enough of a positive cash flow to cover these things as well.
This could allow ISP's to have tiers of service. Basic access could be at the "normal" rate and those wanting access to an "enhanced" packages of what are now pay sites (Like Wall Street Journal) and perhaps a small array of financial sites could pay one low price to one entity to access them all.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
"I hope" is right.
For those of us getting access through some means other than a freenet or .edu this might mean higher prices so our ISPs can write big checks to
Disney, Sony, ...
Even if I never visit their content I'm sure the price for those that do will be evenly distributed over the ISPs customer base.
"The last thing I want to do is deal with a bunch of people who want something."
"The last thing I want to do is deal with a bunch of people who want something."
Major Major
And in less than a hundred years we've reached 6 billion. That doesn't make you think?
From my article:Our best case above adds up to 60% of the continental US to feed everyone a minimal diet. The "realistic" (and still wildly optimisitic) case... 3.5 times the surface area of the U.S. Hmmm... only 19% of the US is arable land, and 25% is grazing land.
We don't have "plenty of land." Large chunks of land on Earth are not, and cannot be made, arable. And did you entirely miss the whole discussion of water?
The "Greed Factor" makes it worse, not better. Didn't it strike you how much land is needed for support in the best case? Unless you have a magic cure for greed, we're going to have to take it into account in coming up with a solution.
Ah, well, if that didn't convince you that the current (and projected future) situation isn't sustainable, I can't imagine what would.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Actually, at this point it's around a ninth of an acre. And it's an extremely misleading statistic, if you think about it at all. I put together what I think is a pretty thorough refutation here.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Internet access has become more and more of a commodity. In a commodity market, the most important element of a business is 'what does this business add to the product that no one else does?'
Will this be what is used in the future to differentiate AT&T Worlnet from Sprint from MSN from AOL from the local mom&pop shop? Will free access to the Wall Street Journal be attractive enough to cause the average Joe to switch providers when the information in the WSJ is available at so many other places? (I'm assuming that hobbyist pages will not fall under this type of agreement.)
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
In the future, they'll be easier (which might not always be a good thing) but e-gold lets you do micropayments & accomodate diverse interests right now. e-gold is also a good way to pay for services delivered instantly online, such as (but not limited to) ISPs, IMO. There are other flavors of currency as well (more of them seem to spring up every day...)
/. folks can try a small bit of e-gold for free by contacting me with an account number. Thanks.
As usual,
JMR
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
Its english-hounds like you who give intelligence a bad name. Do you comment on my point? no. You comment on my spelling/grammar. How childish and unimaginative of you. Its entirely possible I'm an imperfect human who doesn't see the need to pretend to be perfect thru the effort of spell checking unless I'm either asking for money or communicating with a client in a professional manner. But naturally you people never think of that.
Meaty worthwild criticism is always welcome however.
-Matthew
I agree with you about the bandwidth. In the end the data is saved on the hard drive, so its only a matter of time til you get it. But because everything has been speeding up in our lives, we grow less and less patient to get what we want, hence the "bandwidth problem" when only a few years back, it was a joy to watch data DRAW on a 300 baud modem. :)
:)
But again. The only reason we don't have enough bandwidth is because all that dark-fiber is just laying there BECAUSE.. of Money.
-Matthew
First the internet was a university research tool.
Then it went to public access.. followed by commericialzation of the latest saliva-inducing gold-mine that is the web. The Free Spirit is being drowned out by the desire to make money, which is nothing more then just a mirror image of the people who make up the real world, hopping onto the net and trying to do what they do in the real world... make money, get laid.
So whats happening on the internet is we see more junk, we see consolidation, we see great free-content sites like Mathworld fall pray to IP.
What are we to do?
The answer lies in figuring out the formula to reverse trickle down economics. Fight the system rather then continue to take it up the ass. Otherwise soon there will be NO PLACE to escape the real world, for it would have simply engulfed our latest and greastest escape.
I view the Internet as the Final Front for We the People. If we loose the battle here, we'll forever be under the grip of evil greedy men who know no other way. I think the basic ideals in the Internet more then hint that there is another way.
Heck, I have a friend who actually bought his girlfriend a present for her birthday IN EVERQUEST (it cost ALOT of platnium too)! You know what that tells me? We have a generation that finds value in the virtual world, and the virtual world is limitless, so shouldn't we be?
Another example.. Programmers are more likely to help people for free then Lawyers are. Yet both professions involve coded langauge. Lawyers have woven into the spirit of making money, whereas Programmers have woven into the spirit of the Internet. I can't thank the Internet enough for Linux. Wow.
It always amazed me that we had so many battles in europe over land. Not enough room for us. Then we discover America. And we still fought. Don't we have enough land??
There was once a study done that showed every person in the world (this study was done between 1900-idon'tknow) could have a full acre in Texas.
Believe me, the Earth has plenty of land. And we definitely have plenty of hard drive space. Man keeps fighting because it has yet to figure out another value system. How long are we to be animals under the guise of survival of the fittest? When are we going to actually stand upright and look up the word "Humane" in the nearest dictionary?
Sincerely,
-Matthew
Technetos, Inc.
when the ISP is providing/creating the content, e.g. AOL or Compuserver...
Interesting to set it up in a non-partisan way though...
Seems the best thing to do would be to offer area-specific things to allow ISPs to differentiate themselves, or, maybe this sort of thing will foster interest-specific ISPs... hmm, wonder if NASCAR-fan.com has been registered yet...
William
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Enyclopedia Britanica and many other research sites restrict by IP address, so universities have had to set up authenticating reverse proxies, so that some faculty member/student who's dialing up from home can still access the information.
The fact that this is moving to places other than the education front might be interesting, but I'm guessing that as it's been done on the education front for 6+ years, that the only real news is that someone's willing to set themselves up as mediators.
For more information about reverse proxying, take a look at
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
But, you never know what's going to happen...
I do not care about their business model. For me it sucks.
If I wanted any of these, I would be an AOL member...
Why do you people are so excited about business models for making money on the Internet.
I can give you a business model: a painter makes paintings but nobody buys them. He then gets a gun, goes out on the street and shouts: whomever passes by my house has to buy a painting...
This means that the ISP has to pay a fee to the site in order to enable the site's content to the ISP's users.
What do I do when my ISP isn't 'carrying' a particular site? Cable TV networks only carry certain channels, and it's almost impossible to get less than mainstream channels added to the lineup.
Sure, there's more competition in ISPs than in cable TV these days, but no single ISP is likely to carry all the 'networks' i'm interested in.
Except by that time those of us who like to freely share information would already have hopped on to Internet 2, which would be declared by law off-limits to all commercial enterprise. And WE will live happily ever after within our realm of free information while THEIR world will gradually spin out of control into anarchy. Tee hee...
I would be very surprised if the anonymizing services could really afford these fees with the number of non-subscribers they're carrying.
--alt
Who is RTFM and when will he help me with Unix?
You are so right.
What's that saying, "The Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it." Looks like you're saying the same thing will happen here. It'd be much more complex once counter-measures got involved, but it would ultimately still work.
My bust.
--alt
Who is RTFM and when will he help me with Unix?
Think AOL/Time-Warner. At one time, AOL, Time, and Warner Brothers represented 3 of the largest media companies on earth. Now they're one company. Do you think this makes it cheaper or more expensive to obtain access to media?
Where the phrase applies here is that for Joe User to gain access to content, his ISP now has to go through another middleman. While AOL/Time-Warner or Earthlink will probably get sweetheart deals for this, Alteran's Fly-by-Night Local ISP service will probably get a more expensive rate per customer. This is why the big ISPs, like AOL, are not fighting this development-- they get to strangle out the few remaining mom and pops without incurring the fallout of being anti-competitive.
--alt
Who is RTFM and when will he help me with Unix?
For normal sites, the interests of ISP's customers vary way too much. The ISP can't possibly subscribe to all services in the world, only for the The customer subscribing himself to those sites that really interest him, independant of ISP makes much more sense. The only problem to be solved is the (micro)payment. Also having access via different ISP's and places (home and work) is only possible when the user subscribes himself.
Soon my ISP's going to charge me money for content on sites I don't visit, just wonderful.
Wonder what my bill's going to be $50, $100 a month? (and thats for dialup)
Well perhaps the content portion of my ISP payment will become the largest portion of what I have to pay, then the cost of a cable modem will become a moot point.
From this news article in Swedish:
Tric has invented a filter which allows media sites to recognize what surfers have what Internet providers. This way the sites may allow or disallow surfers depending on whether the provider has an agreement with the site.
Is this an invention? Must have been hard! :-)
Nah. Just route everyone on the ISP through a proxy server (which should be done anyways, squid anyone). Then the content provider charges per click from the proxy server, and the proxy server has logs of who made that click. If a user tries to go around the PS, then the content provider won't recognize the connecting IP and will refuse to send content, or ask for money directly.
-no broken link
Smaller sites are never going to get the ear of the biggest ISPs that hold the real dollars. It's the bigger sites that you may see trying this in the future. It's a lot like the cable TV industry -- you provide the premium channel, the cable TV network pays you to carry it, and the cable TV network charges the consumer for the service. It's an interesting idea.
---
Josh Woodward
Josh Woodward
Those free trial disks are going to start looking good again!
Point 1:
It would be easy enough for an ISP to opt-in on a case by case basis so users could pay $20/month for access but $25/month for "premium" access.
Point 2:
Heh. thats my favoriate. When was the last time something was implemented in the the business world simple because it was a better system?
Point 3:
Thats the thing about the internet, they wouldn't have to get to every ISP, just a few. Those could then sell full access or proxy access. "Your ISP isn't signed up for Slashdot? Pay $5 to foobar.com and get Slashdot and 50 other great sites!"
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no comment
This is where content sites are headed. Look at salon. These sites need to make money somehow, and if bannerad won't cut it, its either the ISPs or the users. Like salon, places probably won't get rid of all their free content, but offer special access.
First, many site visitors won't go looking for a proxy until the site is no longer reachable. Some sites may redirect the requests to a list of paid ISPs and proxies, but that could be a hassle to maintain.
it would be a hassle. but a paying hassle is better than going out of business
Second, if the only site you want out of the ones offered by the proxy is Slashdot, would you pay $5 for access to it?
I know the cable analogy isn't perfect, but I pay $30 a month when I only want SciFi and Comedy Central.
Third, users won't be able to go to slashdot.org via a proxy by typing slasdot.org into their browser instead they'd have to go to something like foobar.com/?slashdot.org and then foobar.org will have to rewrite all the internal site URLs.
There are many ways around this, cookies come to mind. If the content site (slashdot) really wanted to work with the ISPs providing proxies (and presumable paying them real money), you could type foobar.com/?slashdot.org and then slashdot could set a cookie and redirect you directly to slashdot.org. There are undoubtably better ways to do it.
I'm not saying its a good thing, I'm as much against the coropratization of the internet as the next guy, but in the post dot-com era, the content sites left really need a viable business model.
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no comment
From a peer's point of view a content provider will consume bandwith, it might provide bits... but it still consumes bandwith. Only backbones provide bandwith, hosts never.
Actually, backbones provide bandwidth capacity, not bandwidth data. Hosts are responsible for nearly all of the data. Some of it is fairly symetrical (e.g. SMTP) and some (e.g. streaming media) is highly assymetrical. In a settlement system, things like email would essentially be a wash. NNTP and the various 'web' protocols have the greatest imbalance.
If you have a T3 peering connection, you'd compare the difference between inbound and outbound traffic over that connection and settle the difference. If you've got nothing but web hosts on your side, you'll send more bandwidth out over that connection than you'll receive in over it (something like 6:1.) If you've got nothing but modems, you'll see almost the exact opposite in traffic patterns (1:6.)
The biggest side effect of this would be higher prices for bandwidth capacity for small ISPs who'll have to learn how to provide collocation services to balance their circuit, or die.
It might be a nice idea in theory to charge towards peers who consume data and away from peers who provide data, with a slight surcharge per bit to pay for bandwith costs, but hosting a spammer or a DOS attack will provide data just as well as good content.
DOS attacks are illegal and hosting spammers will turn your ISP into a rogue that'll be blacklisted by groups like MAPs and most have acceptible use clauses in the bandwidth agreements with their backbone provider. The last ISP that actively pursued spammers as customers, AGIS, was virtually destroyed by it. Even their legitimate customers found their email blocked as AGIS found their entire IP space blocked my mail administrators.
Also keep in mind that settlements will provide a mechanism to pay for quality multi-media content. It'll also reduce some of the strain on the backbone by encouraging ISPs to implement caching of static content.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
They would do this in order to take the content away from the small ISP's, which in turn would drive more users to the large ISP's. Then once again the larger services are giving away what the smaller services cannot afford to.
/. for example. They'd have to blindly abandon their current business model and put themselves at the mercy of getting all their revenue from a few large clients.
You raise a good point, however I think that large ISPs could only keep out the small ones if the content providers were willing to charge a flat, high price. I don't think content providers would expect some mom and pop ISP to pay as much as AOL for access to their site.
Also, content providers would have to be willing to cut off the majority of their visitors if they only deal with large ISPs. If you look at the access stats for a large site, the highest percentage for a given domain (usually AOL, is in the teens.) This would likely be death for community sites, like
It's not unimaginable, just highly unlikely and doomed to fail.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
Do you? Netscape killed Netscape, but I wouldn't expect a Slashdotter to understand.
Well, perhaps this is a troll, but I'll bite.
I've been using Netscape since version 0.99. And watched its demise. As the courts have upheld, Microsoft abused it's market position to paint Netscape into a corner. If you've built a business on selling an Internet Suite (TCP stack, Browser, Mail and News programs), how do you compete with a competitor that not only gives the same stuff away, but pays ISPs to give it away (and bars them from supporting Netscape as part of the distro agreement)? Remember that when IE was first added to Windows (part of 95b) you could download netscape, but it was at a blazing 33.6kbps max speed.
I'm sure Netscape could have done a better job defending itself, but being inept at self defense is not the same thing as suicide.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
Point 1: It would be easy enough for an ISP to opt-in on a case by case basis so users could pay $20/month for access but $25/month for "premium" access.
I'm not sure if I understand what you're saying? Are you saying that ISPs would create tiered services where their users would opt in for access to restricted sites. This would mean that someone like CNN would go from 1 million readers to something like 20 thousand. First, many ISPs won't be extorted like this and will pass on it, most likely cutting CNN to something like 20% of its current traffic. Then if end users of the ISPs who do pay have to opt-in to get access to the one or two top sites they want access to, many would pass on the additional $5 for those couple of sites. If 10% actually opt-in, your talking about cutting down to 2% of the original visitors.
If instead you mean that content providers might strip adds if ISPs pay them to (basically bulk subscription), that would be interesting, but still unlikely.
Point 3: Thats the thing about the internet, they wouldn't have to get to every ISP, just a few. Those could then sell full access or proxy access. "Your ISP isn't signed up for Slashdot? Pay $5 to foobar.com and get Slashdot and 50 other great sites!"
Proxy access has a few problems. First, many site visitors won't go looking for a proxy until the site is no longer reachable. Some sites may redirect the requests to a list of paid ISPs and proxies, but that could be a hassle to maintain.
Second, if the only site you want out of the ones offered by the proxy is Slashdot, would you pay $5 for access to it?
Third, users won't be able to go to slashdot.org via a proxy by typing slasdot.org into their browser instead they'd have to go to something like foobar.com/?slashdot.org and then foobar.org will have to rewrite all the internal site URLs.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
Look at it this way -- MSIE's dominance only really started when Netscape 4.x started to lag behind.
According to this dataquest press release, Microsoft had already captured 39% of the market when NN4 was being released.
Let my explain my perspective with an analogy: Mr. Netscape decides to take a short cut through an alley in the middle of the night. Out from the shadows, comes Mr. Microsoft, who stabs (bundles browser with OS) Netscape, takes his wallet (gives away the browser and pays others to do likewise), and leaves him for dead. Bleeding but still alive, Netscape stumbles out of the alley and turns south looking for help, eventually he collapses, and dies, on the door step of Mr AOL who revives him as an undead zombie. Mr AOL hides Netscape in his basement because he has an agreement with Microsoft not to show him to anyone, not even his closest friends (their subscribers.)
Now, was Netscape stupid to go down that alley? Sure. Could he have done a better job of defending himself against the knife weilding attacker? Sure. If he wasn't in shock and new first aid, could he have lived? Perhaps. Does his failure to do any of these things adequately make it his fault that he was knifed and robbed? No.
Another thing to consider is that had Netscape been more successful in fighting off Microsoft, something the court says would have been difficult given Microsoft's unfair dealings, it would mitigate much of any claims of damages Netscape could now sue for as a result of those judgements.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
Another thing: Who decides what constitutes "content"? RIAA? MPAA? Time/Warner? Disney? And how do we even know that their "special content" is even worth anything? I'm going to be mad as hell if I have to pay for "content" sight unseen and find out it's some sucky pseudoarticle "informing" me aboutBritney Spears' first zit!
Here's another twist: Haven't these guys heard of mirrors? What's to stop someone from gaining access to their precious content and mirroring it in a jurisdiction where they can't be touched?
This is an idea that needs to be stomped to death before it even gets off the ground.
You're using her as bait, Master!
small isp's can sell their demand for content
.oO0Oo.
I small ISP's already buy their bandwidth from a bigger ISP.
death is change
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
We all (well, many of us), got on the internet in an earlier time... and I'm not talking about last century. Originally, the Internet was meant to be about sharing... information, files, whatever... but sharing. That's a cooperative thing. Over the past five years, we've seen (I'd imagine) a decline in non-commercial pages... fewer (percentagewise, at least) people put up useful personal pages, and I don't think even those of us who use the internet for research (either technical or otherwise) really benefitted that much from the boom of the last 3 years. So why shouldn't an internet that's about big companies serving info to people charge? If the people don't give back to the big companies (which they don't) by putting up smaller, useful, web pages, shouldn't they give back money? In the geek circles, we give back to each other by helping each other out... which is why we do it in the first place... but what does a company get out of the internet if not money? I know someone will post a higher modded response talking about importance of communication, how the companies benefit, etc. etc. etc. But think for a minute... the outside worlds internet is, has been, and always will be a commercial venture. "Our" internet is about IRC, Freenet, .org's, and .edu's which will continue to be a community... I hope ;)
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
This seems quite similar to what music publishers do with radio. In this case large providers will probably cut their own deals, but smaller sites will have to band together to get their piece of the pie. Good or evil? Inevitable.
Someone sets up an ad-based anonymous proxy server in one of the paid-for ISPs, and everyone can access the site. Am I missing something here? How do they stop this from happening on a large scale? This just doesn't seem like it'd be a very effective business model. If your payment scheme is annoying enough, people will try to circumvent it.
Think of a shared network of encrypted anonymous proxies, where everyone on the network lets everyone else on the network use their bandwidth in exchange for being a part of the network. Kind of like a grass-roots organized effort to combat silliness in pricing schemes (e.g. Napster or Gnutella).
Oh yeah, that's basically what the Internet was supposed to be in the first place. Silly me. The only way I could see this working is if somehow (miraculously) the costs of an Internet connection did not go up significantly as a result.
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
Another thing to keep in mind is that this idea is being sprouted in Sweden - a country where nobody sees anything wrong with paying a premium for anything - and the local phone call to the isp(used to at least)was metered and cost more than the internet access.
I seriously doubt that this kind of model will fly in America/Canada - any more than metered local phone service.
Didn't MTV try this when they first launched their site and it flopped?
It's also good to note that the idea of per-ISP access is not new. Universities do have deals with sites like Webster or various scientific papers and magazines so that their faculty and students get "free" access to the services, when university pays a fixed sum, probably based on number of potential readers.
Even though I can see potential problems with paying for stuff you don't care about, that is exactly what you get with newspapers, magazines and TVs. Not all articles are interesting or good; you probably downright hate many of them. And still, there are good ones too, and those make it worth the subscription. Of course the power customers have in choosing what they want affects the success of these programs... But the basic idea might not be all that bad as many writers here have declared.
Besides; couldn't this be a new chance for smallers ISPs too? I would guess that even though big ISPs will get bigger discounts, smaller ISPs might be able to focus more closely on exactly what their customers want. Or, they could divide the IP-address space (including DHCP) so that they'd have "virtual ISP"s, if the IP-nubers are used for access/blocking, and their customers could choose which domain they want to be part of.
Well, anyway, it might be good to carefully consider all possibilities of the idea before dismissing as yet another Corporate Plot.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Do you watch all the channels that are available for you on cable/satellite tv (or broadcast)? You are still paying for all the crappy channels you never watch. And the difference between playboy vs. NYT compared is similar to difference between columnist. You can subscribe just one magazine, but not just one columnist. But that's because of level of bundling.
Most important, though, is that if cost to get this mass subscription was significantly less than individual membership, who cares if you just use small part of them? You'll still pay less than for just getting what you want. And as an added bonus, should NYT interest you, not just Playboy, you can start reading articles.
As to universities, well, both students and faculty can be thought of paying for it indirectly. However, I guess that total costs are insignificantly low per person, due to fixed prices.
I'm not claiming it's not a problem that bundling might not fit your needs. But there are also opportunities there (cost, mainly), and it might even spur competition. ISP that has bet "feature set" for you would have a definite edge.
And finally, subscription model would most likely still only be used for minority of sites, and even those that do, would/will probably have a freebie section as well.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
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I always thought this was a good idea, at least for small independent content providers. If we're going to have the web be for more than just buying stuff, the money's gotta come from somewhere. It's pretty clear that advertising doesn't work, at least not enough to keep everyone afloat. People are used to "paying for the internet" in one place - at the ISP. The internet kinda has an amusement park feel to it - pay once and you get to go on all the rides for free. So if some of the money coming from the ISP went to the content providers, I think it'd be a good thing.
on the other hand, when this does come to america, it'll probably just be used to funnel a bunch of money to msnbc or some other big-business net-presence that doesn't need it. there's very little chance of it actually getting money to the independent content producers - the ones who really need and deserve the money.
Back in the day (just before the AOL takeover), I was a contract employee for CompuServe Germany ('hi' to Robert Stabl, my boss!). CompuServe, at that time at least, was pushing a technology called RPA (Remote Passphrase Authentication) as a way to prove a user's identity to a third party website, without that third party needing to know anything about the user's passphrase (reasonably well designed too).
CompuServe GmbH also used this RPA technology to control micropayments to some of its more interesting (to some) content. The example that comes to mind was a site called Recht Online, which was a pay-per-view listing of all court judgements in Germany (I believe). However, there were many other areas of content which CompuServe wanted to sell, and not just to their own subscribers.
My job was to create an ISP authenticating proxy. The idea was that if you, as a user from ISP 'blinkenlichten,' wanted to view some pay-per-view CompuServe content, then you could as long as your ISP had a service agreement with CompuServe. It was the ISP's problem to figure out who viewed what, and how to pass the cost on to their customers.
Perhaps the most magical thing of that whole time was going onsite to a couple of ISPs (one in Frankfurt, the other in Dusseldorf), and seeing the highly sceptical sysadmins' jaws drop when I started happily connecting to expensive CompuServe content through their IP range.
Ironic part of the story: CompuServe lost the source code.
I use one ISP to read /., another one - "The Economist", and by girlfriend's login to read "Gamespot". Damn! No more "click-throughs"!
But in the end this system will not work. For the business isps - ok, companies need real-time content. But for consumers surfing the web - NEVER!
It will put internet back to the 1990's - BBS (paid access) and free hobby and scientific sites. Do you want that?
Well, that's actually opposite of what's going on. It's the contentproviders who are asking the ISPs for money.
>the ISP has no way of knowing what the users
>want, only they know, and only those who want it
>should pay.
Exactly, the ISP doesn't know what the user wants, therefore they may have to sign deals with severeal contentcreators, just to give their users a choice.
I can see one of two possible outcomes from this.
2. This plan isn't successful - Smaller ISP's still make little to no money. The Larger ISP's have competition and the prices stay down as the Internet audience grows. With this growth eventually, advertisers seeking these new audiences start to pay the content sites to host their Internet ads once more. Note the recent trend of content sites refusing to provide click though information.
--
When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
It's not clear to me how this can succeed.
A content provider whose content is sufficiently compelling that consumers will happily pay for it can simply collect subscriptions itself (cf. The Wall Street Journal Online).
A content provider whose content is not sufficiently compelling is SOL - if consumers aren't willing to pay for the content, why should ISPs be willing to pay for it?
I suppose a small content provider who could have been successfully charging subscriptions but couldn't manage the overhead might find this attractive, but a tool to help with direct subscriptions might fit that need better.
The SCO lawsuit makes me wish my company were in Utah. We need a new building.
E.g. when I'm abroard, reading the home news (-headlines) is the most important to me, but probably I won't be logged in via my own ISP.
And a e.g. US provider isn't going to pay for Swedish/Dutch content.
I can't decide what bundle of content I want, the ISP will buy what is cheapest. So probably I'll end up with some popular but worthless crap (Big Brother shows and relatives), because the usefull things are a niche. (according to the ISPs)
Paying is not bad. Paying and not being able to select yourself is bad, since it ends up to be the lowest common denomitor again.
i-mode makes it money from user subscription to services plain and simple, users subscribe to i-mode content providers and the network operator gets 9% of the subscription fee. A good framework to handle subscriptions through the network operator is nice, but for the internet I doubt many people would care if pay per view costs go to their credit card or to their ISP bills.
Free content at the moment costs no money to provide via i-mode, but it certainly doesnt get the content provider any money either. NTT DoCoMo has even hinted it will start charging for it if they grow large enough...
From a peer's point of view a content provider will consume bandwith, it might provide bits... but it still consumes bandwith. Only backbones provide bandwith, hosts never.
It might be a nice idea in theory to charge towards peers who consume data and away from peers who provide data, with a slight surcharge per bit to pay for bandwith costs, but hosting a spammer or a DOS attack will provide data just as well as good content.
But I can live with it, its better than the use of bandwith when you mean data (I guessed you meant that the first time, but it was highly ambiguous you must admit).
:)
Hosting spammers might make you a pariah... but if your bandwith becomes nearly free due to the hosting arrangement you propose they dont need a lot of other buessinuess. I admit there arent a whole lot of way's to generate a lot of traffic in a legit way where the the receiver doesnt explicitly initiate the transfer, so it should be relatively easy to police (the scheme will obviously need traffic _content_ rules in the contracts with anyone providing hosting and policing of those rules though, at least as long as spamming is legal). Such a scheme would make it a lot easier to host warez on you cable account too
IMO bandwith costs should not be covered by the people who have surplusses though, ISP's and hosting companies should not be forced into unhappy marriages if it can be avoided. Just make outgoing traffic surplusses tradeable commodities.
But today, with the content market collapsing and ad revenue dissipating, the article makes /. as a possible solution to our collective content provider woes.
That's the kind of irony that tickles me.
Besides, what kind of freaky porn site could get away with such a tactic?
I'd prefer micropayment that would appear on the ISP monthly bill. Say you want to read an article on "The economist", you would provide the name of your ISP/clearinghouse, your login and pass and voilà you can read the article. It would remove the costly and non popular step of the credit card payment.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
Wow That really sucks, but perhaps smaller sites can benift from the money taken in and stay alive. Not like the current downturn which has killed off many smaller sites
While the idea in general sounds pretty reasonable (paying the content providers, instead of all the money going to mere handlers), I have some serious doubt that this isn't going to happen, not at least in a large scale. There are 2 reasons:
1: End-Users aren't willing to pay a single cent more than they are used to
2: I hardly see any reason that ISP's would like to share their income, they'll rather declare those sites pay-sites and make some system that only those who want to get on those sites and pay for it, get to see it. And that means huge drop on visitor count. Most probably there will always be viable, free alternative for every single news-site.
This is the place where you write something that will make you seem like a complete idiot.
Third party sites collectin money to give you access to pay-per view sites ain't new to. in two words: porn sites.
.com crash, we know that other kind of sites also can't operate just on adds, so it's fair that they start charging.
many of them uses third party services to collect the money and redistribute among their clients. One of this services was AdultPass.
The reason these sites had been charging for so many time, IMHO, is that few companys are willing to associate their images to pornografy, so advertisement isn't enough to keep porn sites operating.
Now, after the
But what makes me worry is that if this spreads too much, the free content in the web may become just a small set of the whole.
Of course, we can press the admins of pay-per view sites to leave some of the content free or at least cheap, so we can pay for it. Or start producing our own content and puting it available via freenet...
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What ? Me, worry ?
Thisis where Anti Trust becomes an issue. Since the line b/t Content owner and ISP is rather blurred (AOL-TW..) A nice case could be made that AOL was using it's rights to all of it's TW holdings to gain an unfair advantage.
That is, if something of this sort was tried. When you think about it, this would make ISP more like Cable/DSS providers. You pay a flat fee, they handle all the content. I hope all you pro-privatization freaks enjoy the Commercial Internet.
- Dan I.
Most of the "big media" sites that would go for such a thing are welcome to blackhole themselves from most of the `net if they wish.
This will give the internet back to the small-time hobbyist websites.
I'm actually hoping that this becomes popular, AND that my ISP doesn't pay, of course.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
Only if consumers sit back and take it. The fundamental infrastructure of the net allows for inexpensive access to anyone's content...
And while it makes sense to charge the highest volume content providers to account for the preponderance of bandwidth they consume, the day my ISP starts blocking all content that doesn't pay off is the day I get a new ISP, with a sharp letter to my former provider that I'm not interested in my internet becoming the next homgenized crap fast that is cable TV. Broadcast economics and technologies don't favor somebody that only gets hundreds of "viewers" per day, but the internet allows this, and I'm confident that someone will sell me the kind of internet service I want.
Another real possiblility is for related small content producers to band together into little networks. They could band together to pay fees for access or possibly there could be "premium" internet service - pay a surcharge of 5 or ten bucks a month, access your choice of networks of smaller content providers. The network splits the difference with the ISP, I get enhanced content from the providers I like without the stupidity of trying to figure out how to pay a nickel evry time I want to see the day's Net Comix.
Of course content on the internet is going to be dominated by big business. They have the resources to build the whiz-bang content and to buy bandwidth and access. And as far as IO can tell from the Billboard charts a lot of people really like the "art" they consume after it's been nicely pre-chewed by some fat-cat executive type. Hey, it's a free country. But the beauty of the internet is (or should be) that costs don't spiral out of control when you scale down the way costs in broadcast media do.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Macropayments are a really bad way to pay for content. Lets think about some possible ramifications for a moment... Well, as was already mentioned, this would be the death of small ISPs, but what wasn't mentioned was that it would also hurt small content providers. Think about it! If every ISP had to make a deal with individual content providers, then the small guys would have a very hard time getting ISPs to get contracts with them. They would either have to give their content away for free or join some kind of AOL/TimeWarner evil faceless content network. Micropayments have plenty of problems to be worked out (privacy issues, etc), but macropayments just plain suck.
If you don't get my sarcastic pessimism about profit and the need for everyone to be making ridiculous amounts of it (aka - GREED), then I can take you out back and show you exactly what I mean.
A simple click-through purchase system not requiring users to give up there credit card info (Which could still be stored only on the ISP, if they were brought in to help in that way).
This would be the best solution, the ISP has no way of knowing what the users want, only they know, and only those who want it should pay.
Think about it...
http://monkeyserver.com --- weeeeee
"War makes me sad." - Me
My Win2k never crashed, and I installed it about September last year.
As for your questions:
I don't need support. But I assume because most Windows users have far less experience than GNU/Linux users.
I never called a support hotline
I don't have an MCSE or ever configured a Cisco 2500. But I doubt that every MCSE can't configure one.
Well, I'm a Windows user and haven't noticed a lack of software. So the only answer to your question is Mu.
I've got no problem with GNU/Linux, good server, not bad desktop. I just personally prefer Windows. I like IE, and like Win2ks reliability. My Mandrake box isn't quite as reliable. I accept that this probably could be made as reliable through extra configuration - but I'd probably make it worse.
And this would be why we have proxy servers.
Get a distributed proxy server software, so it routes round people's ISPs who do have access.
Sounds to me like this is a micropayment system of sorts. Whether the article is talking about ISP's having to pay for the bandwidth of sites or the contents of sites is irrelevant. It is the same thing; a way to compensate sites for the costs incurred in running a site. There are a lot of people that would like to post free content, but we all know how expensive running a site can be. So, ISPs pay a buck, and no banner ads. Or the sites can still use banner ads to help pay for the actual content. This implies artists could finally be getting paid. Sound great to me.
For those of you who would like to read past commentary on the subject, please check out Micropayments: Effective Replacement For Ads Or ?, the Slashdot thread on Scott's Cartoon and the actual cartoon, the Slashdot thread on the second Scott cartoon, and the actual second cartoon, and here is the result of a google search on the topic.
I also just have to mention that I do believe that is one of the longest stories I have seen on the main page ever. Usually, you have the snippet, then more detail when you click the link. Wow, that was shocking to my eyes trying to read all that text in one paragraph.
Lawrence Lessig is my personal hero.
Some how this is akin to the whole idea of push tech. that was going around a few years ago. This is again trying to draw a parallel with TV spec. cable. You are gonna end up with ISPs that act like cable providers with one you get comdey central and SCIFI ,for example, and the other you don't. If you want it all you are pretty much done.
The way phone companies (most ISP's around here are subsidiaries of phone companies) are, we (the users) are going to get bent over and worked like a 2 dollar hoe one more time. I can't even begin to imagine all of the consequences of having such a system where only the paying ISP's get service to certain sites. This means that the ISP will decide for me what I get to use on the internet. This goes against all that is good with the net today.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~ now you know
but this time it won't be for tagging your ftp, or such...
I'll go straight to spoofing myself in your network with a legit access
and you will be micropaying. lets say for 15 000 people.
All with lousy tastes. and a liking for ProN (now, Porn micropayment.. can get quite high 8)
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
Could someone please explain to me what process is described by the term media consolidation? I mean, it sounds like a nice flippy 21st century information society term, but nevertheless I'd like to know what it means and what it's definition implies about where it's leading.
There is absolutely no reason to panic.
Well spoken.
For all that we don't like the Internet being a commercialized place, it bodes well for all of us who make a living off of it if there is more money in it.
To be sure the free geek help tech sector of the Internet has not been helped as much as other parts of the Internet in recent years, but I would say that it's still bigger than it was, it's just more diluted by all the crap.
Geeks have enough time on their hands to keep their communities going, I wouldn't worry about that.
What about non-profit and educational institutions that provide net access? Like libraries and university computer clusters? Would they be expected to pay just like regular ISP's? Or would they be exempted? Or if this system becomes widespread, should their users just forget about accessing much of the web's content?
NetZero Commercials may become a reality a? If this happens thier will still be ISP's run by slashdotters that provide the whole Net as usuall, wich will be to hard for the ckearinghouses to overcome.
Can nothing exist in a simple form? Just seems like a layer of bureaucracy trying to be implemented for the sake of financial gain...
I guess evertone wants to make money somehow.
I would agree that I don't see this as much of a change. The internet as we know it is already divided into realms of commercial and free, and the contrast between the two keeps getting stronger and stronger (with the free software movement). Have you all noticed that the more bloated the commercial sector gets, the more radical and enthused the free sector gets. As this continues I anticipate that we'll end up with a fairly large core of proponents of free communication, which is where the real information will be. If the then separate commerce domain chooses to charge people to spend money(?) then so be it. The worst that could come of this is me having to go out to the store.