Slashdot Mirror
India's ISPs Want Payola from Big Portals
knorthern knight writes "Story on The Register.
America's biggest content providers could face a toll to enter India cyberspace, if plans mooted by the Indian ISP trade association bear fruit.
Although the Internet Service Providers Association of India is split on the issue, several of the larger ISPs want to block access to eBay, MSN or Yahoo! unless the prociders pay a toll.
'In order to increase revenue streams we should ask [the portals] to pay if they want traffic on their sites from India,' reports the Hindustani Times."
"Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."
omgsh u suck, no first post for you >:E
MS, Yahoo, etc will probably just pay whatever they ask (within reason) so that they'll be available to those billion people (even if only a fraction are online.) They'll pay mostly because they're afraid one of their competitors will, and they'll lose all that potential business. The only real way they'd have of standing up to this would be to unite and act as one... but I really doubt that'll happen.
As for the companies that don't pay and that people still want access to... well, where there's a will, there's a way.
omfgsh you suck too, no first post for u either :E
I don't see how this would work. If the sites didn't cough up the dough, and were blocked, then a single ISP would gain a huge advantage by not blocking the sites, and advertising as such. I know I'd switch to that ISP.
This will have absolutely no effect on the blocked sites. The only thing this will do is annoy end users.
It just goes to show you how the internet is all about money now.... pity.
I doubt they will pay, because that would set a bad precendent, and then they'd be beholden to other countries as well.
Yeah, most are just so profitable now.
I bet most were wondering what to do with all that extra cash just lying around.
Talk about shooting yourself in the foot!
I can just picture "Umm, ok" from the US Companies. India will soon realize that it's their loss...
I mean seriously, with the economic downfall and .com bust, do they really think that the few remaining sites will even give a crap if India can or can not see their sites? I personally don't think that any site should have to pay a toll have the privlidge of being accessable in a country, and I certainly think that the websites should just say "Screw you" and have it be the ISP's users that yell back at the ISP because that is where the real problem is.
This victimizes the users. Yahoo, MSN, et al. could care less.
I know that i can mirror msn through my apache proxy server. How the hell does india plan to block access. Microsoft will just setup msnindia.com or whatever is needed and contstantly go around it.
Futhermore it might even prompt something like distributed sources for site content into ie. you isp blocks x well lets skip down the list of servers till it finds one thats not blocked.
short of a deny-all firewall which only allows pay sites into india this simply wont work even if they wanted it to.
Isn't he average network bandwidth for a user at home in India like 28.8kbps??
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
Does this now mean that the US will Bomb India to protect US Business Interests Abroad? Hmmm...
On a more serious note, seeing as India has a population of over 1Bn, that is a huge market that is probably worth the cost to tap into it.
What is of concern, however, is that they are starting with MSN Yahoo and eBay. Who will it filter down to in the end.
Will these Virtual boarders spring up all over the net. That would truely be a sad day.
I would hope that memebers of the Worlds largest Democracy will fight against this infringement on their freedom to access information.
-- "To ask a question is to show ignorance; Not to ask a question means you'll remain ignorant."
how about we make those indian isp's pay for the privilage of having their traffic carried on any backbone outside of india?
No soup for you! NEXT!
If there's a demand for these services, the customers will bug their ISPs big time about it. I don't see any reason why the portals should pay up. In fact it could be argued exactly the other way around: If it wasn't for the big portals, all those ISPs woul be out of business because nobody needs an internet line if there's no content.
Most American websites are having problems paying their bills at this point. I doubt that they would be willing to pay, but I really doubt that most would be able to.
Albuquerque PC
Anyway, I doubt it would work. Surely the ISPs existing users have a contractual right to a "best effort" ability to send packets to and receive them from Yahoo's web server, for example? That is in fact what they are paying the ISP for. It is, in fact, the defining service that an ISP offers.
As far as new users are concerned, would you choose a) an ISP who will deny you access to web sites you want to contact, or b) one who will allow you access to anything you want? Simple market forces would mean that people would chose the ISPs which weren't attempting to extort the large portals.
Yahoo not being usable from XXXX ISP would be a much greater problem for XXXX ISP than for Yahoo.
that in India there is 1,000,000,000 people. That's roughly 1/6th of the worlds population.
Okay, so all of them wont be surfing the internet. But even if 10% would that would still be 100,000,000 and imagine if only 10% of those would be surfing MSN , eBay or Yahoo! that would be 10,000,000. I bet that's worth paying for.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
There was an article not too long ago regarding ISPs in the UK considering charging a per-use connection fee to high-traffic services such as Yahoo, MSN, etc.. Obviously some CFO got his wires crossed and assumed you had to swim upstream for money just like how it makes sense for the local newspaper to pay me to read it.
Users pay ISPs to access internet content. Because of us they are able to buy and build fiber networks to better provide the service we pay for. Content providers do the same by paying their local data centre money to host their servers, crossing the line like this just isn't feasible.
-Matt
--- Need web hosting?
A consortium of now bankrupt US ISPs, in control of major portions of the transcontinental backbone, decided to charge Indian ISPs a fee for access to major portal sites such as Amazon, Yahoo, etc., in addition to major corporate sites such as Microsoft, Oracle, and Adobe. When asked why such a fee was necessary, a spokesman for the US ISPs said, "In order to accurately account for our costs, we must ask the Indians to contribute their fair share in exchange for the traffic that we peer for them.
No comment so far from the Internet Service Providers Association of India. The major portals so far are ignoring both groups.
</sarcasm> Are the Indian ISPs really this stupid?
On one side this makes sense from their perspective. International bandwidth from what I understand costs a bundle to provide and usually most of this cost is not picked up by the US which is generating most of the content to begin with. Europe I hear has similar problems with paying an arm and a leg for transatlanic traffic, etc. On the other hand this sets dangerous precedent. How can we expect the internet as we know it to stay free with this kind of scheme. The cost for these portals traffic is already built into the wholesale general cost of traffic that ISP's sell each other and eventually to the end user. It seems as if they just want to double dip on this access. Secondly how are content providers who already pay big $$$ for their pipes just to get their material out of their server farms start going to then start paying carrier fees as well. What we are going to end up with is the internet becoming like basic cable. You pay for a few channels here or there but if you want the premium channels you gotta start shelling out. This method of billing breaks the IP protocol as we know it. The net is supposed to be mostly blind to the traffic that it is throwing around. If routers stop universally moving traffic this is going to get ugly very quicky. Good bye univeral routing. hello pay tv internet.
If religous zealots don't believe in Evolution, then why are they so worried about bird flu?
I can't believe im even responding to this, but there is a reason for that, its so that people don't do first post crap because no one wants to read FIRST POST!!!!!, well im sure someone does, maybe I should setup a mirror of the /. front page with my own SQL back end for those that wish to have a first second... ninety ninth post competition. I'm hoping that your post was a joke
Eventhough India has a large, huge, out of control population, in business that is not the only concern. Businesses need to assess the purchasing power of this group. I know that this is short-sighted, but India doesn't have the purchasing power as of yet, and therefore they do not have the power to press these internet company.
eBay, Yahoo, et al should charge the ISPs for the privilege of presenting their content.
--Blair
wasn't there a slashdot story at one point where content providers in Norway (not sure) wanted to band together and demand a percentage of what ISP made, because "they were the reason people got on the internet".
Now it's the other way around - "we provide you with customers, so give us some money"
Very funny.
If european ISP's are really that concerned with the traffic generated by portals, they should buy a few 100 Gig drives a RAID controller, download squid and setup a transparent proxy. Problem solved. On average a proxy server will save 50% of your traffic, btw these are real stats from major ISP's that run HTTP proxies. The major amount of traffic comes from P2P networks, when FastTrack was still running port 1214 traffic accounted for more then 50% of the traffic
Please ? Could all the ISPs in China, in fact, anyone providing access in the APNIC area, please start charging us if we wish to receive email from any of your clients.
Cutting out all the spam from that hellish region would be lovely.
There is quantity there but not as much financial muscle as those numbers would give the ISPs. And that is not to be overlooked.
So what if these sites doesn't pay up?
Sounds like the ISPs essentially would be screwing their own customers by disallowing them to visit popular sites despite having paid for internet access...
This could be a very good thing for India. The association only wants to (currently) target large foreign portals, it can effectively increase the number of homegrown (in India) portal sites.
Why would I want to pay a fee to have my content viewed in India? It's not as though I have any kind of potential customer base there. I won't get a return on my expenditure. Maybe corporations would pay for that "privelage", but what about the rest of us little local businesses who would not benefit from what is being "offered"?
The article mentions the "Indian ISP Trade Associatoin," which might be some sort of (government or non-government endorsed) trust or treaty that, if all ISPs are members of (whether forced to or not) could enforce the ban across all national ISPs.
If someone from India could fill us in on the details, that'd be great.
This ridiculous feint at getting some quick cash by the Indian ISPs will be forgotten by this time next month.
- SMJ - (It's not just a name: it's a bad aftertaste.)
If ISPS/Governments decide to block certain sites, it will increase the proliferation of anti-censorship tools like peekabooty.
Hopefully truly anonymous and uncensored internet will one day be a reality.
if the "Internet Service Providers Association of India" is going to do this as a group, then let the "Internet Content Providers Association of America" declare that if any of their members are blocked, then the others will also block themselves.
India will then choose to have the big sites on the Internet or not.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Indian Isp Organization (IIO): Pay or we block your portal!
MSN: Are you sure about that?
IIO: PAY US OR WE BLOCK YOU!
MSN: Block us and we block India.
IIO: OK, maybe not.
The Internet is self healing. It is designed to route around problems. Play nice children.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
I can't believe I'm responding either, but no matter what the delay ppl are still going to post. First posts usually dissapear after 5 mins anyway with more important stuff
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
heheheee, man, its they who have the soup.... 1/6 of the earth's DAMN POPULATION
The lunatic is in my head
Gimme a break - who the hell do they think they are? Precisely how much do you think a first-world wanna-be provides in revenue to Ebay? They don't have enough money to hurt the portals; screw 'em. If it were Germany, Japan, the US - hell, even France, somebody might give a rat's ass. What's next? Is Luxembourg or Lesotho going to declare tolls for visiting their internet sites? I wonder how much of this is India taking itself way too seriously after getting second-rate nukes. Newsflash: you aren't a world power just because you can create a fission reaction. You're a first-world nation when most of your citizens can read, and when they don't have to go overseas for jobs.
People have always told me Indians are some cheap bastards but this is ridiculous.
It's quite clear. Someone has to pay the bills. Routers don't buy themselves, infrastructure doesn't just materialize.
How many telecom/datacom companies have we seen go bankrupt in recent time? I've lost count.
In Holland, an ISP tried to gain revenue by giving out stock. Huge mistake. Stock devaluated rapidly, company bought by the Italians, not heard much of 'em since.
A number of companies use 'creative accounting' to make things look better, but we've seen what that leads to.
Maybe it has something to do with scaling, and in a couple of years 4 out of 5 ISPs will have been weeded out, to leave a few strong, healthy ISPs. But right now, it doesn't seem like an ISP can live of the revenues of user accounts.
Since no customer is very willing to pay twice/thrice the price he's paying allready, revenues must come from another direction.
So either the government must put up a program to help their people onto the net (but since India is not that rich, that's not likely), or the revenues must come from the other side of the line, the content providers.
But then again, how many content providers are able to cough up a bag of dollars/euros for every ISP in the world? Putting an extra strain on them will probably increase the amount of banners, popups and spam on the web.
I think it's a bad idea.
If anything, the sites have a better chance of collecting money from the ISPs. After all, if Yahoo/MSN etc. are not available, you are taking away one killer app (web browsing), though the other (email, provided by the ISP) would still be available. So if they are not available, why would I want an Internet connection at all?
Since the parties need each other, it is a matter of bargaining power: right now, it is about even, with a slight tilt towards the portals.
1-2 years back, Wired reported that some portals in Norway (I think) tried to bully some ISPs into a revenue-share. Wonder what came of that?!
Seriously, GOOD RIDDANCE. Have you used Yahoo chat in the last two years? If so, you know what a nuisance all those belligerant, retarded cyber-seekers from India (and pakistan and bangladesh) can be.
They will not be missed by the other users, for the most part.
Traditional bricks and mortar producers have to sweeten the distribution channels, so why not MSN?
Traditional media (TV, radio) pay the content people (record labels/musicians, sitcom producers). So why not the ISPs pay the sites?
hmm.... well, if sites are too cheap to pay, or dont have enough money to pay, then access to those sites from india would be blocked... so, that would be censorship, right? sure seems like that to me.... this is bad, very bad......
I have no idea why this is a problem. I run a couple of fairly high-trafficed sites which cater to an Indian audience and getting any money out of the folks from India is a PAIN. Most don't have access to internationally accepted credit-cards and a fair amount of traffic is from students who would not be able to afford the dollar transactions.
Why cant the ISP's say just charge those premium subscribers? For Option 1 -- Indian sites only, subscribers pay $1 / month (hypothetical) and for Option 2 -- Access to all sites including international and porno subscribers pay $50 a month.
Would be simpler than building complex legal traffic / royalty arrangement with the major portals.
heheheee, man, its they who have the soup.... 1/6 of the earth's DAMN POPULATION
Not the *Internet* population, I assure you !
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Why don't the US simply pull the plug on India? Shut off all their connection to the US. I bet the ISPs won't be terribly happy then...
This is pure terrorist economics, I don't like it one bit, I hope the ISPs croak on this one big time...
I'd think that this was a really shady iniative on India's part if not for the fact that they're probably going to use the money to feed their nations many starving.
...management at some of India's largest ISPs are smoking crack.
I hope they go forward with the plan. Reading the resulting string of articles on slashdot will be better than watching a sitcom on TV.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I find it interesting, that only big american sites are mentioned, that don't really offer anything that can't be done easily with local companies.
You all assume, that indians are interested in ebay. Here in Europe, for an example, getting stuff from ebay is a really big hassle and with shipping costs added not worth most of the time. I guess with india it's even worse. If there happen to be an indian big auctioneer working the local market, it's very likely that ebay isn't of interest only to a very small minority.
But as written before, most likely those site won't care about indian traffic anyway, as most of their advertisers are interested in american consumers only.
In the end, this could promote the devlopment of a strong asian counterpart to the big american sites. It happened before with Lineage in Korea.
I wonder, if they're going to block Doubleclick and their ilk next.
First, the Prisoner's Dilema: Two prisoners are in separate cells. The prosecuting attorney says to each one separately: "If you rat on the other guy I'll give you less time". If they both rat then they both go to jail for a long amount of time. If one rats and the other doesn't the one that didn't goes to jail for a long sentence. The one that did gets set free for cooperating. If they both don't rat they get a plea bargain and get a short sentence.
Now for the telecom analogy: If one telecom charges another to peer traffic, the telecom that charges makes a lot of money and the one that doesn't looses a lot. If they both charge then they both loose because they won't send hardly any traffic and their customers will use less because of the high prices. If they both don't charge then they both win, because they do a lot of isp business and the market grows. The catch is, like the example above, if one of them charged and the other didn't the one that charged would do better than the one that didn't as compared to how the one that charged would have done if they had cooperated.
What is the solution for prisoner's dillema historically? It's tit for tat. If you defect (and rat on me). I will defect (and rat) on you. This works very well in games that are played over and over again. So what's going to happen is that the big portals are going to start charging the isps and vs. versa until they both decide to cooperate.
If you use this article:i ndia0715.s tory
http://www.newsday.com/business/ny-biz-
you'll see that the AVERAGE salary in India is $40.00 per month.
Oops. When an MP3 player is 2.5 months rent I don't think there a premium crowd of net surfers out there in India.
Did India first make the connection (be it by laying down a line or dialing through an existing phone line) to the rest of the world (today's Internet), or did someone outside of India (without their permission) make the first connection (be it by laying down a line or dialing through an existing phone line) to India?
If they made the first connection to today's Internet, then they shouldn't have any right to charge money to access anything within India.
If someone outside of India made the first connection to someplace within India, without their permission, then I can see their perspective on this. That I see their perspective on this does not mean that I agree with it, or anything like it.
It's really stupid.
.in domain. That'll bankrupt the stupid indian ISPs and hopefully some Indian with reasonable business intelligence will take over everything.
MSN, yahoo, google etc. provide SERVICES for FREE that many inidan net users go on the internet for.
If they dont have access to these services then they wont go on the internet.
Stupid Indian ISP's. This is what happens when people have no understanding of economics and are taught socialist isolationist anti-trade nonsense.
They should teach Adam Smith in India.
They doint understand that tariffs screw over themselves. Really I hope they decide on the tariff and MSN / hotmail blocks the
This story is very very shady. Note that there isn't a paper called Hindustani (note the i) Times. There's Hindustan Times and it's online version has no mention of this at all.
There have been various messages flying up and down Indian telco lists such as India-GII that this is blatently untrue. Move along, there's nothing here to see.
All weakness is within you, As is all courage.
I think software like This would complete prevent this kinda crap from happening.
See this comment from a list I run, by an office bearer of the ISP Association of India - the organisation which is supposedly behind this scheme.
J ul y/002003.html
http://lists.vipul.net/pipermail/silklist/2002-
Looks like we have misquoting to thank for this "story".
-- God is silent. Now if we can only get Man to shut up.
This will be done in a split second. Portals wont pay for it anyway - consumers will. Watch ISP access prices go up...
This is just another way for someone to dip into the pocket of the consumer, indirectly of course but the same none the less.
Just like I'd ask my ISP to pay ME to ALLOW myself to use their services to access sites like yahoo.
Otherwise, I'll simply switch ISPs!
WTF!
Did India ask to be connected to the internet (rest of the world), or did someone from outside of India make the first connection into it (physically laying out lines or connecting with a modem), without asking them?
If they asked to be connected to the internet (how it's known today, I suppose that the internet is dramatically different now than it was when it was first being born [or however long after that India got connected to it]), then they should not be allowed to charge anything to access anything within India. That's not (as far as I know) how it started, and it should not become that.
If someone from outside of India made the first connection, then I could see India's point of view. This is suggesting that India had a network presence within the country before it was connected (unvoluntarily) to the rest of the world (the Internet today). This is only saying that I would see where they're coming from, not that I would agree with that type of suggestion.
Just make them unable to access anything outside India and see how they like that. Their tactics sound like blackmail to me.
In this context, we are not talking about mutual benefits or mutual losess. Rather we are talking about ISPs in India asking portals for money.
The advantage India has is its sheer size. However, if you've ever gone there (like I have over the last 22 years) then you'll realize that the marketing potential is not that of a billion person country. Rather, there are very few middle class people and it would be almost safe to say that the country is system of just a majority lower class and minority upper class. This propoganda spread by Indian-nationals in our country regarding the potential of the marketplace is sheer bulls***. India is stuck with their hindu caste system which forever locks the poor into the lower class. Efforts to shed this system have been met with huge resistance from the upper castes. On a side note, many (if not most) Indians in the US are from the lower classes who migrated here after the partition took place. They settled here with funds they stole from fleeing "Pakistanis" (in quotes since Pakistan didn't exist at the time of the partition technically). India is no better off than Pakistan. Sure people could argue that the economic indicators support that India is stronger, but that is largely because of the extremely wealthy that live their.
Anyway, back on track to the prisoners dilema. India has a population that has a little bit of market potential. They make a demand asking the large portals for money. If the portals refuse, does India gain anything? No it does not. Even the fear that Yahoo or MSN or some other person might take the market over is utter crap since this idea is a pure "make-money" scheme. It is hardly plausible to assume that if both Yahoo and MSN wanted to pay the Indians would lock themselves out of one of the portals for a little bit more cash. I hope I am clear. My conclusion is that MSN and Yahoo and other portals will say F-YOU and move on. On a side note, a good retaliation is to charge indian isps for all the traffic they send over the non-indian backbone.
Sounds like the Indian ISP association is wholly against this scheme, so mod the parent up...
Internet Service Prociders? What are those? Are they for cider rights?
india did not have a networking infrastructure before the lines were laid out to connect them to the internet. They should respect the ideology of the internet and stop attempting to make a cheap buck. Even if they had the infrastructure in place, the bottom line is that their traffic is carried w/o charge around the world so they shouldn't be asking for money now.
People can always get around these barriers, and if they really start to try to exploit companies to get more money then they can always rot by themsleves. Just because India is having trouble doens't mean they can just foot the bill to other people.
ok i'll buy into this. from now on any person from india viewing my web site "all about india" at xxx.x.x.xxx will be charged $1,000 us to my numbered account in the alps. after i creat a virus/ pop-up that redirects you to this site. really what would happen if india started makeing pop-ups that went to ther site just to get the money
I have a hard time really caring what lame brain schemes third world nations and companies invent to give themselves their weekly foot-bullet.
The only area where I have any opinion about countries like India is when it comes to immigration. Tech firms here are exploiting everyone by either bringing foreign workers in on temporary visas as slave labor, or simply exporting the job itself to india where they can pay ten cents on the dollar compared to american wages.
The best solution I see to this is to encourage immigration. I might have more people to compete with, but I won't be competing based upon price so much. I'd rather lose my job to someone living here than lose it to someone living in Rangoon. Besides, just imagine what an influx of talent and intelligence will do for our gene pool?
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
The companies should refuse the ISP unions offer (or rather form of blackmail), after all who will join an ISP where you don't have access to the sites that you will most regularly visit, whether it be for online email, instant messaging, news or software updates. Take all those away and you basically leave your customers in the dark.
hmm.. sounds like you got rather miffed about indians getting some jobs in the US The point is they are qualified and competetive and they deserve it...plus they work cheap and are willing to work hard unlike most americans i meet. 2. About you not liking Indians since college: you probably need to grow out of your college years now. You ineveitably end up thinking of people as groups with characteristics.. maybe you should have taken the time to actually meet more people. 3.lack of commerce/traffic: The simple reason for all this and you being miffed about H1Bs is that the dollar is an expensive commodity in India, so, Indians cant buy in dollars.. ;-)..
Where will you go when the oil is gone and the Euro is worth 40 dollars?? ;-))
...rod, reel, basket, and copy of Angling Times
Yep, I bought it for a whole minute or more. Then I realized that I have no reason to believe that any Indian ISP is as stupid as (say) Phil Lawlor.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
1.Indian ISPs are lame
2. they oversell bandwidth.
3.average indian download speeds are less than a KB per Sec.
4. They are as harebrained as they get when they take huge non refundable deposits.(check out dishnet dsl http://www.ddsl.net)
5. no one has any decent customer service.
maybe its time customers charged the ISP for being loyal esp in times like this.anyways, about blocking.. no blocks are good enough...however since the download speeds are so low, maybe RIAA willpay these guys... a single movie takes 2 weeks or more to download.
Actually, it seems to me like this whole thing is turned upside down. It's like, those sites are 'established' in another country (most servers are), and when someone from India wants to see that site, wouldn't they need to 'pay toll' to 'go to' the site (the site doesn't come to them, although that can be discussed because its data actually does flow to them, but it does seem 'more right' for an individual to pay toll as for, let's say a 'touristic monument' itself).
I know this probably doesn't matter in the case. They smell money and go for it. But it seems to be done on a really strange basis as well.
It does look that to me. Its like the increasing use of banner adds, 100 spams from the same person. Someone needs money and has had some "bright" idea as to how they get it...
Its not as if they're aiming for exceptionally cash rich targets either. Now 2.5 years ago they might have made a killing....
The food-chain in ISPs looks something like this: Customer -> Tier 3 -> Tier 2 -> Tier 1, with each level paying the layer above for access. Tier 1 ISPs are people like UUNet with global reach. Tier 2 are national or "regional" (e.g. EU, Americas, Asia-Pacific). Tier 3 are local ISPs, and customers are both individual users and hosting companies.
Actually there is nothing stopping a customer or Tier 3 ISP from signing up with a Tier 1 ISP, and many do. But the principle is the same.
There are two kinds of link an ISP can have to other ISPs: Transit and Peering. In a transit link an ISP pays a larger ISP for access to "the Internet". In other words the smaller ISP can route packets through the link to any destination and expect to receive replies via the same route. In a peering relationship two ISPs, usually in the same Tier, agree to exchange traffic, usually without payment, but with the proviso that only traffic for customers of the other ISP is to be routed through that link. You can't send traffic to B through your peering link with A (although there are sometimes mutual backup link terms in the agreement).
You can think of this in your own terms quite easily. You have a transit link with your ISP that you pay for. But if you and your neighbour exchange a lot of traffic you might string an Ethernet cable between your houses and create your own peer link. But it would be very bad manners to use that link to pinch bandwidth off your neighbour.
The market forces that created this system are very straightforward. Originally the Internet worked with free transit links, but then the people investing in global networks realised that all the smaller ISPs were getting a free ride, and so they started demanding payment. This happened around 1996-7, and you can find lots of discussion papers from that time worrying about "the balkanisation of the Internet". In fact nothing of the sort happened. Metcalfe's law saw to it that everyone found more value from being connected to an unbalkanised Internet, and the net effect (sorry) was that money flowed from you and me up to Worldcom, and much good it did them. Meanwhile the smaller ISPs found that peering arrangements helped them to cut their costs because peer traffic avoided the expensive transit routes.
Thats not to say that things are so simple in real life. Peering arrangements in particular are fraught with difficulty because it usually means negotiating with your direct competitors, and you can play all sorts of dirty tricks like "hot potato" routing (routing packets to your nearest exit point instead of the globally most efficient one). But thats the general idea.
Incidentally the economics work like this regardless of the direction of most of the bits. People who tried to analyse the Internet using telephone economics got this wrong, because with the phone its usually the caller who pays. On the Internet the "caller" is hard to identify and the rules for doing so keep changing. And in any case the issue is irrelevant. You have content providers who want to reach readers and readers who want to access content. (Peer to peer changes the numbers and locations, but not the fundamentals). Both pay ISPs to provide this service, and those ISPs then pay the next tier up, and so on.
So now we look at India, where a bunch of Tier 3 and 2 ISPs are demanding payment from Tier 1 ISPs. The Tier 1 ISPs will rightly tell them to get lost.
I suppose that the Indian ISPs (who are mostly consumer ISPs) might demand payment from content providers such as Yahoo, Slashdot and co, on the grounds that the content providers want to reach Indian eyeballs. But I don't see this flying either. Those Indian eyeballs want the content just as much as the providers want to provide it, which is why you get no-payment peering arrangements between content providers and consumers: its the flow of value that counts, not the flow of bits.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Um, check your facts...for the most part US ISPs do charge extortionate amounts to their foreign counterparts.
. ht ml
n te rnetPolicy/scottspeech.htm (scroll to slide 13 and onwards)
For instance, most Pacific Asian countries (inc Australia) get charged for line lease and data travelling both ways between that country and the US.
This is regardless of who initiated the data transfer, in other words an Australian ISP hosting a page that is viewed by someone in the US is still charged for sending data back to the USA.
I wish you guys knew how good you have it. The cost bias is one of the factors that inflate the cost of Internet connections (and ultimately broadband) high in areas outside the US.
http://www.isoc.org/oti/articles/1000/vanbeelen
http://www.noie.gov.au/projects/international/I
working link
Um, check your facts...for the most part US ISPs do charge extortionate amounts to their foreign counterparts.
. ht ml
n te rnetPolicy/scottspeech.htm (scroll to slide 13 and onwards)
For instance, most Pacific Asian countries (inc Australia) get charged for line lease and data travelling both ways between that country and the US.
This is regardless of who initiated the data transfer, in other words an Australian ISP hosting a page that is viewed by someone in the US is still charged for sending data back to the USA.
I wish you guys knew how good you have it. The cost bias is one of the factors that inflate the cost of Internet connections (and ultimately broadband) high in areas outside the US.
http://www.isoc.org/oti/articles/1000/vanbeelen
http://www.noie.gov.au/projects/international/I
Make UK mirrors of all US sites, and point India to those mirrors ;)
You were expecting a sig?
they do charge others to carry stuff on the backbone
After looking around, it seems like the original TheRegister article disclosed only partial information; the provider list is correct, but the services and the reason for blocking are not (though the effect would be to extort some money and/or partnerships with Indian ISPs).
The actual point in question was the blocking of voice cht services, which by (new) Indian law can only be offered by ISPS, due to the failure of their law makers to distinguish voice chat from IP telephony, when they legislated to permit Indian ISPs to enter the IP telephony market.
The concern appears to be that India requires a license, and requires that you be a Licensed ISP in India, to offer these services.
Here is the original Press information from the ISPAI (Internet Service Provider's Association of India) web site:
http://www.ispai.com/bs05042002.html
-- Terry
It will not take too long before someone will make a 'e-bay' or MSN gateway or mirror via another site if these are blocked from an ISP. On the other hand, MSN or e-bay can also do the opposing: any traffic coming from this service provider will be blocked unless the service provider pays for the 'content'. If everybody does this for this service provider...
I wonder who constitute the Indian ISP Association and Hindustani times, that doesnt make sense either. There isnt a newspaper of that name of any standing in the Indian sub-continent.
One of the large Indian ISPs just changed hands and went to one of India's biggest private business houses but they continue to dominate Internet services both at a retail and at a business/corporate level.
The very notion that these entities can think of charging large portals is complete balderdash. First up even if this statement were to be true by a remote strech of imagination does anyone have any idea how many dollars are actually made in India? Should be a fraction of the viewership because most people in India still dont spend dollars (that is important.. dollars as opposed to local currency purchases) that would even show up on the big ISPs.
Secondly, the very notion that people who allow access to services on the Internet will be able to hold a democracy to ransom by preventing users from accessing the sites on the Internet is crazy. Indians dont live in a place where this will even see the light of day in thought forget practice.
Third and most important, inforamation technology is one of the only Indian industries showing a decent growth and sustaining it [considering it gives India more than 25% of its export income] will be a priority with teh govt. and they are not going to kill the golden goose for an insane idea.
going further there are any number of reasons why this report sounds completely baseless.
- ramas opines !!
...provided they limit it to sites in the USA.
The rest of the world is sick of subsidizing the USA's international bandwidth. It might also level the playing field for few of the smaller dot-coms.
It will never work of course, but they say it's the thought that counts.
Zilch
This story is very very shady. Note that there isn't a paper called Hindustani (note the i) Times. There's Hindustan Times and it's online version has no mention of this at all.
Hindustan Times is one of the larger newspapers in india. It is the largest selling newspaper in the capital city of Delhi. I get this paper, and this news was the main headline on the front page of the newspaper a few days back.
The online versions of most of the Indian newspapers don't carry all the news items.
The solution is simple: Block the ads from those portals.
That's even worse for the portal and the ISP customers are happy.
True warriors use the Klingon Google
Most of these sites derive zero income from foreign users. If this "consortium" is stupid enough to actually filter major sites, then people will find a way to get around them one way or the other.
What a bunch of money-grubbing idiots.
You mean I won't have any more deadbeat bidders from India for my stuff on Ebay? SIGN ME UP
I hope this happens, because it will help to put an end to Indians using Yahoo and other portals to trade answers to certifcation exams, and other methods for cheating their way into H1B jobs.
This is the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. It's
like BBN's attempt to charge backbone providers and ISP's for access to its customers when the ISP's backbone is SPRINT. The internets architecture is based on cooperation. This amounts to nothing more
than commercial extortion, and If they're going to pull this BS, then the backbone providers in the US should drop their routes.
This sounds like the perfect job for -- daaa-da-da-daaaaa... Peek-a-booty!
/. publishes a story with a non US country in its title... ...Expect half of the replies to be irrelevant to the issue but full of clichés on that non US country.
A billion people. Significant natural resources. A booming and dynamic IT economy. A net exporter of goods and services. Nuclear capability. And, as we see, an attitude.
When you read commentators speculating that India might be the next superpower, don't just scoff and assume that the status quo will preserve itself. This is just one of many signs that India is ready to try throwing its weight around on the world stage.
It might get slapped down this time, but the sheer audacity of it is an eye opener. Up to now, only the USA has been able to impose unilateral conditions on world trade. It'll be interesting - but probably not very comfortable - to see what happens when India starts playing the same game in earnest.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Some dot-head in a farm out in the middle of nowhere is telling huge US companies "do or die"?
Yeah, and I bet they will pay up too. See this is how you run a free society. By posting barriers for your own users because you are greeding and stupid.
Why don't they just put tolls on the borders!
hehehe...arrg...whatever...
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I was talking about the american incarnation of ebay and getting stuff from there to Europe. In most cases, any possible price benefits are eaten up by shipping costs. Getting stuff from ebay's usually just interesting for items not easily available here.
For domestic auctions, any auction local house will do, no matter if it's called ebay.co.uk or something else with no links to ebay.com.
But you can watch the 'slashdot effect' live, in action. View the error_log of the server, and see the number of hits to this missing URL.
I know this is offtopic, but just had to throw it out... :-)
You're completely missing the point. If Yahoo had to pay tariffs for other countries to access their site, they would have to cut costs. Indian customers can currently access Yahoo freely, so if they decided against paying the tariff they lose users, if they decide to pay, users who previously had access maintain that access. They wouldn't be gaining *ANY* userbase, just retaining what users they had a month ago. Therefore, profits don't magically go up...they can't even say that traffic went up, the same number of users access their site. Thusly, they now would have to cough up money for keeping the same amount of traffic, which = cutting costs. First thing to go? Free services. They're not making any direct revenue, so they're out. Now they lose more users. Hmm. See the frightening trend? As for the ISPs, they wouldn't be making a million bajillion dollars (yes, that's scientific notation), just a moderately sized sum. What does that mean for the company? Holiday bonuses, new CIO gets a new car, etc. They wouldn't be making enough to distribute a noticable savings over thousands (tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands) of users anyway. Finally, India doesn't have the Internet clout to pull this off, anyway. As it was stated, there are only 3.3 internet subscribers in India. As a country, it's just not worth it, as there wouldn't be anough users to justify the extra costs. ...and I'll give you a hint: less profit for "Internet Companies" equals fewer free services. You could kiss hotmail goodbye if MSN had to pay $0.50 for every customer to their home country.
--- What
Is how much India's internet users are willing to pay to actually HAVE a reason to use the net?
/.'ers around. What will they do if access to OSDN is cut?
Looks to me as though this is an elaborate blackmail scheme, any time a site becomes popular among India's users, the ISP cartel hits them up.
Given the large percentage of English speakers there, I'd bet there are a fair amount of
Corporatism != Free Market
a previous post mentioned something along these lines as well, except with the caveat that they were rupee millionaires. Now with an exchange rate of around 45 rupees to a dollar you would have $22,222 if you were a rupee millionaire. I don't know how far that actually goes in India, but that doesn't seem exceedingly wealthly by US standards. Granted the cost of living is less in India, but it seems like their might be less incentive for foreign portals to enter the market than those ISPs think.
we can rebuild this sig. we have the technology
so if this pans out, maybe I could convince New York to pay part of my Tunnel tolls if they want me to keep living here...
-- oh.... so..... sleeeeeepy.
Part of me is against the gating off of part of the internet (which doesn't work in the long run anyway), but part of me doesn't really care if American businesses have to kick back some dough for the privelage of gaining an Indian market. India's pretty poor, and has a buttload of people in it...if taxing America's "New Economy" helps them, more power to them. The smart ones will find ways around anyway ("triangle boy"). I suppose this would probably be against "free trade" though.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
On the whole I agree with the comments of others that this idea will probably not succeed.
Indian traffic is probably too small to matter now, but the intent of the ISP's is to reduce competition in the future in support of local ebusinesses. Quite frankly, American ecommerce companies have an enormous advantage of being first to market in their respective fields.
India's trade groups are pretty strong at blocking out international competition. In this case, they could block strictly ecommerce sites from consumers, provided that they wasn't enormous demand from consumers already for those sites (there isn't).
Under this scheme, they could allow content sites, but block the big ecommerce sites. The problem is that the line between content and ecommerce sites is being blurred. Amazon, for example, has great commentaries on books and the literary world. And yahoo/microsoft, which provide free services, also features classified advertising. Making such a rule would tend to give an advantage to sites mixing both types of content.
But don't for a moment think that Indian ISP's (or other third world countries) would simply buckle to international pressure. Indian ISP's want to make money and if blocking the site is as easy as entering an address on a routing table, then kudos to them for trying.
Such a measure could work if the government somehow codified these fees should be and ISP's were ordered to comply. Such money could be used to support national infrastructure charges (in the best case scenario) or to line officials' pockets (in the worst case scenario).
But don't fault them for trying. Actually, I kind of wonder why American ISP's didn't get this idea first.
(BY the way, if American ISP's took retaliatory measures by blocking access to Indian sites, that might unblock those sites very quickly).
You have to remember how wierd it is to view the internet in a developing country. Not only is a lot of it in English, but they probably see advertisements for dozens of American/Western companies and very little from their own country.
It's a really easy target to choose.
PS. I write about India and cyberculture on my
Asiafirst weblog.
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
Not that I agree with the idea personally, but they do have a right to control whats on *their* backbone in the country.. Its their lines, their laws.. Not ours.
Whats more scary to me, is that its even possible to restrict things on that large of a scale..
And yes i realize there are ways out for those with the ablity, im meaning in genral for the masses.. They are stuck with what is fed to them.
Wonder what is being filtered here in the US that we dont know about... Hmmmm
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I think the content providers should charge Indian ISPs for giving their users something to look at. In fact, I think Yahoo, and MSN, and any other major site should charge 100x what the ISP asks.
After all, who wants an ISP that bars them from visiting sites?
The Generation
I'd say something witty here, but I'm not that bright.
First off, if not ALL the isp's go along with this, nothing stops people from switching. And even if they do go for this stupid idea, what's stopping external proxies? Its one thing to simply deny certain domains or ip address ranges, its another thing entirely to scan all text that comes over the wire to detect and block traffic from specific websites, no matter how it made it to the end user.
And who's to say that Ebay and others won't just tell the Indian ISPs to go screw themselves. Ebay doesn't exactly have much in the way of viable competition. If this goes through, they could probably turn around and demand money from the Indian ISPs instead or they'll block access. And when the ISPs own polices cause great dissent among their users, they'll be forced to pay up to return things to the way they once were.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
I've never read the Hindustan times but papers in the US print crap that isn't true some (most?) of the time...
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
Let's look at it from a legal point of view: Since portal sites like Yahoo are "in the open", i.e.: anyone can access them by simply typing their URL (or by clicking on a link of another sire), that would make them analogous to one walking past the street and seeing a sign for a business that says "Yahoo".
So, when the Indian ISPs block these sites asking for a payola, they are in essence placing their hands in front of people's eyes and chaining them to the sidewalk telling them "you cannot view that yahoo store or go in there", even though it is the citizen's right.
Now the question is, would this hold true in a court of law, and does India have a "freedom of expression" clause in its constitution to grant web surfers this right?
According to a Yahoo spokesman:
"This doesn't affect us, as we're not a procider. Heck, I don't even know what a procider is!"
Um, don't the users go to the major portholes for service and not the other way around? Last I looked, I didn't see Yahoo (or anybody else) knocking on India's door to offer them their services. So what if they want a bribe. Screw em. The users will find a way around, just like in China, if for different reasons.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
That will shut them up. You cut them on and they will come crawling back. You pay them and you've set bad precendence. Dont bow to finicial terrorism.
The short of it is that Indian ISPs are trying to make a buck off of American companies without really understanding how the internet cashflow model works. Basically, content isn't really free, it's paid for by subscribers, advertisers, and web users buying the products and services of the providers and their affiliates. If you think about what the Indian ISPs are saying, they're really saying that "In order to have access to our markets, major US web content providers have to pay a tariff". And what does the Indian market look like? It's really piss poor right now, both figuratively and literally.
A tariff works well in a place such as the US steel market, where the US charges foreign steel makers tariffs to sell steel in the US, and the US steel makers are subsidized with the tariff. Why do foreign steel makers even bother? Because the US is huge consumer of steel, i.e. the steel market is strong, and there is money to be made. The Indian people are poor as a whole, and if there's no money to be made there, US companies won't take interest.
It makes sense that companies in India have to find ways of making money off of rich countries like ours. But charging "web content tariffs" isn't a good way, unless they can convince US web companies that putting money into the Indian economy will benefit the US in the long run, which is highly unlikely in this case.
... they use hashish.
I think you are right.
However it could work if the ISPs create a cartel and all agree to block the portal sites.
Let's turn the tables on them. Lets charge them to access anything outside of India.
Assholes.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
As all non-US ISP are already to show $greener$ to access US content or distribute their own to the US. Many people alredy pointed it out.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
What's the point with portal sites anyway? As far as I'm concerned Yahoo and MSN are nothing more than those annoying pages that certain browsers and IM tools try to point my start page to.
News coverage? news.bbc.co.uk Heck, even cnn.com is a better source of news than the portals that put Britney Spears in the headlines (note that they only push their own products).
Weather? weather.noaa.gov Why get weather information from a bunch of middlemen that think that "doppler radar" is nothing more than a catch phrase?
I admit that my start page points to the one EarthLink provides me, but not only does it tell me when I have e-mail (without having to sign up for a spam-laden free account), their USAA-branded service has information available that is just too obscure for the "real" portal sites to care about.
I realize that most internet users more resemble my mother than me, but I've seen her surf and she doesn't spend any amount of time on the start-up page, she just goes to her favorites and goes to the sites she knows to do her thing. Heck, I'm not sure she'd notice if her start page somehow got pointed to goatse.cx she spends so little time and attention on it. How do these people make money? Arthur Andersen Consulting?
I lived in India for 6 years, and my experience is that, from what the article mentions as "several of the larger ISPs", they are probably talking about government ISPs like VSNL, which are ultimately run by clueless bureaucrats and dhoti-wearing politicians (netas). Basically, progress on the internet, telephone, telecommunications, etc., has been slow to an almost standstill in many sectors in India because the government can't leave business to the businesses. This is part of India's socialist heritage from the time of Nehru.
This is one of the main problems with Linux. Everyone wants to focus on the user interface issues with Gnome and KDE but what about the rest of the applications people have to use? Many of the applications written for linux are nowhere near as friendly as applicatoins written for OSX or Windows. Eventually the Linux world is going to have to realize that the GUI is a real part of people wanting to switch over. OSX is a perfect example.
What this is all about is voice over IP vs. an overpriced state-operated telephone company. It's the old "voice over the Internet breaks the telco pricing model" issue. It's not about content at all.
Thats slightly misleading. A well provisioned web cache will save approximately 25% of your bandwidth. You'll see a document hit rate of 40-50%, and a byte savings of about 20-30% (average 45% and 25% respectively). I'm a cache vendor, I see these stats all the time on customers servers. Its really interesting actually, the size doesn't seem to matter (T1, T3 or more) the numbers are almost always identical.
Some people don't seem to believe it, but I'll say it straight out: A web cache WILL reduce bandwidth usage on a pipe by 25% (well, 25% of web traffic, that is. For most ISPs and companies, thats the vast majority of traffic on the pipe).
I like to think of the phrase "I could care less" as shorthand for "I could care less if I bothered to make the effort".
Reminds me of the spanish phrase "me vale un huevo", meaning literally "it's worth an egg to me", espressing the same sentiment as the english "I could care less". Since "huevos" is also slang for (ahem) balls, the phrase has the same kind of reverse meaning as the English slang.
Point being? Do expect inconsistencies in slang; that's part of the fun.
They could replace the ads with their own from local sponsors.
Now that would get sticky on the legal side of things.
- Esperanto
- Newspeak
- Klingon
- CowboyNeal
Love to sig!___ This sig is in boldface to emphasize its importance!
Here is what I am thinking - today the Internet is an all or nothing deal. If you have internet access, you reach ALL the websites. Why should it be that way?
Take TV, for example. There are various packages of programming that I can purchase which determine whether I see just the local networks (Free!!!) or HBO. Why can't it be the same way for internet access?
People who want to visit speciality websites need to pay a higher ISP charge than "regular" folks who only care about their email, some news and weather. The ISPs, pay some of this money to the speciality websites.
Regardless of how this is actually implemented, I think the time has come for dividing up the Net in various smaller internets.
What do you think?
All your favorite sites in one place!
Charge an H1B shipping tax so high that those job-sucking idiots stay home.
Indie Go Home!
I'm sorry, I keep seeing this and people seem to forget something. Internet traffic is by nature bidirectional.
You're assigning different values to inbound bits versus outbound bits. They have the same worth. End subscribers (whether they be content providers or users) pay the service providers ON BOTH ENDS.
Any time you have peering, it is by definition an equal exhange of bits - the direction will often be lopsides, but the number will be equal on both sides of the peering connection.
Geesh.
Fuck em. Yes, I am displaying a degenerate attitude and lack of intelligence, however, I am being honest.
India's ISPs can stick it in their collective ear
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Ah, but the minor problem here is that this is a governmental initiative and not a people intiative. It might actually be meaningful if Yahoo had physical offices in India like CocaCola or something, but they don't. Yahoo didn't go to India and say "We'd like to sell our products to you." The people are going to the source of the service, not the other way around. And if, like file sharing, those billion plus people decide that such restrictions are simply an annoyance, they'll ignore the imaginary boarders the government will erect in cyberspace. Trinagle Boy is a good place to start. If somebody finds a site they really found useful all of a sudden cut off they'll either pitch a fit or ignore the government. How many billions of those people use Yahoo-India email? What would YOUR reaction be if you suddenly couldn't get to it? Pissed? Just a little? Tell the truth! Sorry, but this just won't fly...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
They want to get paid in US $, but wont spend a dime on US goods.
waky waky... Wakeup US economy, your are employing so many foreign Indian workers or wanti to market to 'potential' customers in India, who won't give those dollars back.
We could just block Korea & China and reduce spam by 80% :P
so they're making these threatening noises. they can get it done by selectively ( time of day based) blocking and firms will support them. the app gobbling up most bandwidth is likely to be instant messengers, and webmail.
Ahem
Unfortunately, until they become a little more mature in Internet usage, that's 896,567,000 spammers. Not as bad as China or Korea (both countries are blocked completely by me), but bad enough that I have to block parts of India out.
What do their clients in India think about paying for a busted net connection?
A contract in india isn't worth a lot, and until it is they will remain a 3rd world country. If someone makes a deal and it tourns out well (take the dabhol powerplant) the contract is ignored and people are shaken down for cash. The highway robbery in india will keep it down for as long as it goes on.
They must be using a different definition of "mooted" than the one I know, which is roughly "made irrelevant". If the plans have been made irrelevant then they wouldn't seem to be very...well... relevant.
Perhaps someone meant "promoted". That's about the closes word I can come up with that makes sense in the cpntext.
This sounds eerily just like big radio, ie
emmis, clear channel,
and others, wanting record companies to payola them under the table for the privelege of playing music that the advertisers deem fit.
The internet is like a road. Most content and traffic comes from the US, but that will not be true forever (this is just a guess, dont mod me or flame me down). India is a developing country, but they shouldnt charge major companies access to their country. Are they going to act like China now and try to block it all off?
The internet should be toll free. Or, if India does not like that, their burgeoning programmer base should try to replicate this services on their own.
So, if the .com's wanted to fix this debate, all they'd have to do is block *ALL* of india's ISP's except for one. People would move ISP's, overcrowd that one, and everyone would lose.. Maybe just do this "project" for a week, it'd be really funny to see what would happen. It would have to be quite a few big .com's to get together to do this though, otherwise it wouldn't be a big deal. The chances of getting them all together is slim too.
--
Nate - nhart@NObonez.SPAMnet
Guess I'm gonna pack my bags and start up an ISP in India that doesn't block access to the large portals.
:P
Spread the word
Slashdot.. Land of nerds, trolls, and FlameBait..
.. if they think that web portals can not survive without traffic from India. They're mentality must be that they are the center of the known universe and that all worldly functions can be rendered useless via they're removal from the process.
m.mmm..myyy
If India wants to continue to develop technologically as it is already doing and if it wants to bring its poor into some semblance of plenty then India should be perfectly happy to give normal and full open Internet to its citizens as quickly as possible. Putting roadblocks in the way is only likely to slow down India's progress. It is also a really bad precedent. The Indian government does not own its people's freedom to participate on the WEB and so cannot dole it out.
If anything, they have this whole thing backwards - don't you think it would make more sense if the ISP's were paying for the websites, not the websites paying for access to the ISP's?
It would be like NBC suddenly going "You know what Tom Brokaw, you have ridden on our coattails for long enough. If you want to continue your nightly newscast, you must pay us, or we wont show it."
Granted its a little different because NBC owns that broadcast, and those ISP's dont own those websites, but its sorta similar.
Here is the denial... (check out www.naavi.org...)
Mr Amitabh, Secretary of ISAPI has in a mail sent to Naavi denied the report which appeared in Hindustan Times suggesting that some ISPs in India have suggested blocking Yahoo.com and Hotmail.com.
His full mail is reproduced below. We regret that the report of Hindustan Times caused an unnecessary turmoil in the minds of the Customers and also hurt the image of the Indian ISPs in the international markets.
Data Infosys whose name is also quoted in the article as having mooted the idea has also denied the report. Their rebuttal is also produced below.
We have also asked for the views of Hindustan Times in this regard and will post the same when received.
Naavi
July 28, 2002
Amitabh's E-Mail to Naavi:
Dear Naavi,
Thank you for the mail and your interest in the matter.
The report appeared after a Panel Discussion on 25th July and the discussion and debate included the much talked about subject of some ISPs blocking rival ISP's net telephony services. The issues thereof were discussed. This is not a new issue and it's been reported in the media widely for the last 2 months or so.
The Hindustan Times report, however, gave an entirely different twist and I think quite a scary twist fm the customer's perspective )..which had no basis at all.
Here's an industry (ISPs), who have been bleeding themselves out for the last so many years, being termed as wannabe extortionists, is stretching credulity a bit too far. And on top of that, to qoute people like Pawan Duggal, out of context and misquoting me to boot as if i support blocking popular web-sites..is something that's unacceptable.
regds
amitabh
E-Mail from Data Infosys:
Dear Sir,
This refers to the news article published in Hindustan Times and referring Data Infosys as the brainchild behind the proposal for Blocking Yahoo and Hotmail by Indian ISPs. In this regard we wish to state that Data Infosys never favour blocking of any website and the Company's name has been misquoted by the Newspaper. Data Infosys is a responsible ISP and understand that the Internet is for all. Even we are against the blocking of Net Telephony sites as done by some of the ISPs in the country.
Regards
Company Secretary
Data Infosys Ltd.,
Jaipur
www.datainfosys.com
Just use Triangle Boy. Problem solved. No entrepreneurs need apply.
[insert witty comment here]
If I were Yahoo!, I'd just create an Indian subsidiary, that way it would be domestic traffic and not international.
Just make sure you import the content from America, give it about a 10 second delay, and BOOM! you are in business.
Dog is my co-pilot.