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."
I know there are a lot of programmers in India and stuff, but do they really thing Yahoo and MSN will care?
Ahem.
India
1 peninsula region (often called a subcontinent) S Asia S of the Himalayas between Bay of Bengal & Arabian Sea occupied by India, Pakistan, & Bangladesh & formerly often considered as also including Burma (but not Ceylon)
2 those parts of India until 1947 under British rule or protection together with Baluchistan & the Andaman & Nicobar islands &, prior to 1937, Burma
3 country comprising major portion of peninsula; a republic within the Commonwealth of Nations; until 1947 a part of the British Empire capital New Delhi area 1,195,063 square miles (3,095,472 square kilometers), population 896,567,000
[M-W.COM]
Enough said.
Your plan is so very old.. they are paying for this from the first day they obtained Internet conectivity from their uplinks.
It already happens. All US telcos and ISPs refuse to peer with non-US providers, arguing only US traffic has any value. Non-US providers already get reamed in exactly the way you describe.
Population: 1,029,991,145 (July 2001 est.)
According to the CIA World Factbook.
Open your book again and lookup Germany. There should be only one entry.
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.
umm they do pay. just like you and I pay for net access. India's access to the internet backbone is not part of some US aid package.
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.
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
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
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.
Indian online population: 3.3 million.
Total world population online: 580 million.
So... they probably won't care that much. It just makes it a stupid move on the part of the Indian ISPs, who are facing a cash crunch due to shrinking subscriber numbers (see the first article).
-"People want to see MSN, Yahoo, and eBay"
-"I rather doubt people want to see those sites that much, especially if offered workable alternatives."
-"In fact, it has closed down because everybody was using Yahoo auctions"
Please compare the 1st and 3rd sentences...
What makes you doubt that people would want to see those sites? People everywhere do.... Hence the popularity....Whether it's a good site or not is moot...
Carpe Canem - Seize the Dog
Looks like another register "story". THIS STORY
IS FALSE.
From a mailing list of Indian ISP's:
------------------ begin quote -----------
> This reminds me of the "Modem Tax" of early 90s in India, probably less
> because it's conceptually similar, but more because it's equally retarded.
>
> Pay up, or you're blocked: Indian ISPs tell US megasites
> By Andrew Orlowski in London
> Posted: 30/07/2002 at 15:48 GMT
>
> America's biggest content providers could face a toll to enter
> India cyberspace, if plans mooted by the Indian ISP trade
> association bear fruit.
The ISPAI is not split on the issue. On this issue, the ISPAI speaks with one voice: there is
absolutely no intention of blocking Yahoo,
Hotmail, eBay or any other popular site.
The article is pure bullshit.
cheers,
Divya
------------------ end quote -----------