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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."
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.
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.
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.
This victimizes the users. Yahoo, MSN, et al. could care less.
Not only that, but since these portals are probably losing money for every non-western world click-through because their advertisers only want to advertise in North America or Europe, the sites would probably gladly allow their url to be blocked in India.
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?
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.
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.
- India has 2.2 telephone lines per 100 citizens
- 0.4% of the population uses the Internet, not 10%
- high poverty levels are limiting Web access to the few that can afford it
- "Shopping is still considered a family duty in India, so online shopping may not be as popular as it is in the West"
U.S. tech firms are flocking to India for developers because they will work for about what a Silicon Valley developer pays in rent (this I've heard in-person from developers who were flown to the U.S. for several weeks of training before being sent back -- a lot of them are brilliant, but they have to take what the market in India offers because they can't stay in the U.S.). If that's any indication of the economic state of India, I doubt eBay is that desperate to reach the Indian market.Yahoo isn't going to pay some smart-ass ISP for the priviledge of allowing Yahoo to distribute its already free content.
And MSN will laugh at them: "You want us to pay how much? OK, but we're invoking the terms of our EULA that allows us to remotely control your systems."
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.
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.
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.
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.
I, on the other hand, *have* been to India. And the old adage is true - never assume... People come from India to work here for much the same reason as people come from Europe or other First World countries.
India is the largest consumer market on the planet. They have the largest middle-class and that middle-class has extensive access to the internet. Heck, even the folks living in the slums know where the nearest internet cafe is.
The basic fact is that Indians surf the internet. And sites like Yahoo! know that and have even gone so far as to create India-specific sub-sites. Now the enterprising major ISPs in India think they can cash in on that. What will happen remains to be seen, but suffice it to say that they aren't going to say 'Sheya, right, as if'.
Oh, and incidentally the population of India is actually 1.1 Billion as of February 2002.