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India's ISPs Want Payola from Big Portals

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the tell-you-one-thing-slashdot-ain't-payin dept.

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."

7 of 338 comments (clear)

  1. Won't work by csnydermvpsoft · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Won't work by Graymalkin · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You're kidding right? Do you think an portal site paying out dough to ISPs is not going to pass on the cost to its customers? Did you just get here on the slow boat or something?

      If a portal like Yahoo had to pay money to reach their users they would just stop any and all free services. How the fuck are they supposed to be profitable with little to no revenues from advertisements, operational overhead, plus tariffs they'd have to pay to ISPs. Where in the positive cashflow in that situation? I'll give you a hint, there is none. ISPs aren't going to charge end users any less. The data capacity of the fiber in the US has risen emensely in the past seven years but the price of internet access has remained relatively fixed.

      This is a stupid idea. Portals providing free services to users are not going to fork over money in order to access the ISP's users. If anything they will in return charge ISPs for their services going out to their network and the net change in cash will be 0. All charging tolls does is piss off users. Like the other poster said, people would switch to the one ISP that didn't block access. Likely portals would only allow access from the ISP that wasn't acting like an assclown anyways. If the one ISP charged too much thse customers would go to the next ISP that allowed access to anything and had low rates. You'll notice this pan has no steam behind it because there isn't universal support for the idea. Without a giant cartel of ISPs the plan has no way of working. In a service oriented business the cartel would last as long as it would take for a single upstart to allow free cheap access to everything.

      --
      I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
    2. Re:Won't work by WNight · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The internet is all about the content and the people at the other ends. Your ISP is *just* a wire.

      I use email, but I get it through the same company I have hosting my domain because my home provider (rogers cable -> rogers@home -> shaw@home -> shaw cable) has made me change my email account five or six times. If someone else came along and offered the same service they did at a buck less a month, I'd switch. They're just a commodity.

      Even google, as much as I like their service, doesn't actually offer any content themselves (except perhaps the usenet archives) and if they went away the net as a whole would carry on. People would just go back to bookmarking.

      Yahoo and sites that offer content and/or host private content, are a big part of the net for me. If my ISP blocked them I'd cancel my service the same day. But, if an ISP started playing games with Yahoo, I'd stick with Yahoo (if, theoretically I had a Yahoo email address) even if they blackholed that provider.

      So, if Yahoo and India fight, India loses. Nobody has patience for companies that try to blackmail others.

      And really, the peopel of India need the net more than the net needs them. As such, their ISPs will give this up fairly quickly when their customers start bitching about wanting access to everyone that blocks them.

  2. Doubtful by jhunsake · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I doubt they will pay, because that would set a bad precendent, and then they'd be beholden to other countries as well.

  3. Re:Funny and sad.... by big.ears · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. This would be the final dagger... by MrByte420 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?
  5. Re:Lets not forget... by guttentag · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Some points to note:
    • 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."