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."

Comments

Won't work

[csnydermvpsoft]

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.

Re:Won't work

[Graymalkin]

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.

Re:Funny and sad....

[big.ears]

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.

Re:Lets not forget...

[guttentag]

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."