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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."
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?
So, in other words, what you're saying is, you realize there's a market there, yet you've failed to grasp the way most of these sites & ISP's have worked so far.
People want to see MSN, Yahoo, and eBay. Take that away from them, and they will find alternative methods to connect to the Internet.
Especially in the case of eBay, this will mean near certain death for the current India ISPs. eBay is doing fine as it is, and if my former company's foray into the international market, www.etoys.co.uk, is any lesson of the past, they will not make any effort to go international on their own. If Indian ISPs block it, some smart entreprenuer will offer some sort of alternative connection that doesn't block those sites.
Also, a statement of population has little to nothing to do with a) how many of those people are on the internet and b) how many of them having spending cash to support your advertisers/sellers. Though I have never been to India, I'm going to assume that given the number of Indian workers who have come to America to find good paying jobs and the tales I've heard of poverty in India, there's not a HUGE money market in India right now that any of the three aforementioned sites are going to care at all about.
Still, I'm very impressed that you found the population.
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.
You're right about the average salary, but you also have to take into account that population figure, currently estimated at a billion people, and bear in mind that the variances are huge.
I spent a few months in India at the start of this year, and one of the (many) things that boggles the mind is the sheer variety of everything, the wild contrasts. In India, there are millions of people who live in the street, who live under blue polythene tarps, who live in mud (well, cowdung, usually) huts and if they're lucky, get to break rocks by the roadside in the ferocious heat to feed themselves and their families. But the 250 million people of the 'middle classes' as they are referred to in India are, in many cases, doing extremely well. As in cellphones, Mercedes cars, designer suits, laptops, satellite TV, and all those other appurtenances of a modern 'western' lifestyle. In Bangalore alone, there are reckoned to be maybe 100,000 rupee millionaires (at about 45 Rs per US dollar). And then there are the industrialists, the Bollywood people, and let's not even start on those who've become staggeringly rich through the back-channel of baksheesh.
So the minority of rich people in India, and the relative handful of very rich people, still represent a huge market, and what a lot of them want is the 'american' lifestyle - McDonalds, Starbucks, Tommy Hilfiger and so forth.
It's all about that figure of a billion people. There's a huge amount of money to be made in India, make no mistake.
Which is why, as a tourist, it's so hard to get your head around the lepers, the polio victims, the people whose parents cut off their feet in childhood to give them a glimmer of hope of a living as a street beggar.
TomV