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

Re:Sheya, right, as if

[TomServo]

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.