Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
They will give a crap because in India there is ~1,000,000,000 people.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
MS, Yahoo, etc will probably just pay whatever they ask (within reason)...
It seems like a hollow threat to me. If India's ISPs block all of the major portals, then they will lose customers. The end users use the Internet to have access to content. If the Indian ISPs block the content, no more end user.
If there's a demand for these services, the customers will bug their ISPs big time about it. I don't see any reason why the portals should pay up. In fact it could be argued exactly the other way around: If it wasn't for the big portals, all those ISPs woul be out of business because nobody needs an internet line if there's no content.
Anyway, I doubt it would work. Surely the ISPs existing users have a contractual right to a "best effort" ability to send packets to and receive them from Yahoo's web server, for example? That is in fact what they are paying the ISP for. It is, in fact, the defining service that an ISP offers.
As far as new users are concerned, would you choose a) an ISP who will deny you access to web sites you want to contact, or b) one who will allow you access to anything you want? Simple market forces would mean that people would chose the ISPs which weren't attempting to extort the large portals.
Yahoo not being usable from XXXX ISP would be a much greater problem for XXXX ISP than for Yahoo.
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.
that in India there is 1,000,000,000 people. That's roughly 1/6th of the worlds population.
Okay, so all of them wont be surfing the internet. But even if 10% would that would still be 100,000,000 and imagine if only 10% of those would be surfing MSN , eBay or Yahoo! that would be 10,000,000. I bet that's worth paying for.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I know there are a lot of programmers in India and stuff, but do they really thing Yahoo and MSN will care?
Ahem.
India
1 peninsula region (often called a subcontinent) S Asia S of the Himalayas between Bay of Bengal & Arabian Sea occupied by India, Pakistan, & Bangladesh & formerly often considered as also including Burma (but not Ceylon)
2 those parts of India until 1947 under British rule or protection together with Baluchistan & the Andaman & Nicobar islands &, prior to 1937, Burma
3 country comprising major portion of peninsula; a republic within the Commonwealth of Nations; until 1947 a part of the British Empire capital New Delhi area 1,195,063 square miles (3,095,472 square kilometers), population 896,567,000
[M-W.COM]
Enough said.
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?
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?
eBay, Yahoo, et al should charge the ISPs for the privilege of presenting their content.
--Blair
wasn't there a slashdot story at one point where content providers in Norway (not sure) wanted to band together and demand a percentage of what ISP made, because "they were the reason people got on the internet".
Now it's the other way around - "we provide you with customers, so give us some money"
Very funny.
Your plan is so very old.. they are paying for this from the first day they obtained Internet conectivity from their uplinks.
If european ISP's are really that concerned with the traffic generated by portals, they should buy a few 100 Gig drives a RAID controller, download squid and setup a transparent proxy. Problem solved. On average a proxy server will save 50% of your traffic, btw these are real stats from major ISP's that run HTTP proxies. The major amount of traffic comes from P2P networks, when FastTrack was still running port 1214 traffic accounted for more then 50% of the traffic
So what if these sites doesn't pay up?
Sounds like the ISPs essentially would be screwing their own customers by disallowing them to visit popular sites despite having paid for internet access...
This ridiculous feint at getting some quick cash by the Indian ISPs will be forgotten by this time next month.
- SMJ - (It's not just a name: it's a bad aftertaste.)
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.
Indian Isp Organization (IIO): Pay or we block your portal!
MSN: Are you sure about that?
IIO: PAY US OR WE BLOCK YOU!
MSN: Block us and we block India.
IIO: OK, maybe not.
The Internet is self healing. It is designed to route around problems. Play nice children.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
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.
If anything, the sites have a better chance of collecting money from the ISPs. After all, if Yahoo/MSN etc. are not available, you are taking away one killer app (web browsing), though the other (email, provided by the ISP) would still be available. So if they are not available, why would I want an Internet connection at all?
Since the parties need each other, it is a matter of bargaining power: right now, it is about even, with a slight tilt towards the portals.
1-2 years back, Wired reported that some portals in Norway (I think) tried to bully some ISPs into a revenue-share. Wonder what came of that?!
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.
What you've seen of India on TV is mostly bullshit, I suspect.
India and China have similar large populations and similar profiles - a lot of poor, backward people (especially in rural areas) and a lot of affluent people (especially in the big cities). There's a lot of money to be made in India.
You probably have a more favourable impression of China because the government of India hasn't been as friendly to tycoons like Murdoch.
I have no idea why this is a problem. I run a couple of fairly high-trafficed sites which cater to an Indian audience and getting any money out of the folks from India is a PAIN. Most don't have access to internationally accepted credit-cards and a fair amount of traffic is from students who would not be able to afford the dollar transactions.
Why cant the ISP's say just charge those premium subscribers? For Option 1 -- Indian sites only, subscribers pay $1 / month (hypothetical) and for Option 2 -- Access to all sites including international and porno subscribers pay $50 a month.
Would be simpler than building complex legal traffic / royalty arrangement with the major portals.
heheheee, man, its they who have the soup.... 1/6 of the earth's DAMN POPULATION
Not the *Internet* population, I assure you !
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
...management at some of India's largest ISPs are smoking crack.
I hope they go forward with the plan. Reading the resulting string of articles on slashdot will be better than watching a sitcom on TV.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
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.
Sorry, but are a bunch of Indian programmers gonna buy a car from Yahoo! Autos? Or sign up for Yahoo! Personal?
If they offer a localized version of the site (which they already do for other countries, BTW), and they figure that the average Indian has enough disposable income to make it worthwhile, then I don't see why not.
Fucking computer geeks think they're the center of the damn universe....
There's no denying that.
-a
How to rationalize theft.
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.
Population: 1,029,991,145 (July 2001 est.)
According to the CIA World Factbook.
Open your book again and lookup Germany. There should be only one entry.
This story is very very shady. Note that there isn't a paper called Hindustani (note the i) Times. There's Hindustan Times and it's online version has no mention of this at all.
There have been various messages flying up and down Indian telco lists such as India-GII that this is blatently untrue. Move along, there's nothing here to see.
All weakness is within you, As is all courage.
See this comment from a list I run, by an office bearer of the ISP Association of India - the organisation which is supposedly behind this scheme.
J ul y/002003.html
http://lists.vipul.net/pipermail/silklist/2002-
Looks like we have misquoting to thank for this "story".
-- God is silent. Now if we can only get Man to shut up.
Sounds like the Indian ISP association is wholly against this scheme, so mod the parent up...
I have a hard time really caring what lame brain schemes third world nations and companies invent to give themselves their weekly foot-bullet.
The only area where I have any opinion about countries like India is when it comes to immigration. Tech firms here are exploiting everyone by either bringing foreign workers in on temporary visas as slave labor, or simply exporting the job itself to india where they can pay ten cents on the dollar compared to american wages.
The best solution I see to this is to encourage immigration. I might have more people to compete with, but I won't be competing based upon price so much. I'd rather lose my job to someone living here than lose it to someone living in Rangoon. Besides, just imagine what an influx of talent and intelligence will do for our gene pool?
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
...rod, reel, basket, and copy of Angling Times
Yep, I bought it for a whole minute or more. Then I realized that I have no reason to believe that any Indian ISP is as stupid as (say) Phil Lawlor.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
no they're not. They're going to use it to become richer, just like any company here would do. The division between the poor and the rich in that country is enormous, and paying these stupid ISPs isn't going to make it any smaller.
The food-chain in ISPs looks something like this: Customer -> Tier 3 -> Tier 2 -> Tier 1, with each level paying the layer above for access. Tier 1 ISPs are people like UUNet with global reach. Tier 2 are national or "regional" (e.g. EU, Americas, Asia-Pacific). Tier 3 are local ISPs, and customers are both individual users and hosting companies.
Actually there is nothing stopping a customer or Tier 3 ISP from signing up with a Tier 1 ISP, and many do. But the principle is the same.
There are two kinds of link an ISP can have to other ISPs: Transit and Peering. In a transit link an ISP pays a larger ISP for access to "the Internet". In other words the smaller ISP can route packets through the link to any destination and expect to receive replies via the same route. In a peering relationship two ISPs, usually in the same Tier, agree to exchange traffic, usually without payment, but with the proviso that only traffic for customers of the other ISP is to be routed through that link. You can't send traffic to B through your peering link with A (although there are sometimes mutual backup link terms in the agreement).
You can think of this in your own terms quite easily. You have a transit link with your ISP that you pay for. But if you and your neighbour exchange a lot of traffic you might string an Ethernet cable between your houses and create your own peer link. But it would be very bad manners to use that link to pinch bandwidth off your neighbour.
The market forces that created this system are very straightforward. Originally the Internet worked with free transit links, but then the people investing in global networks realised that all the smaller ISPs were getting a free ride, and so they started demanding payment. This happened around 1996-7, and you can find lots of discussion papers from that time worrying about "the balkanisation of the Internet". In fact nothing of the sort happened. Metcalfe's law saw to it that everyone found more value from being connected to an unbalkanised Internet, and the net effect (sorry) was that money flowed from you and me up to Worldcom, and much good it did them. Meanwhile the smaller ISPs found that peering arrangements helped them to cut their costs because peer traffic avoided the expensive transit routes.
Thats not to say that things are so simple in real life. Peering arrangements in particular are fraught with difficulty because it usually means negotiating with your direct competitors, and you can play all sorts of dirty tricks like "hot potato" routing (routing packets to your nearest exit point instead of the globally most efficient one). But thats the general idea.
Incidentally the economics work like this regardless of the direction of most of the bits. People who tried to analyse the Internet using telephone economics got this wrong, because with the phone its usually the caller who pays. On the Internet the "caller" is hard to identify and the rules for doing so keep changing. And in any case the issue is irrelevant. You have content providers who want to reach readers and readers who want to access content. (Peer to peer changes the numbers and locations, but not the fundamentals). Both pay ISPs to provide this service, and those ISPs then pay the next tier up, and so on.
So now we look at India, where a bunch of Tier 3 and 2 ISPs are demanding payment from Tier 1 ISPs. The Tier 1 ISPs will rightly tell them to get lost.
I suppose that the Indian ISPs (who are mostly consumer ISPs) might demand payment from content providers such as Yahoo, Slashdot and co, on the grounds that the content providers want to reach Indian eyeballs. But I don't see this flying either. Those Indian eyeballs want the content just as much as the providers want to provide it, which is why you get no-payment peering arrangements between content providers and consumers: its the flow of value that counts, not the flow of bits.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Um, check your facts...for the most part US ISPs do charge extortionate amounts to their foreign counterparts.
. ht ml
n te rnetPolicy/scottspeech.htm (scroll to slide 13 and onwards)
For instance, most Pacific Asian countries (inc Australia) get charged for line lease and data travelling both ways between that country and the US.
This is regardless of who initiated the data transfer, in other words an Australian ISP hosting a page that is viewed by someone in the US is still charged for sending data back to the USA.
I wish you guys knew how good you have it. The cost bias is one of the factors that inflate the cost of Internet connections (and ultimately broadband) high in areas outside the US.
http://www.isoc.org/oti/articles/1000/vanbeelen
http://www.noie.gov.au/projects/international/I
working link
After looking around, it seems like the original TheRegister article disclosed only partial information; the provider list is correct, but the services and the reason for blocking are not (though the effect would be to extort some money and/or partnerships with Indian ISPs).
The actual point in question was the blocking of voice cht services, which by (new) Indian law can only be offered by ISPS, due to the failure of their law makers to distinguish voice chat from IP telephony, when they legislated to permit Indian ISPs to enter the IP telephony market.
The concern appears to be that India requires a license, and requires that you be a Licensed ISP in India, to offer these services.
Here is the original Press information from the ISPAI (Internet Service Provider's Association of India) web site:
http://www.ispai.com/bs05042002.html
-- Terry
What you've seen of India on TV is mostly bullshit, I suspect.
What I have seen on TV of India is many people starving, a Hindu population that is as violently anti-Muslim as some Muslims in the region are violently anti-non-Muslim, and a military that is willing to push a Muslim country of former Indians to the point of nuclear war, because they know they will win even if the Pakistani do nuke them. You are right, it is bullshit, but unfortunately it actually is true.
India and China have similar large populations and similar profiles - a lot of poor, backward people (especially in rural areas) and a lot of affluent people (especially in the big cities). There's a lot of money to be made in India.
More than a third of the population is unable to afford an adequate diet. Only half of the population is literate. China isn't a very nice place to live for most people either, but there is money to be made there, naturally, because there is money to be made everywhere. Most of both of the two countries are existing in third-world conditions, even if a lucky few aren't. The only reason why there are a lot of people who aren't poor in India is because even a small percentage of 1,000,000,000+ people is a lot of people.
You probably have a more favourable impression of China because the government of India hasn't been as friendly to tycoons like Murdoch.
Most people in the U.S. who are old enough to remember the Tiananmen Square incident have that as their inpression of China, which isn't a very favorable impression, a less favourable opinion then of India even, and it has little if anything to do with Australian media moguls.
Best Slashdot comment ever
Suddenly, yahoo et al can't get access to China (I'm not that they could already, but at least the Chinese Govt isn't doing it as a revenue raising exercise) and there go the two biggest developing markets in the world unless you pay every ISP.
Add in a few more countries without anti-competitive behaviour laws, and there goes the internet.
I hope they don't cave in. Those sites are barely making it as they are.
-- james
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
This story is very very shady. Note that there isn't a paper called Hindustani (note the i) Times. There's Hindustan Times and it's online version has no mention of this at all.
Hindustan Times is one of the larger newspapers in india. It is the largest selling newspaper in the capital city of Delhi. I get this paper, and this news was the main headline on the front page of the newspaper a few days back.
The online versions of most of the Indian newspapers don't carry all the news items.
The solution is simple: Block the ads from those portals.
That's even worse for the portal and the ISP customers are happy.
True warriors use the Klingon Google
Indian online population: 3.3 million.
Total world population online: 580 million.
So... they probably won't care that much. It just makes it a stupid move on the part of the Indian ISPs, who are facing a cash crunch due to shrinking subscriber numbers (see the first article).
Ummm.....I'm an Indian, and guess what? I'm not a programmer....yes!!! We do exist (Indian non-Programmers, that is), even though we're a paltry 98.8% or something of the total population....
-"People want to see MSN, Yahoo, and eBay"
-"I rather doubt people want to see those sites that much, especially if offered workable alternatives."
-"In fact, it has closed down because everybody was using Yahoo auctions"
Please compare the 1st and 3rd sentences...
What makes you doubt that people would want to see those sites? People everywhere do.... Hence the popularity....Whether it's a good site or not is moot...
Carpe Canem - Seize the Dog
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.
But you can watch the 'slashdot effect' live, in action. View the error_log of the server, and see the number of hits to this missing URL.
I know this is offtopic, but just had to throw it out... :-)
Part of me is against the gating off of part of the internet (which doesn't work in the long run anyway), but part of me doesn't really care if American businesses have to kick back some dough for the privelage of gaining an Indian market. India's pretty poor, and has a buttload of people in it...if taxing America's "New Economy" helps them, more power to them. The smart ones will find ways around anyway ("triangle boy"). I suppose this would probably be against "free trade" though.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
On the whole I agree with the comments of others that this idea will probably not succeed.
Indian traffic is probably too small to matter now, but the intent of the ISP's is to reduce competition in the future in support of local ebusinesses. Quite frankly, American ecommerce companies have an enormous advantage of being first to market in their respective fields.
India's trade groups are pretty strong at blocking out international competition. In this case, they could block strictly ecommerce sites from consumers, provided that they wasn't enormous demand from consumers already for those sites (there isn't).
Under this scheme, they could allow content sites, but block the big ecommerce sites. The problem is that the line between content and ecommerce sites is being blurred. Amazon, for example, has great commentaries on books and the literary world. And yahoo/microsoft, which provide free services, also features classified advertising. Making such a rule would tend to give an advantage to sites mixing both types of content.
But don't for a moment think that Indian ISP's (or other third world countries) would simply buckle to international pressure. Indian ISP's want to make money and if blocking the site is as easy as entering an address on a routing table, then kudos to them for trying.
Such a measure could work if the government somehow codified these fees should be and ISP's were ordered to comply. Such money could be used to support national infrastructure charges (in the best case scenario) or to line officials' pockets (in the worst case scenario).
But don't fault them for trying. Actually, I kind of wonder why American ISP's didn't get this idea first.
(BY the way, if American ISP's took retaliatory measures by blocking access to Indian sites, that might unblock those sites very quickly).
You have to remember how wierd it is to view the internet in a developing country. Not only is a lot of it in English, but they probably see advertisements for dozens of American/Western companies and very little from their own country.
It's a really easy target to choose.
PS. I write about India and cyberculture on my
Asiafirst weblog.
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
First off, if not ALL the isp's go along with this, nothing stops people from switching. And even if they do go for this stupid idea, what's stopping external proxies? Its one thing to simply deny certain domains or ip address ranges, its another thing entirely to scan all text that comes over the wire to detect and block traffic from specific websites, no matter how it made it to the end user.
And who's to say that Ebay and others won't just tell the Indian ISPs to go screw themselves. Ebay doesn't exactly have much in the way of viable competition. If this goes through, they could probably turn around and demand money from the Indian ISPs instead or they'll block access. And when the ISPs own polices cause great dissent among their users, they'll be forced to pay up to return things to the way they once were.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
I've never read the Hindustan times but papers in the US print crap that isn't true some (most?) of the time...
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
Let's look at it from a legal point of view: Since portal sites like Yahoo are "in the open", i.e.: anyone can access them by simply typing their URL (or by clicking on a link of another sire), that would make them analogous to one walking past the street and seeing a sign for a business that says "Yahoo".
So, when the Indian ISPs block these sites asking for a payola, they are in essence placing their hands in front of people's eyes and chaining them to the sidewalk telling them "you cannot view that yahoo store or go in there", even though it is the citizen's right.
Now the question is, would this hold true in a court of law, and does India have a "freedom of expression" clause in its constitution to grant web surfers this right?
Um, don't the users go to the major portholes for service and not the other way around? Last I looked, I didn't see Yahoo (or anybody else) knocking on India's door to offer them their services. So what if they want a bribe. Screw em. The users will find a way around, just like in China, if for different reasons.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
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.
What's the point with portal sites anyway? As far as I'm concerned Yahoo and MSN are nothing more than those annoying pages that certain browsers and IM tools try to point my start page to.
News coverage? news.bbc.co.uk Heck, even cnn.com is a better source of news than the portals that put Britney Spears in the headlines (note that they only push their own products).
Weather? weather.noaa.gov Why get weather information from a bunch of middlemen that think that "doppler radar" is nothing more than a catch phrase?
I admit that my start page points to the one EarthLink provides me, but not only does it tell me when I have e-mail (without having to sign up for a spam-laden free account), their USAA-branded service has information available that is just too obscure for the "real" portal sites to care about.
I realize that most internet users more resemble my mother than me, but I've seen her surf and she doesn't spend any amount of time on the start-up page, she just goes to her favorites and goes to the sites she knows to do her thing. Heck, I'm not sure she'd notice if her start page somehow got pointed to goatse.cx she spends so little time and attention on it. How do these people make money? Arthur Andersen Consulting?
What this is all about is voice over IP vs. an overpriced state-operated telephone company. It's the old "voice over the Internet breaks the telco pricing model" issue. It's not about content at all.
Here is what I am thinking - today the Internet is an all or nothing deal. If you have internet access, you reach ALL the websites. Why should it be that way?
Take TV, for example. There are various packages of programming that I can purchase which determine whether I see just the local networks (Free!!!) or HBO. Why can't it be the same way for internet access?
People who want to visit speciality websites need to pay a higher ISP charge than "regular" folks who only care about their email, some news and weather. The ISPs, pay some of this money to the speciality websites.
Regardless of how this is actually implemented, I think the time has come for dividing up the Net in various smaller internets.
What do you think?
All your favorite sites in one place!
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.
India's ISPs can stick it in their collective ear
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Ah, but the minor problem here is that this is a governmental initiative and not a people intiative. It might actually be meaningful if Yahoo had physical offices in India like CocaCola or something, but they don't. Yahoo didn't go to India and say "We'd like to sell our products to you." The people are going to the source of the service, not the other way around. And if, like file sharing, those billion plus people decide that such restrictions are simply an annoyance, they'll ignore the imaginary boarders the government will erect in cyberspace. Trinagle Boy is a good place to start. If somebody finds a site they really found useful all of a sudden cut off they'll either pitch a fit or ignore the government. How many billions of those people use Yahoo-India email? What would YOUR reaction be if you suddenly couldn't get to it? Pissed? Just a little? Tell the truth! Sorry, but this just won't fly...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
However the term "Middle class" is subjective.
In the US, someone who considers himself "middle class" owns his home, can afford DSL or cable and has a reasonable expectation to send his children to college.
In India or Mexico, someone who can afford that is definetely considered in the upper-middle-class region.
No sig for the moment.
We could just block Korea & China and reduce spam by 80% :P
In the UK, most people can afford cable or DSL, owns their own home, and don't need to spend their own money to send their children to college.
quoting someone else: Depends. An auction site needs to build some kind of connected market to be attractive. EBay US is mostly uselss for me in Germany, since it doesn't establish German/European areas. So, I venture to guess, it is for Indians.
As far as I know Ebay Germany is doing OK right now.
A contract in india isn't worth a lot, and until it is they will remain a 3rd world country. If someone makes a deal and it tourns out well (take the dabhol powerplant) the contract is ignored and people are shaken down for cash. The highway robbery in india will keep it down for as long as it goes on.
If India wants to continue to develop technologically as it is already doing and if it wants to bring its poor into some semblance of plenty then India should be perfectly happy to give normal and full open Internet to its citizens as quickly as possible. Putting roadblocks in the way is only likely to slow down India's progress. It is also a really bad precedent. The Indian government does not own its people's freedom to participate on the WEB and so cannot dole it out.
If anything, they have this whole thing backwards - don't you think it would make more sense if the ISP's were paying for the websites, not the websites paying for access to the ISP's?
It would be like NBC suddenly going "You know what Tom Brokaw, you have ridden on our coattails for long enough. If you want to continue your nightly newscast, you must pay us, or we wont show it."
Granted its a little different because NBC owns that broadcast, and those ISP's dont own those websites, but its sorta similar.
Which is why the UK is considered a Rich, First World country, thank you very much for your comment.
Let me remind you that we are talking about countries like India, Brasil, China or Mexico, which may have people with good technical skills, but where the divide between rich and poor is abysmal and there's not much of a middleclass as you understand it.
Let me illustrate, here in Mexico a Software Engineer fresh out of a public university can only get a job that pays 600-1000 USD a month, depending on luck and connections.
That's why people like Miguel de Icaza leave for the US and become parte of the brain-drain.
That's why people in India or Brasil do the same, whenever they can.
No sig for the moment.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Yes, that was kind of my point. The previous poster was applying a "USian" view of middle class. I was trying to illustrate that there are other countries where the US idea of middle class is considered fairly unusual - *most* people in the UK have the same level of privilege as the US middle classes. Which suggests that the US has a large underclass, who are poorer than their equivalents in the UK.
The gist of it is, you can't apply a First World economy class system to a developing country.