Did Internet Founders Actually Anticipate Paid, Prioritized Traffic?

Fri Sep 17 16:50:13 UTC 2010

On 9/17/2010 11:43 AM, Drew Weaver wrote:
>> How would you feel if you paid for priority access to hulu.com via this means, only to see>your carrier de-prioritize that traffic because they're getting a check from Netflix?
>
> Isn't this where "competition/may the best provider win" comes into play?
>

That argument may not work, as there are many non-competitive 
jurisdictions.

Of course, the non-compete areas aren't necessarily where a content 
provider would pay for such a service. Content provider must see value 
in the higher class service, which generally means they send a lot of 
traffic to where they are paying, which implies a lot of customers on 
the ISP side, which implies a high probability that we are talking 
metropolitan areas where there is more competition (or a massive NSP 
which will have a mix of rural and metro).

Jack