Tortoise For Sale

With net neutrality being an ongoing debate, another angle has just hit me as being open to abuse. The fear people have is about the well known, rich corporate sites being able to pay the ISPs for extra bandwidth, making those sites load quicker for their visitors. Those who can't afford to pay are left quite literally on the slow lane. Start ups doing anything bandwidth intensive don't stand a chance. What happens if Company A pays extra to restrict the bandwidth of Company B?

Imagine if Google paid extra to ensure that all visitors on AT&T who went to Yahoo got served at dial up speeds. That would affect people's perception of Yahoo negatively and they wouldn't know why, therefore it'd help Yahoo's competitors, including Google. Yahoo would then need to cough up money to AT&T to counter the effect, that's assuming they track it down to the fact that they're being hobbled by a deal between Google and AT&T. If they do pay up, what are Google paying extra for?

Imagine a board meeting at Microsoft where they see a steady increase in demand for Zimbra, and decrease in demand for their own Exchange servers. It'd be easy for them to pay extra to limit Zimbra's site down to a crawl, making Zimbra look bad, and very likely loosing them a lot of potential customers. Companies like Microsoft can absorb costs like this to kill off a competitor, specially when they can jack the prices up later to compensate when the customer has no choice but to use their products if they want those services.

It's not just websites that'd be effected with a web browser either. Imagine if Apple paid extra to restrict Ubuntu.com to a crawl. This would affect their repos and mirrors too, which means updates and distribution is heavily damaged. The internet is a great leveller in allowing small companies or individuals to compete and make a living along side the mega rich corps who avoid more in tax in a single year than most of us will ever see in our lifetimes. Without other streaming hosts I couldn't do my screencasts.

On the other hand it could be a point of distinction in ISPs, if BT say they're happy to bend over for the highest fee, their customers can choose to switch ISPs, and tell BT why they're switching. If enough people do that, the ISPs won't make anywhere near enough in fees to make up for the loss of regular revenue to other ISPs from people who have left.

It's a numbers game, if people abandon an ISP who does offer a paid superhighway, then the companies who want to pay for the service won't be having as much of an effect, which means they won't pay as much for it. If the subscriber base before starting was say 5 million, that's potentially 5 million people they either speed up to their own sites, or slow down to their competition. If 3 million leave because of that policy, that leaves a potential target of 2 million to speed up or slow down.

It's also a selling point, as people pass around the "good ISPs" who don't sell out, who will gain kudos as well as previously happy customers who jumped ship from the "bad ISPs" who have sold us out. Word of mouth is very important, backlashes can hurt, specially where it involves withdrawing custom and therefore profits.

In the UK there is a decent number of ISPs of varying qualities, coverages and prices. I'd expect plenty of them are ready for the influx of new customers if the large ISPs are stupid enough to go ahead and sell their users out. I'd imagine that some of them are secretly hoping it happens.

What does this mean for how ISPs advertise their speeds? I'd imagine they'd have to say "up to 8mb except Yahoo, which is up to 10k" After all if all of your online contacts are within the Yahoo network, you're relying on that service being snappy and unimpeded. That ISP is no good for you if your bandwidth is tight enough that you can't do a simple voice chat with someone.

Are people expected to compare restricted sites or services for their prospective ISPs, in addition to all the other comparisons when choosing one? Is there an opening for a comparisons website which lets you search for sites you use a lot, and recommends an ISP that either doesn't slow it down or one that slows it down the least? Would that site then be targeted for the tortoise treatment to try and discourage people from being empowered by seeing just who sold you out to who.