[PookztA]

link: http://www.kansascity.com/2010/08/05/2132310_possible-agreement-between-google.html?storylink=omni_popular

[cosmicvibrations]

A couple people on the mailing list I'm on was talking about how this is blown out of proportion and etc. They're knowledgeable on the topic of the internet… I don't know much, but I do think this is grain-of-salt material.

[Pauldo]

I have found it common through out the various psychedelic/alternative community lists that I'm on to find alarmists responses to topics such as this one.

[nodsamadhi]

it is painfully obvious from reading this article (and others like it) how little people understand about network infrastructure

large content providers and ISPs already pay a premium for traffic delivery – they pay it through the cost of their infrastructure. all of the routers, fiber optic cables, servers, optical transport equipment, maintenance staff, etc. necessary to move from pushing 10gbps to 100 gbps are not cheap.

in addition, pretty much every service provider pays ISPs to take their traffic already – and rates vary widely from agreement to agreement. various factors affect this price, including the size of the ISP's network (level3 can command a steeper price than palmettonet, for instance) and the desirability of the content provider's content (many customers want to get to msn, yahoo, google, nytimes, cnn, bbc, etc and will bitch at their ISP if service is poor).

there is a *lot* of money going around the networking world1, and a *lot* of agreements made between most of the 'big players' and/or 'medium players' – in order for anybody to reach shit on another network (e.g. you at home on comcast reaching the touch samadhi server in the colo in virginia, or the slightly-more-oldschool example of a verizon user calling a us cellular user) there must be one (or often more) networks between them connecting together, and those connections frequently involve one party paying the other some amount of money.

the wikipedia description of peering is a good place to start educating yourself about how some of this works, or perhaps the entries about colocation facilities (often called carrier hotels) and tier 1 networks.

you could also watch the video i posted in april or the other article i posted in the same thread

edit: and this doesn't even begin to touch on companies like akamai who offer globally distributed content distribution/mirroring services to help bring content (physically and logically) closer to the end-users to offer lower-latency connections to popular websites. fun fact for the paranoid fringe: one of akamai's co-founders was an mit grad student who was born in the US but raised in isreal, served in the IDF for longer than his mandatory 2 years, and died on one of the planes that was hijacked in NY in 2001.

1 – sadly, very little of this money goes to my bank account 🙁

[nodsamadhi]

and now the sekrit is out:

http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/08/joint-policy-proposal-for-open-internet.html

[PookztA]

and now the sekrit is out:

http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/08/joint-policy-proposal-for-open-internet.html

thank you for this, Nod

[Author]

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