Broadband Extortion Act
Many of you may or may not be aware of the struggle by Internet Service Providers to try and slow down your broadband internet connection whenever and however they feel like it, then their plan to turn around and shake down content providers like YouTube, Google, and more for big bucks in order for you to access those web sites at full speed. In the real world, we call this a protection racket, but when you have a business license and spend millions upon millions of dollars on lobbying on the local, state, and national level, they call it a business model!
The New York Times posted an article about how slowly, amazingly, it seems that the FCC is moving past its usual behavior of rubber stamping the wet dreams of the telecom industry and actually is threating to lay down some ground rules so at least this extortion at gun point will be somewhat orderly.
We feel really strongly about this topic (as you might be able to tell) as Telecom companies charge hosting companies like us an arm and a leg already for bandwidth costs so that no matter what traffic we’re getting, you get your site in just a couple milliseconds. It’s pretty hard to choke down the idea that not only should we pay what we do already to them, but now we get the privilege of paying MORE for basically providing the same level of service we provide our customers already. And to make matters worse, they want those negotiations to happen on a “per company” basis, so we’d have to negotiate specific deals with each ISP like Comcast, AOL, BellSouth, Qwest, AT&T, etc. in order to continue to keep the level of service. As you can imagine, each company would have different pricing, different terms, different bandwidth minimums and maximums, and minor contract stipulations. Yeah, I think we’ll pass on all that garbage folks, thanks but no thanks.
Fortunately, fellow Internet content providers aren’t taking this sitting down, and have organized a broad and pretty effective movement called the Save The Internet Foundation. Check out their website for more specifics and see how you can help.
Tags: broadband, extortion, FCC, hosting, internet, ISP, net neutrality, save the internet, telecom
