Net neutrality is an illusion: CDNs [telecom]

All the furor over cable companies trying to sell "premium" connectivity, and yesterday's FCC announcement that they'll allow this, ignores the fact that content providers with deep pockets have long had ways to get better connectivity to end users. They're called Content Delivery Networks, either purchased from service providers like Akamai and Limelight, or done in-house by Google and Amazon. These companies have large networks of servers distributed all around the Internet, located on most of the large ISPs and/or at connectivity points between ISPs. When users go to a site, the network automatically directs them to the closest server, to minimize latency and provide better connections.

In other words, if you wanted to provide a better quality service, you just bought more servers and connections from multiple providers. The only difference the latest decision makes is that now you have another option: pay the ISP for priority routing. The Internet has never really been a level playing field -- if you could only afford basic web hosting, you've been at a disadvantage.

So what's the big deal?

Reply to
Barry Margolin
Loading thread data ...

Per Barry Margolin:

I'd say it's the issue of an informed consumer and legitimate forms of competition.

Instead of users paying extra for bandwith, content suppliers are paying or not paying basically "under the table"... so a consumer does not know if his connection to a given site is poor because of his ISP or because the site isn't paying anybody off.

Same situation as the priority routing thing... but now it's official: institutionalized.... and, I would expect, on the fast track to be applied to every mom-and-pop operation as ISPs maximize profits.

Sites with big pockets but not necessarily the best product are going to tend to dominate while small providers who can't pay the freight but might have a better product are going to be frozen out as customers try to connect but get very poor transfer speeds.

Seems like the continuation of what I see as a sort of natural law: power wants to coalesce. The rich get richer, the big squash the small... the big get bigger, and eventually we wind up with very few people running a very large show.

I think we have already passed a sort of tipping point where corporations have become big enough to acquire most of the legislature most of the time and democracy is fast becoming an illusion.

Witness the "Too Big To Fail" banks. In spite of Congress' posturing and profiling those banks are now bigger than ever and they *know* they'll get bailed out next time.

Reply to
Pete Cresswell

Cabling-Design.com Forums website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.