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The thing is - if the BBC pay they're being utterly stupid "Your ISP doesn't support the BBC IPlayer - please let them know about it here" strikes me as a pre
by crnflke 16y ago
The thing is - if the BBC pay they're being utterly stupid
"Your ISP doesn't support the BBC IPlayer - please let them know about it here"
strikes me as a pretty obvious marketing tool.
In exactly the same way, not providing access to youtube would probably be the most moronic thing most ISPs could do.
If the BBC pay anybody else beyond their own bandwidth costs, the top brass should be sacked.
- eftpotrm 16y agoBut.... that only works for the big boys. Imagine how YouTube would've got going if this rule had been around in 2005 - they'd have been strangled at birth by individual ISPs each demanding their own contract and their own payment. What we have here is fundamentally ISPs trying to run a private toll booth by claiming that 'others are profiting from their network'. Not at all true. The BBC, YouTube, whoever, all pay their outgoing bandwidth bills to their network provided. I pay my incoming bandwidth bill to my network provider (and outgoing, for that matter, when I put my content provider hat on and legally upload to various sites). All parties are getting correctly paid in proportion to the value of the services that they are delivering, but the ISPs know they are a critical man-in-the-middle and can potentially extract value from this proposition in exactly the same way that rebel armies set up 'checkpoints' in territories they control. ISPs should be ashamed that they're trying it. The Conservative Party should be utterly ashamed that they think it's a good idea and I plan to write to my local (Conservative) MP to inform him of this.