GerardM wrote:
Hoi,
The American company BellSouth Corp. wants to have organisations pay
transport fees for the content they deliver over the Internet.
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story.asp?guid=%7B02432D2D-1EE0-4037-A15F-5…
They have even the affront to say that the Internet end users should
welcome this.
I don't think this is going to be as bad as it appears. They are trying
to charge providers for Quality of Service preferences over other
internet traffic. In other words, if you have a time-critical download
you can pay Bell South extra money to make sure their network pipeline
will carry your content instead of non-paying customers. Or for video
delivery to get an extra boost in reliability when being sent over the net.
If this happens I'm sure the Foundation will get some letters describing
the services of Bell South, this is not Bell South saying that Wikipedia
will not be carried on their network unless the Wikimedia Foundation
pays a delivery charge to Bell South customers. The Wikipedia will come
through just fine, although from time to time you may find that your
connection to Wikipedia content may be still slower than normal from
time to time, and this time your ISP is to blame, not the Wikimedia servers.
When sites like Wikipedia are completely stopped from service, I
guarentee this sort of thing will end and get a host of complaints from
the Bell South customers themselves.
--
Robert Scott Horning