Brian, Actually the document I referenced is also around 9 years old - so even then we were having a Fine Debate about settlement systems in this industry. The introduction of "Content" into this debate has also been interesting with the earliest intersection of the two groups (ISPs and content factories) resulting in the claims of "you have to pay me" coming from the content industry and being directed to the IP access providers, while the precise opposite is the case today. (Some reflections arising from the first set of encounters are at http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2001-06/2001-06-content.html if anyone is vaguely interested in such things!) Content was, and remains, a distinct overlay economy and making claims that content providers should pay ISPs for the shortcomings in the ISP's own network engineering are around as specious as earlier claims that that ISPs should pay content providers for content that their customers may well have been completely uninterested in! (Bundling service and infrastructure, in whatever form, also strikes me as yet another reprise of that 'convergence' nonsense that has been inflicted on this industry for some decades now, primarily by folk looking desperately for monopolistic relief from the harsh realities of a highly competitive deregulated communications industry.) regards, Geoff At 02:02 AM 26/03/2006, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
Geoff, things were indeed different then, as long distance bandwidth costs were a serious concern. That has changed. I think the fact that content providers who are paid for that content don't (in effect) pay for the congestion that they cause hasn't changed. But mainly I was interested to see PHB making arguments quite close to the ones I made ten years ago. Brian
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