{"id":541190,"date":"2010-04-22T15:59:38","date_gmt":"2010-04-22T19:59:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techdirt.com\/articles\/20100420\/1241319115.shtml"},"modified":"2010-04-22T15:59:38","modified_gmt":"2010-04-22T19:59:38","slug":"now-apparently-its-not-just-content-providers-that-are-getting-a-free-ride-on-broadband-networks-but-consumers-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/541190","title":{"rendered":"Now, Apparently It’s Not Just Content Providers That Are Getting A Free Ride On Broadband Networks, But Consumers Too"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of US telcos’ favorite talking points is the “free ride”<\/a> that Google and other content providers get on their networks. It’s fundamentally wrong, since Google and others obviously pay their bandwidth bills, but it’s also conceptually flawed, as telco execs seem to think it’s their networks, rather than the content which travels over it, that consumers value. The stupidity isn’t bounded by this country’s borders, though, with the head of a UK broadband-via-satellite provider saying that “Neither consumers or providers are bearing the cost”<\/a> of data traffic over broadband networks. With that, we’d like to extend our usual challenge<\/a> to the exec: if neither consumers or content providers are paying, how about paying their bandwidth bills for a month?<\/p>\n

The exec contends that broadband providers will all eventually move to usage-based pricing, and in a letter to the Financial Times, says that when they do, “content free loaders will suddenly find that demand falls dramatically”<\/a>. Perhaps it’s just a typo, and he meant to say “broadband providers will suddenly find that demand falls dramatically”? Once again, the exec fails to understand that people don’t buy network access from his company just for the sake of it, they buy it for access to content. If he, or any other provider, starts putting walls up between consumers and the content they want to access, whether through walled gardens or usage-based pricing (really just a code word for “much higher fees”), they will reduce the value of their customers’ connections, and subsequently what they’ll pay for it. So if the end result of a shift to usage-based pricing is decreased usage — and subsequently no real change in providers’ revenues — what good is the shift?<\/p>\n

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One of US telcos’ favorite talking points is the “free ride” that Google and other content providers get on their networks. It’s fundamentally wrong, since Google and others obviously pay their bandwidth bills, but it’s also conceptually flawed, as telco execs seem to think it’s their networks, rather than the content which travels over it, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6722,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-541190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6722"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=541190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541190\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=541190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=541190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=541190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}