Btw, I don’t think there is anything in Snowe-Dorgan that would prevent the telco’s from putting 20,000 servers all over globe and competing with Akamai in a fair manner.

http://www.pantherexpress.net/

http://www.savvis.net/corp/Products+Services/Digital+Content+Services/

http://www.vitalstream.com/content/index.html

- They have placed a bunch of servers (20,000) all over the internet (71 countries) for the purpose of distrubuted processing and optimised routing of data for their customers (Yahoo! presumably is their bread and butter).
- They do not have any special priortization tag provided to them by ISP’s to speed up content delivery over the “last mile” to end users.
- They have to go over shared internet traffic like everybody else (when not using one of their many smaller private networks) with the only advantage being improved routing not better prioritization.

From what I can see, without Snowe-Dorgan Akamai will be charged a toll fee along with all the other large content/service providers who can afford to pay and I promise you Akamai would pay (they would go out of business if they didn’t). The big telco’s should not be given carte blanche discriminatory QoS no matter how many “neat” things they can do with it. Its too much power.

Also, how competitive is the “on-ramp” market? Does Akamai have competition (so that Yahoo would have an alternative provider if Akamai turned them down)? Can Internet content providers create their own on-ramps (like I think Google has)?

And do these on-ramps effectively solve the jitter and latency problems with time-sensitive content, even as the Internet becomes more congested?

I don’t see that as the end of the Internet as we know it, frankly.

Like I said, the telco’s would most likely not block much access to content/services regardless of any law making it illegal since doing so to any great extent would cause a huge public backlash. However lets compare the wording of the cope act vs. snowe-dorgan to determine which one offers better protection for the consumer:

Snowe-Dorgan: “`(1) not block, interfere with, discriminate against, impair, or degrade the ability of any person to use a broadband service to access, use, send, post, receive, or offer any lawful content, application, or service made available via the Internet;”

COPE act: “To encourage broadband deployment and preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of the public Internet, consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of
their choice.”

Hmmm… I wonder which one I would want if I was a consumer that had just had a site blocked by my ISP?

Blocking sites is an afterthought. The telco’s are focused on having a legal right to use a discriminatory QoS so they can blackmail large content/service providers, play favorites with competing services (esp. if they own the competing service lol) and decide the fate of startup innovators. All good for the ISP’s (and perhaps for companies developing discriminatory QoS architecture) but all bad for the rest of us.

The COPE Act makes it a crime to block access to any legal web site, and so does the Stevens bill.

You speak as if ISP’s operate within a competitive environment and would actually have to worry about losing business if they did block content or services. The main thing ISP’s would worry about in blocking a site or service would be a strong public outcry that resulted in NN laws being passed. Its not as if there is no precedent for ISP’s blocking content however I don’t think ISP’s would block very much content but I really don’t want them to have the legal right to do so.

ISP’s don’t have to deny access to a service or web site, all they have to
do is stick it in the slow lane so that their own product or those that can afford to pay the fast lane toll have a huge advantage. Google and the other internet giants will not be overly hurt by the cope act cause they can afford to pay for the fast lane. Innovative startup companies can ill afford to pay a fast lane toll.

ISPs don’t make their money by denying access to web sites.