Network Neutrality Threatened In Norway

eirikso writes, "In June 2006 NextGenTel, one of the biggest broadband providers in Norway, decided to deliberately limit the bandwidth from the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. The CEO of NextGenTel, Morten Ågnes, told the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten that they will give priority to the content providers who pay for better bandwidth. The Consumer Council of Norway takes this as a serious threat to network neutrality in Norway and wants to call a meeting with the biggest broadband providers in Norway to find a solution."

Re:Neo-coms

[spathi-wa]

I am posting the parent a second time (parent not my post) with easier to understand labels.

The examples may be poor but they only serve an illustrative purpose.

Parent post follows:



I don't quite think you understand the issue.

There are four parties involved.
A. The content provider [e.g. YouTube]
B. The content provider's ISP / Hosting provider, whatever [e.g. Comcast]
C. The consumer [e.g. You]
D. The consumer's ISP (in this case NextGenTel) [e.g. AOL]

Note - [YouTube] is _NOT_ a customer of [AOL].

If [YouTube] wants to serve more content at higher speeds, no problem, they pay [Comcast] more money.
If [You] wants to get more content at higher speeds, again no problem, they pay [AOL] more money.
No one has any problem with that concept.

The problem is when [AOL] decides that they can extort money out of [YouTube], by throttling the traffic between [You] and [YouTube] unless [YouTube] pays them some money - regardless of the fact that [AOL] doesn't actually provide any service to [YouTube]. They try to use the justification that with there being so much high bandwidth content around that they can't handle the load anymore, so someone has to pay. But they gloss over the fact that someone _IS_ paying: [You], the customer that actually requested the content from [YouTube] in the first place.
If [You]'s internet habits are really costing [AOL] money, then they should be charging [You] directly, not charging the sites they visit - that's just insane.

I don't know how any of these companies think they can possibly justify it - they already have the means to cover their costs, it's not the content providers' fault that the ISPs are greedy enough to try to charge coming and going.