Sir Tim enters the fray on net neutrality

Tim Berners-Lee warns of the dangers of a two-tier internet.

The telecoms companies don’t really have a leg to stand on here, I don’t think. I’ve heard them complain that companies like Google and Skype are making lots of money from customers on their networks, and they’re not getting a share of it. But they are, of course. The whole reason people want to buy their broadband services is that there are companies like Google and Skype out there.

And that’s not counting the fact that those companies are already paying for their bandwidth at the other end. A recent estimate put YouTube‘s connection costs at $1M/month. So if service provider X is concerned, for example, that they failed to win YouTube’s contract, but they’re handling lots of traffic to and from YouTube’s site, they should sort it out with the other service providers concerned, not simply try and aim at the people for whom they feel the most jealousy.

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-29 Comments

It must be very tempting for the telco’s once they have Narus’s http://www.narus.com/ equipment installed to start messing about with all those Skype packets…..

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