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incrediBILL - 6:54 pm on Aug 9, 2010 (gmt 0)
tired of letting 50% of their bandwidth costs go free to google
That's a huge fallacy because the bandwidth is being paid for and used by their customers.
Likewise, Google buys and pays for it's own bandwidth as well, just like any other site on the web.
If their customers don't access Google (Youtube), they'll access something else (Hulu), that's the very nature of running an internet service whether you like it or not.
The true issue here is Google, Facebook, and others have deep pockets and the telcos and cable companies, running out of room to grow their earnings, and being pressured by customers for more speed, are looking for new ways to get new money to show Wall Street and pay for the infrastructure upgrades, even if it means extortion.
Let's examine how this would work in the real world.
City A has a huge popular shopping mall.
City B is situated between City A's shopping mall and the on/off ramps for the highway. The highway exit ramps just happen to carry hundreds of customers an hour going to City A's shopping mall.
City B demands that City A's shopping mall, which has already paid it's dues to City A, also pay City B, which technically has no domain over any business within City A, money to help improve the roads and traffic control in City B.
Otherwise, City B has threatened to deliberately create massive traffic jams at the highway on/off ramps to block those thousands of customers from getting easy access to the shopping mall.
This actually happens in the real world, plus or minus threats, where big businesses (Walmart, casinos, movie complexes) that cause extra traffic have to pay extra to help build and maintain the infrastructure to support that traffic, including but not limited to new roads, road upgrades, traffic signals and parking structures.
That's what Google is attempting to avoid because they aren't just being hit by "City B", there's hundreds of service providers out there looking for someone to share their expenses.
In the real B&M world, they would probably have no choice but to pay up, but they would also only have to pay once, not hundreds or thousands of times for the same access and to pay continually, month after month, not a single one-time payment.
All I know is the minute Google has to pay for priority, the rest of us paying can't be far behind.