Having spotted my backhand of double-dipping Ed Whitacre’s defense of ISP “premium service” schemes, Paul Hoffman of the VPN Consortium chimes in with another slice of mud pie on his own blog.
“It’s worse than that. Because the ISPs cannot even measure accurately where some ‘content’ originated, the first one that tries to start charging more for faster transit is going to get it wrong and start slowing down their currently-paying customers traffic because of internal billing errors,” Hoffman writes. “The result will be that their customers will flee in droves to their competitors. Any sane ISP will wait to see how badly their competitors fail in introducing this new anti-service before trying it themselves. It seems likely that such a boneheaded move could seriously hurt at least one entrenched carrier, completely to the benefit of the others. It will be fun to see which one gets nailed first.”
Good point. And also credit Hoffman with a clever blog name: “LookIt — (1) a juvenile imperative verb for getting attention. (2) a personal blog by Paul Hoffman.”
