by Ivor » Mon Jun 02, 2008 9:11 am
[quote="Sean Hogan - 何祥"]Not sure, but it makes sense for the likes of Yahoo, Google, AOL and such like to seek to control and thereby charge for access.
Actually it doesn't make any sense for someone like google whose business model is based on their being millions of small sites all serving up a little bit of their advertising for them. Both Yahoo and AOL have tried to be one stop content "portals" before and failed miserably and nearly lost the game completely so I'm not sure they'd be that keen on trying again.
Yes the ISP's are in talks with media producers to determine the model for distribution of "broadcast" style content. i.e. movies on demand, video on demand and so on. But that's simply out of necessity with the current infrastructure. The bandwidth demands will require a different model as will the means of paying the content providers for supplying their wares and the subscription type "bundle" model a-la-cable or satellite TV is one of the easiest to do.
On the other hand the idea that individual sites like ebay or google will be only available under certain higher tariffs is totally laughable. Not a chance of that happening.
What you will see more of and be more of a hot topic will be traffic shaping, where ISP's are analysing the type of content being delivered and adjust bandwidth and speeds according to some metric of their own. This is likely to be your typical everyone loses arms race however and new software and techniques will work around any artificial controls until the ISP's catch up.