Ray was commenting yesterday that the debates over telecom and content issues are often closely linked, but not always perceived so by the players.

One case, it seems to me, is the net neutrality issue, which is oft-discussed over on the PFF Blog (see here e.g.).

If it is indeed true that almost a third of the traffic over the Internet now is BitTorrent file-sharing, mostly unauthorized, then wouldn't content providers be much advantaged by a system that billed senders for the bandwidth they used? Would people be so eager to share the latest movie with 2 million of their closest friends if they got an e-bill for a several hundred dollars in return? Even if each download cost the sender only a penny, if, say, 1,000 people did it the sender would pay $10, enough to discourage.

Am I missing something here?

posted by James DeLong @ 9:10 AM | Big Tent

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