Why? Fastlane charges are just another barrier to entry for potential upstart competitors. The companies you've listed are big enough to negotiate separate contracts for a lower rate or create solutions like OpenConnect to lower their costs. What better way to ensure that they have little-to-no competition than to have a crippling fee that smaller competitors would have to pay just to compete with them?
I'm not sure. Google is very aware that 100% of their userbase (and revenue) are one click away from using another search engine. If this decision makes it more difficult for a start up to create a better way for people to search the internet, you can see why Google might not put up a fight..
> Google is very aware that 100% of their userbase (and revenue) are one click away from using another search engine.
Actually, google outperforms all other search engines. It seems some people prefer duckduckgo (as search engine i mean, not just for the other features), but most i heard people couldn't get the same results (including myself).
Secondly, Google is much more than search nowadays. 100% of their income isn't gone just like that.
And they have the means to make a stance against paying extra by informing the public. Not to mention Google Fiber.
You're right, Google is by far the best. I tried using bing,duck,yahoo and none of them even come close, but that doesn't mean everyone else who uses Google values the same features that I do. Pretty soon people might want to search based on what their friends like, and suddenly Facebook becomes the new discovery engine. It's not too far fetched.
> It seems some people prefer duckduckgo (as search engine i mean, not just for the other features), but most i heard people couldn't get the same results (including myself).
Why? If the ISP's push the issue too hard, the public will be up in arms for net neutrality. If they just push hard enough to keep small companies from competing it will be a win/win for everybody since the ISP's make even more money, and the internet companies get to avoid new players.
I didn't, but I can see how my wording was misleading. In my eyes I see the ISP's at odds with the companies which require heavy internet usage. Comcast/Time Warner/Verizon/etc don't like Apple/Netflix/Google. If they had their way, they would impose the pay per site model that we are all afraid of. This obviously won't fly so the ISPs throttle the non-isp media providers until they are willing to pay up (as we are seeing with Netflix especially). As long as this process is more or less transparent to the end user, nobody will make a big deal about it and all parties involved will get something positive out of the deal (besides the consumer).
It's a mistake to consider Comcast/Time Warner/Verizon pure ISPs. They are media companies who happen to own last-mile internet pipes into homes in addition to other products which are in direct competition with data which users may want to access through that pipe.
