Will 2011 be the year online video unravels the Internet? | VentureBeat.
Theexplosive growth of online video over the past couple of years has begun to unravel the way both businesses and consumers have used and paid for Internet access over the past decade. Although past Internet growth has been exponential, the deluge of video that is coming in the next decade has already forced a series of legal, regulatory, and business disputes that have set the stage for significant changes for the next decade of video on the Internet.
A lot of this has been talked about in the lofty intellectual framework of net neutrality, which advocates present as the principle that providers of Internet access should not discriminate between types or sources of traffic on their network. But what it really comes down to are a new set of business arrangements for who will pay to get the bits from point A to point B. A host of developments in the past year have set the stage for major battles over bandwidth in 2011.
In April, theUS Court of Appeals in Washington, DC overturned a 2008 Federal Communications Commission ruling forbidding Internet service providers from throttling BitTorrent, a popular video sharing protocol. With that ban overturned, ISPs now had free reign to meter particular bandwidth-hungry protocols.
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