Note: This column represents the opinions
of the writer and as such, is not represented as fact
At last,
the contents of Aardvark's "million-dollar ideas" notebook
are revealed for all to see!
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Are independent ISPs becoming an endangered species?
After all, it's just a few months ago that we saw one of NZ's oldest
independent ISPs (Asia Online, formerly ICONZ) go belly-up.
Are we going to see more closures or failures in the ISP business?
Has the marketplace become so cut-throat and lacking in margins that
only the big players such as XTRA and Telstra/Clear can survive?
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I mean to say -- who'd really want to be a small ISP anyway?
Right from the early days it wasn't hard to see that trying to run an ISP
business in a country where the PSTN was owned by a monopoly, and the market
for other essential data services were effectively ruled by a duopoly, would
be damned hard work.
Of course this situation hasn't improved any with the arrival of DSL services
which are, for 99 percent of the country, yet another monopoly owned by
Telecom.
It was always obvious that once Telecom itself got a sniff of the fact that there might
be money to be made from these crazy kids and their computers, then they'd also
get in on the ISP game.
Now you don't have to be a brain surgeon or rocket scientist to figure out
that if the company which controls the local loop and has the lion's share
of the bandwidth market is going to get into the game at a retail level then
other, independent ISPs were going to have a very hard time of it.
Telecom and XTRA will tell you until they're blue in the face that
XTRA gets no special treatment over and above any other ISP when it comes
to PSTN access or data-circuits/bandwidth -- but do we believe them?.
The battle over 0800 numbers back in 1996
certainly cast more than a little doubt on the veracity of those claims.
A similar situation arose more recently when Telecom decided to force ISPs to use the 0867
system for dial-up accounts -- XTRA certainly seemed to be at an advantage
compared to the independents.
As predicted, XTRA (largely due to having Telecom as
its parent) has rapidly grown to become the country's dominant ISP,
reaching its first 100,000 users in
April 1998, and now claiming a massive
340,000 customers.
All of this has made life hard for the small independent ISPs -- of which there are
far fewer now than there were six or seven years ago. The fact that so many
are still in business is really quite amazing -- particularly in light
of the "free ISP" situation we had a year or two ago.
And now we have another hassle for ISPs -- the consumer guarantees act.
According
to reports,
emails are to be classed as goods under the act, meaning that ISPs could find
themselves caught in a rather unenviable situation.
As I understand it, the Consumer Guarantees Act (CGA) applies to goods and services
primarily purchased for non-commercial purposes. It provides a range of
protections against fraud and bad practice and many of these provisions can't
be contracted out of.
By comparison, the laws pertaining to the sale of goods and services for commercial
use are somewhat different and allow significantly more ability for its provisions
to be waivered by terms and conditions explicitely added to the sale contract.
Now you can bet your bottom dollar that the providers of data and other services
to ISPs will have carefully worded contracts that effectively reduce their
liabilities to the bare minimum allowed by law. Since some of those services
(such as access to the PSTN) are still a Telecom monopoly, ISPs will have no
option but to accept such disclaimer-filled contracts.
However, the ISP may be in no position to pass on such disclaimers to its
non-commercial customers. Not only is the retail Internet access marketplace
a competitive one, but there's the higher level of implied consumer protection
provided by the CGA.
When a domestic customer incurs a loss because one of their emails isn't
delivered due to a fault with an ISP's supplier, a denial of service attack
or whatever, the ISP may well find themselves well out of pocket in
remedying those losses under the CGA. Unfortunately, they may not be able to
recover anything from the party really at fault because they were forced to sign
all those disclaimers and waivers in order to obtain the service in the first place.
But wait -- there's more.
If Telecom's market dominance and the CGA doesn't get you, the cost of complying
with inevitable snooping legislation and fending off defamation suits will -- sooner
or later. Although we've only got the O'Brien versus Brown case here in NZ and
as far as I'm aware, the liabilities of ISPs has not yet been tested,
a British case
would suggest that they could be in the firing line sooner or later -- after all,
much of our law seems to hold more parallel with Britain than the USA.
So -- how bleak is the future for the independent ISPs?
Well I figure that those who have survived up to this point are either incredibly
tough and good at what they do -- or a division of Telecom NZ. Maybe we've
lost the also-rans -- but I think I could find 101 better things to invest my
retirement money in right now.
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