Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Every business wants the services they rely on to be commodity, but they don't want to be a commodity to the layer above them - they want to extract some of the value those upper layers provide. For example, a toll bridge is a commodity; it charges the same fee for a truckload of diamonds as a truckload of coal. If you were a bridge owner, you'd prefer to be able to charge more for people getting a lot of value out of your bridge.

Similarly, people who own the Internet pipes want to claim part of the value of new innovations build on them - to charge differential pricing for, say, streaming movies, vs less profitable types of content. The people building those innovations say, no way - charge us by the bit and it's not your business what those bits are doing.



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: