You exactly see my argument correctly as "when does it end?" If this becomes standard practice, you'll have a selected number of entrenched sites able to be inside the network. That then gives the telco provider more power than they have as mere dumb pipes, replicating the carriage issue I raise with my cable precedent. There's no reason to believe that the telcos will take everyone willing to pay a certain amount; these will all be negotiated, bundles will be introduced, and you'll kill the promise of a free and unfettered internet where we all have equal footing.
I'd be OK with licensed CDNs, but not with content and/or web application providers. Again, this is me with my antennae at attention, looking at a worst possible case scenario, but I play the red pieces. (Yes, I coined that phrase, which is why you haven't heard of it. Yes, I'm mixing chess and war games metaphors. Yes, damn straight I think it's a cool phrase.)
Who "licenses" the CDNs? That sounds scarier to me than adding more caching to an already heavily cached infrastructure.
You do realize this is all just a matter of degree, right? There are probably a half dozen caches involved in every request you make. Certainly DNS has multiple caches along the path to getting your data, your browser caches local copies of lots of data, and your ISP probably has a cache as well. A CDN is just a specialized form of cache that can be a little bit smarter than each of those caches.
these will all be negotiated, bundles will be introduced, and you'll kill the promise of a free and unfettered internet where we all have equal footing
I think this assumes a difference in performance expectations that isn't reflected in reality. The difference between data coming from Dallas, or San Jose, or Chicago, or coming directly from your ISP data center is measured in the tens of milliseconds. I don't think this could realistically be expected to result in "packages". Who would sign up for a "Google/MSN/Yahoo/eBay" Internet that merely promised "30 ms faster!"?
I'd be OK with licensed CDNs, but not with content and/or web application providers. Again, this is me with my antennae at attention, looking at a worst possible case scenario, but I play the red pieces. (Yes, I coined that phrase, which is why you haven't heard of it. Yes, I'm mixing chess and war games metaphors. Yes, damn straight I think it's a cool phrase.)