I intend to chronicle the debate between Comcast and Level 3 Communications with regard to claims that the freedom of the internet is being threatened by Comcast's decision to charge a fee for the excess traffic caused by Level 3 Communication's decision to cache large amounts of data (to ease congestion on their own backbone.) On wikipedia as it stands, there is very little on Level 3's own page about the incident and only a small blurb on Comcast's (This blurb also appears to be incomplete and ends rather abruptly.) I would like to denote how exactly this conflict was started. This would be mostly about Level 3's motivation in caching data and why Comcast thinks they have the right to charge Level 3 for a rise in traffic. The two main sources I intend to use can be found here :
One major side of the debate according to Ars is that "Comcast is trying to charge a content provider for the very access to content that it is selling to its own customers." So in this way Comcast is leveraging control over a service that competes with it's own video services.
The articles I intend to contribute to are found here:
Grade
editCheck (as opposed to check plus or minus). It sounds like an alright idea, but I'm very confused where you will be chronicling this debate; on an entirely new article (probably not worth it), on comcasts page, on Level 3's, page? It's important that you talk to an online or campus ambassador who can help you with this and ways to structure your depiction of the conflict. PatBerger (talk) 09:07, 15 March 2011 (UTC)
Update: Last week I spoke with Joni at Patrick's request. Although she claimed she was not the authority to decide if my topic was feasible or worthwhile, she was confident I would be able to find enough material on the subject to warrant it's own page. So I would then be contributing to the blurb on Comcast's page, adding a blurb on Level 3's page, and both would have a link to the main article something along the lines of "Comcast v. Level 3."