| I disagree. A user requesting http://example.com is that user requesting everything that the webmaster of example.com wanted example.com to include. This includes ads. The webmaster has decided that the content hosted on http://example.com includes some HTML, some off-site resources (maybe images hosted on a CDN, maybe some ads, maybe some Javascript hosted elsewhere). Are you going to charge CDN owners too given the user doesn't 'know' that websites often use a CDN to host their content? What about jquery.com for hosting the version of jquery the site uses (if they don't host it themselves)? Why are ads special? Simply because the webmaster is being paid by the ad network? In the CDN case, money flows in the opposite direction -- the webmaster pays the CDN. Why shouldn't the ISP take a cut of that transaction too? If a website has ads the implied contract is that you get access to this content in exchange for having these ads on the screen. Why does an ISP get to take a cut out of that agreement between the webmaster, the ad network, and the user? They are already compensated by the user to deliver all the bytes the user's computer requested to them. If an ISP is unhappy with how many bytes the user is requesting, and how many of those bytes come from a particular source (e.g. Google) then they need to renegotiate their contract with the user. |
I am not a lawyer, but the implied contract argument doesn't seem to hold water. Google and the ISP aren't in privity - unless of course there is a contract between them such as the article provides. I'll leave aside the applicability of common law principles to France in regard to the theory of implied contracts required as a premise to the argument.