ESPN to ISPs: Pay for Your Customers to Play Video

The culprit is ESPN's strategy of licensing ISPs rather than users. If your ISP doesn't want to pay for you to watch ESPN360, there's nothing you can do about it, short of switching to a provider that pays for it.

But Free Press' Ben Scott thinks the this new internet model will ultimately be bad for providers. "My gut reaction is that it's a terrible business model," says Scott. "The beauty of the internet is that you put a piece of content on your server, and it's available to anyone with a computer anywhere in the world that's connected to the internet. If you begin walling off your content and selling network operators [the right to distribute content], that defeats the whole idea of maximizing the exposure of your content."