9 Association of Research Libraries Research Library Issues 293 — 2018 R&E institutions that need to reach consumers connected by these ISPs are very limited. The ISPs that provide backbone access to the R&E institutions (including Internet2) could attempt to negotiate contracts with the consumer broadband providers to ensure faithful, private, and timely carriage. It’s not clear whether the consumer broadband providers would be willing to do this, or what it would cost further, while there are a fairly small number of major consumer broadband providers that cover the vast majority of homes in the US, there is also a long tail of smaller consumer last-mile providers that would need be to considered. Additionally, there are all sorts of special arrangements currently in place between universities and ISPs serving the local consumer markets near major universities. Contractual arrangements involving Internet2 or a commercial tier 1 internet provider on a national scale may not be helpful here the university will need to renegotiate terms with the local ISPs as part of their peering arrangements. Another strategy would be to move bandwidth- or latency-sensitive materials to large-scale commercial services, which have the scale and the clout to negotiate with last-mile consumer services for example video could be placed on YouTube or Vimeo, depending on what services were most effective in setting up good arrangements with the last-mile consumer ISPs. (There are issues about authentication, access control, and user privacy that need to be considered when using such video-hosting services, however.) Note also that very large vendors that provide bandwidth- or latency-sensitive materials to consumers (for example, large courseware providers) will likely negotiate with the last-mile ISPs to the consumer when necessary, or use strategies very similar to what have been outlined for R&E institutions. Small Content Providers Important to the R&E Community Consider a website operated by a small, independent, scholarly or arts organization, or perhaps a small public interest organization. Often