I’ve been reading but not writing about he battles lately by the Baby Bells (AT&T and Verizon) to charge “content providers” for access to their customer base. First we had AT&T making waves (pretty soon after joining with SBC Global).
Ed Whitacre, chairman and CEO of AT&T, told Business Week in November, “Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can’t be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment, and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!”
And then we had we had the Kool-Aid comments John Thorne, Vice-President of Verizon, and then there was the well written articles I ran acrossed from Cringly of PBS who did a nice job relating this and a Linux Journel article saying this would happen.
My take on all this is pretty much the same as any intellegant person. Google (and other content providers) pay for their bandwidth, and we pay for our internet access (according to how much we pay = how fast). And even though we aren’t getting the speeds that they promised, they still have the gall to want money for what they are getting paid to provide?
Tags: Google, Networking, Technology
