On the heels of my last posting involving my disgust with the concept of a tiered internet and the completely uneducated comments that the CEO's of telcos are making these days, comes another gem:
"I think the content providers should be paying for the use of the network—obviously not the piece from the customer to the network, which has already been paid for by the customer in Internet access fees—but for accessing the so-called Internet cloud." (AT&T chief says that people are only paying for half the internet)
Please. Google and MSN don't have bills for the bandwidth they consume? What is he smoking? He is making claims that providers of content aren't paying for the type of bandwidth (QoS/guaranteed, etc). This flies in the face, however, of the fact that operations like Google, MSN, Yahoo pay for mega pipelines to the internet that us geeks sitting behind our capped upstream connections can only dream of. Not only do they pay for their fat pipes (which should be covering the costs that Whitacre claims are not being covered), but they are paying multiple providers for their pipes to make sure that their content gets to the user as quickly as possible. If Whitacre wants to complain about the size of the payments he is receiving, then maybe he's simply dreaming of the mono-telco days of yesteryear. What seems to slowly come to the surface in all of the complaints we are hearing from the telco boys is this: they want to convince us that they are not getting their fare share and that the government should step in to assist them assist us. They are scared and it shows. By placing controls on how content is delivered from one side of the net to the other, they take back some of the control they had when our phone lines were captive portals into our homes only to find DSL had competition from cable, wireless (in the form of WaveRider, Trango, Canopy, WiMax, and cell companies), etc. - and the competition was working hard to get our money instead of them.
While these guys continue talking in circles, I hope the rest of us are able to see what it is for: competition is hard and they want it easy.
