Broadband companies know they’re the gateway to the internet for the time being. Anyone wanting to do a quick search or listen to a song online has to go through them. While still on top, companies such as AT&T, Bell South and Verizon are looking at schemes that could easily be defined as cyberextortion to pad their wallets. So what is Google doing about this, and should we be concerned?
These are our pipes, so pay up
The rumors started last fall. The CEO of SBC, Ed Whitacre, had an ingenious idea. His company is charging DSL customers to log onto the internet, and this much is great. However, these sites on the internet are making money from his customers finding them. They are profiting from his profiting! Oh no!
So, Mr. Whitacre did as any enthusiastic CEO would do. He went on a rant about web services freeloading on his precious pipes:
Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. 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!
The diatribe actually summarizes the position well. Websites are reaching customers through lines his company controls, and he ain’t getting nothing for it!
So to get what he deserves, he will charge Google and Yahoo and every other high profile site to become a part of the SBC internet. The whole controversy seemed to go away temporarily. Of course, late last year, SBC was busy being swallowed up AT&T. Now Whitacre is in charge of the AT&T empire, and he revisited his plans to control the internet late last month. In January, he stressed again that content providers would not receive a “free ride” on his network.
AT&T is now the largest provider of DSL, and they even distribute broadband in cooperation with other companies like Yahoo! However, AT&T is not the only telecom planning to do this anymore, and the reasons behind this seem less than honest.
This January, Verizon and Bell South spoke out as well. They want to pull revenue from both ends of the pipe too. Verizon sounded resolved to charge high profile sites, like AT&T wants to do. Bell South’s proposition is a little less drastic, offering higher bandwidth to websites that pay up.
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