Telco's Go Viral and Make Me Sick

Lobbyists representing the major telephone companies, like Verizon, which have been pushing the "two-tiered internet" have come out with several sleazy cartoons to make their "argument". As you might expect, this argument has nothing to do with the problems people have with the telco's proposal, which would basically give them complete control over how traffic flows on the internet. According to the cartoon, all they want is to ensure Quality of Service - i.e. making sure that things like internet telephony, which is time-sensitive, goes over the internet faster than e-mail, which is not - an issue that's been around for years and years. And no one ever complained about QoS. But that's certainly not what the telco's themselves are saying. They've made it quite clear that it's about money - pay up, and your e-mail will go faster than Joe Schmoe's phone call. Don't pay, and you're in the slow lane, no matter how fast your actual internet connection already is (it's called double-dipping - you get charged for the connection and then again for the traffic). Naturally, the telco's won't have to pay extra to offer their internet telephony services (or television or anything else), so they can undercut everybody else, and hey! Can you say monopoly?

The other result would be that any new internet technology anyone comes up with will have to pay protection money to the telephone companies first. The entry costs to get a business on the internet would go way up. And once again, the telephone companies will have killed innovation***.

--YY

*** From link: "Although electronic switches based on solid-state components had been developed by 1959, AT&T didn't introduce the first digital switch into the Bell System until 1976. And electronic switching was still being gradually rolled out well into the 1980s, when AT&T's monopoly on telephone service came to an abrupt end. The much more rapid introduction of digital switches by MCI and Sprint probably contributed to AT&T's downfall."

p.s. Googling for "AT&T innovation" gives you all sorts of obnoxious corpo-babble results. "AT&T innovation monopoly"... not so much ;-)