Free Ride For Google Is Over
AT&T’s CEO Ed Whitacre is once again crowing about his company’s plans to extort money from Google and other Web sites who want to be able to reach AT&T customers.
The NetworkingPipeline has a short roundup of an article on the Financial Times.
Ed Whitacre:
“We have to figure out who pays for this bigger and bigger IP network,” said Mr Whitacre, who was in New York ahead of AT&T’s annual presentation to investors and analysts on Tuesday. “We have to show a return on our investments.”
“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.”
“If someone wants to transmit a high quality service with no interruptions and ‘guaranteed this, guaranteed that’, they should be willing to pay for that,” the AT&T chief said.
“Now they might pass it on to their customers who are looking at a movie, for example. But that ought to be a cost of doing business for them. They shouldn’t get on [the network] and expect a free ride.”
Read more on the Financial Times.
UPDATE: Nathan here. BusinessWeek reports that Verizon is holding back as much as 80% of its fiber optic bandwidth (a network you paid for through government concessions) for its TV service. I wonder how many of these companies that are suggesting Google pay a “premium” are hogging most of the bandwidth for themselves, screwing over regular net users.
(via Techdirt)
UPDATE 2: Apparently there’s a book, $200 Billion Broadband Scandal, that explains the whole thing. Shouldn’t this be a crime?
(via MetaFilter)
