The Coming Internet Covercharge

The Washington Post is following a story about US phone companies plans to start charging a premium to website owners for priority delivery. Violating an unwritten rule of Internet commerce that says the networks between a website and a consumer should treat all traffic equally (a.k.a. 'Network Neutrality'), the proposal would have phone companies speed up delivery of websites that could afford to pay extra for faster delivery.

Essentially, phone companies have seen internet access reduced to a commodity, with limited profit margins and merely steady growth while entrepreneurs such as the founders of Google have become billionaire's overnight. Now those phone companies want a slice of the action, even if that means strangling future entrepreneurship or, in a worst case scenario, all non-commercial websites. The great hope for the moment is that Google, Ebay, Amazon and Yahoo will be able to match the lobbying dollars of AT&T and BellSouth in order to protect their own profits. However, at some stage in the future, it is highly likely that a more established, conservative set of Internet businesses would favour the plan as a means of fending off new competitors and entrenching their dominance.

So enjoy while you can your current freedom to publish absolutely anything to the entire world.

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