[tw]

From Washington Post of 10 Feb 2006:

Charge E-Mailers, but Keep Pipeline Open
A lot of the companies involved in our online experiences must be running short on pocket change this month, because so many of them have been doing the equivalent of looking under the sofa cushions for quarters. To be exact, they're looking under each other's sofa cushions.

Executives at telecom giants such as AT&T and Verizon Communications are talking up the idea of inviting popular Web sites and services to pay extra for better access to their lines -- and some are going further, suggesting that they would demand compensation from the likes of Google and Yahoo for all the bits they send down their lines. Yahoo and America Online, meanwhile, are rolling out plans to charge companies that send large quantities of e-mail to their users. ...

But when some of the largest, most deeply entrenched Internet service providers in the United States alternate between griping about how other firms sponge off their bandwidth and suggesting that they'd merely give Web sites the chance to buy higher-priority access, we have a different situation. ...

Second, these mainstream Internet service providers should think about what, exactly, their customers are going online for in the first place. To use the great search engine Verizon's developed? To get directions and satellite photos using AT&T's brilliant mapping site? To buy songs at BellSouth's wildly popular music-download store?