Let’s look at it from a business perspective and see that the telecom giants truly have their heads up their asses:

You sell a service. It doesn’t matter what service, but let’s use taxicabs as the example since it loosely matches Internet packet transfers. You operate for decades with taxicabs that anyone can load up, route to a destination, and pay a certain amount for that service. One day, you get the wild idea that you can earn MORE money from your customers by having your drivers deliver them to their destinations faster if they pony up extra cash, and if they refuse entirely, they’ll still make it to their destination, but will do so at 20 MPH instead of 35-45 MPH.

This is removing the value from the service. You’re suddenly charging people not based on how many trips they take alone, but also forcing charges that make it impossible to arrive at a decent time at all without paying more. At 20 MPH, one could easily just take the subway and walk, but walking (dial-up?) is slow, so you really don’t want to do it. Once you realize that you’re being shafted so bad that you’ll never make it anywhere because you’re not rich enough to afford this new pricing plan, guess what? You either start walking or hop on with a competitor that doesn’t shoot itself in the foot.

Americans especially are very passive about things that affect their futures, and are notorious for being lazy and online all day. What happens when some addicted gamer suddenly experiences lag time because the game servers are controlled by the “pay per pipe” QoS routing at a telecom giant? Normally, this person will pay their $45/mo. Road Runner bill, play the game, and never bother looking at any other options. The next thing you know, Time Warner’s throttling of his gaming experience pisses him off and he buys into something like Clearwire instead. Time Warner loses their customer. Now envision thousands of first-person shooter gamers switching service providers. All it takes is for 99% of the telecom guys to do QoS, and 1% not to, to propel the 1% into huge profits and growth.

The whole damned idea just doesn’t hold water. Even if they do this, when the implied right to do what you want at the speed you paid for goes away, a lot of normally silent pushover type of people will be inconvenienced to the point that they get off their asses and DO something. That’s what the telecom giants need to fear.

The activists like myself will put a frown on the faces of some execs at SBC, but that’s about it. The silent majority, however, cannot be ignored if they begin to become loud. It’s like sleeper cells of anti-telco terrorists, just waiting to wake up and take their business elsewhere.

They won’t ever see it coming until the CEO and CFO of all of these companies are getting fired…and by then, it will be far too late. What’s even worse for them is that I’m starting to consider designing a device that may change the face of the Internet as we know it. We’ll see.

–Jody Bruchon, jbruchon at nc*rr*com

Their “pipes” are in use because ppl want to access content. So bigbiz thinks that if they segment the net into “regions” and buy some content they can charge pretty much whatever they want for access, thinking they only need one compelling piece of content to keep ppl in their region instead of moving to someone elses. By deliberately making it hard to change regions they’ll also “subtly” enourage ppl to stay put.

Problem is that with less content available to everyone on the net, everyone will have less reason to stay on it. This will translate into a reduction in net usage, which means a reduction in traffic in the pipes and less revenue and profit for the pipe owners.

They’re going to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Then they’re gonna bitch about not getting any more eggs!