[jjacob]

Originally Posted by Stoofa

USA Today has a great article about this issue. Clickity Click.

Thanks! Took the liberty of quoting it here:

n the history of great ideas, the Internet will surely rank near the top. In a relatively short time, it has made vast amounts of information searchable, sortable and readily available with a few key strokes.
Much of the Internet's appeal is that no one controls it in the way that, say, a grocery store decides which brands to stock. Within its virtual walls, a start-up such as MySpace or Craigslist can surge to prominence entirely on the power of an idea.
Now, some very old-school companies want to change all that. Using market dominance achieved through the relative scarcity of lines into people's homes, phone companies such as BellSouth, Verizon and AT&T are eyeing a system that would demand that operators of search engines, e-commerce sites and other Web applications pay them fees or be relegated to the slow lane.
Here's how AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre put it while discussing Vonage, Google and Yahoo with BusinessWeek magazine: "What they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it."
Let us count the ways why this vision by the telecommunications companies is misguided:
• It shows a complete lack of comprehension of why the Internet is so attractive. It is not, like television, a pipeline for delivering content and advertising to consumers. It's an interactive medium that empowers individuals to communicate, join virtual communities, shop, search, prioritize information and engage in an evolving list of other activities.
• Google, Yahoo and other companies are not freeloading off of anyone. Their data flow over the lines of companies such as AT&T only if AT&T's customers pay for it.
• Search engines, e-commerce sites and other major destinations have invested billions of their own dollars on servers, routers and software to make the Internet work. The only difference is that these companies do not have a potential chokehold over the Internet's on-ramps.
• Phone companies achieved dominant positions through their origins as part of the Ma Bell monopoly. It would have been unthinkable for them to demand royalties from catalogue sales over toll-free numbers when they were treated as "common carriers." But now they feel empowered to shake down companies such as Amazon or Travelocity.
Competition might keep the phone companies from putting the squeeze on website operators. That would be the best outcome. But consumers in many parts of the country have little choice in broadband, so Congress is appropriately exploring legislation that would lay out a principle of "Net neutrality" that would require all websites to receive equal access.
Telecommunications companies say they are not altering the Internet, merely offering a new ultra-high-speed tier of service on top of it. Don't be fooled. Once they begin choosing search engines, auction sites and other applications for their premium service, they alter the entire competitive landscape.
In this new world, companies would have to spend more time kowtowing to the likes of AT&T and less time innovating. That doesn't sound like such a great idea.

It's mostly editiorial and not very informative/in depth, but still a good piece, though it's wrong about Congress supporting a bill of net neutrality, that's an initiave of a brave few, an very unlikely to stand up against the lobbying giants and the already altered FCC regulations. Still, there is some hope. *sigh*