IP Democracy: BellSouth's CTO: We Want to Charge for Priority Access

Despite the negative reaction to comments such as SBC (now AT&T) CEO Ed Whitacre’s “they’re my pipes” gaffe, broadband providers, and the telcos in particular (at least publicly), are tenacious in their advocacy for setting limits on competitive services and applications that ride over their networks. The latest evidence: BellSouth CTO Bill Smith wants to charge rival VoIP and video services for high-quality throughput, according to this Washington Post article.

William L. Smith, chief technology officer for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., told reporters and analysts that an Internet service provider such as his firm should be able, for example, to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc. Or, Smith said, his company should be allowed to charge a rival voice-over-Internet firm so that its service can operate with the same quality as BellSouth’s offering.

To be clear, Smith doesn’t want BellSouth to block services — he simply wants a “pay-for-performance marketplace” to develop, a notion that will drive independent VoIP and emerging web-based video services crazy. Or as Public Knowledge President Gigi Sohn says in the piece:

“Prioritization is just another word for degrading your competitor. If we want to ruin the Internet, we’ll turn it into a cable TV system” that carries programming from only those who pay the cable operators for transmission.

[Update: As one of our commenters correctly notes, cable operators don’t charge cable networks for transmission. Cable operators actually pay license fees for the networks they carry. Update on update: somehow I originally wrote the update completely backwards. It’s correct now.]

But, unfortunately, there’s a good reason that phone companies publicly (and cable companies privately) will never let go of the notion of setting limits on competitors. Despite the power that prioritization gives network providers to hamper competitors, it’s an inescapable fact that at some point someone is going to have to fulfill the role of broadband traffic cop.

There’s only so much capacity on any network, and sooner or later if all services and applications are allowed to use the networks without any limits, congestion and network breakdowns are inevitable and then nothing works right. This is a real conundrum, and not merely anticompetitive positioning by phone companies and cable operators.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on December 1, 2005 7:45 AM to IP Democracy