Internet Tolls Are Next

These People Are The Internet Enemy: "'We do have to recover the cost for building the new capacity out there that the content providers are expecting us to provide,' said Jim Cicconi, AT&T Inc.'s senior executive vice president of external and legislative affairs.
AT&T already provides connections between offices of the same company, or between government offices, using AT&T's own lines rather than the public Internet. This allows AT&T to guarantee a certain quality level.
By prioritizing packets, AT&T could extend that service to the connection between a Web site and a surfer at home.
To the opponents, abandoning the 'network neutrality' principle opens up the prospect of the carriers blocking sites that don't pay up or that compete with the carriers' own services -- for instance, by providing phone calls.
The carriers have stoked those fears with some hard-line rhetoric. John Thorne, Verizon Communications Inc.'s senior vice president and deputy general counsel, was quoted by The Washington Post as telling a conference that Google 'is enjoying a free lunch that should, by any rational account, be the lunch of the facilities providers.'
Ed Whitacre, AT&T's chief executive, has raised eyebrows with similar statements to the effect that Google and Yahoo Inc. are freeloading on the Internet, a remarkable assertion considering both companies pay millions of dollars in Internet access fees, and their visitors pay for Internet access as well."

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"The next great idea, the next Google or eBay or Napster or whatever, won't have the capital to get themselves in the fast lanes right away," said Ben Scott at Free Press, a nonprofit that promotes freedom of speech. "The reason the big e-companies were so successful were that they started on the same level playing field as everyone else."

Another objection to packet prioritization is technical.

The Internet2 association assumed that prioritization was the way to go when it started building a super-fast next-generation network connecting universities.
However, engineers abandoned that notion after a few years, concluding that it's more effective simply to expand the network's capacity for all traffic -- adding lanes to the highway instead of a parallel toll road."