This Bell tolls for fee
I woke up this morning feeling sad. Not for the displaced Gulf coasters or the millions of homeless in America, no, not even for anorexic, cocaine-addicted supermodels. I feel sorry for the poor rich bastards in the telecommunications industry. Like their cousin industry, organized crime, they are experiencing a rag-to-riches-to-jail industry lifecycle.
They had it made back in the 90s, They were the "it" boys of their generation; rich and snide, full of pride. How quickly things can change. The boom in telco was the Fort Sumter firing of the Dot Com Bubble. Millionaires, even billionaires split from the mass, rose like a lava lamp, only to pop at the top and sink into obscurity.
The industry is humbled now. Bernie Ebbers going to jail for the rest of his life. Schroeder's fall from PSINet just in time for the unnaming of a sports stadium disassociating themselves from the failed and delisted company.
Yet they're up to their old tricks again. Today's Washington Post features a story quoting William Smith, the CTO OF Bell South as suggesting that they might start charging more for some Internet companies to make their sites load faster. He denies that they would deliberately slow or block any nonpaying web site, but hey, the protection racket is an ancient and honorable one.
This proposal is socially irresponsible. By creating a multi-tiered track of speeds for web access, they've proposing taking away one of the two greatest egalatarian features of the Internet (the RIAA is working on the other one).
It's easy to guess where this could end up. The biggest bucks buy the best bandwidth. The chilling effect that this strategy would have on startup ecommerce companies is as yet, unimaginable. It's hard to believe that it could be good for the economy.
Tony Soprano, though would be proud.
Posted on December 01, 2005
