Wow, this is scary… Verizon Executive Calls for End to Google’s ‘Free Lunch’

The network builders are spending a fortune constructing and maintaining the networks that Google intends to ride on with nothing but cheap servers,” Thorne told a conference marking the 10th anniversary of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. “It is enjoying a free lunch that should, by any rational account, be the lunch of the facilities providers.”

Verizon is spending billions of dollars to construct a fiber-optic network around the country for delivering high-speed Internet and cable TV services. Executives at other telecom companies, such as AT&T Inc. chief executive Edward E. Whitacre Jr., have suggested that Google, Yahoo Inc. and other such Internet services should have to pay fees for preferred access to consumers over such lines.

And they’re not the only American telco trying to do that. BellSouth: Cyberextortion Pays Off

BellSouth’s new business model, a slightly more polite form of the kind of extortion practiced by Tony Soprano, is starting to pay off. The company says it is in negotiations with several Web sites willing to pay extra fees to BellSouth for more bandwidth than it provides to other sites.

BellSouth says that it shouldn’t have to bear the cost of providing bandwidth for big sites like Google. Instead, the sites should pay for them. But BellSouth ignores an inconvenient fact — it doesn’t bear those costs; its customers do. So BellSouth gets to double-dip.

BellSouth now says it’s talking to several sites willing to pay the extra fees. The film-download MovieLink, it claims, is in talks to fork over cash. BellSouth will also target gaming sites. It says Apple may be willing to spend five to ten cents a download for iTunes music.

This is, of course, bad news for the Internet. Bandwith is the oxygen of startups, and without it they die. Remember, there was once a day when Google was a startup, and Yahoo and other search sites ruled. Google delivered better results — and it delivered faster results. If Google had been denied bandwidth, it would have died.

But some have seen this coming are are already out trying to save the internet

Doc Searls’ Saving The Net article basically covers an emerging phenomenon in the US: the growing consolidation of regional communications networks by telephone and cable companies. And, the suggestion by an SBC executive that the telcos and cablecos are looking at selectively charging for the information packets that flow through their “pipes”. The telcos and cablecos supply in one way or another, much of the highbandwidth connections for residential customers in the US. They also own and lay out much of the fiber and hardware necassary to bring these connections into homes. There has been evidence that some of these companies engage in public disinformation campaigns to discourage municipal fiber-to-home projects, so that they can corner the market on these services.

Doc Searl is warning us that the cable and telco consolidation is very close to completion, and that once they control the only broadband “pipes” that can bring data into homes, then they will begin controlling who sends data across those “pipes”. This will effectively destroy the open nature of the internet for people in the US.