Today’s Wall Street Journal had a cover story on the Telco’s desire to charge consumers extra to download video from Google or a song from iTunes.
Sure, the Telcos might be able to get more money from people who need super fast, six sigma reliability Internet connections. There has always been a business model around super high performance networks.
But this is really just marketing spin. What’s really going on is the CEOs of Verizon, AT&T, Bell South and the other Telcos are looking at their margins going down month after month while the service providers like Apple and Google, who deliver their services to consumers over the Telco’s networks, are watching their margins go up and up.
Jarvis calls the Telcos "robber barons" and Om Malik calls this hairbrained scheme a "chimera". I had to look that up. Om’s either calling this money grubbing scheme a "fire breathing she monster" which sounds about right, or a "creation of the imagination" which it clearly is.