We are witnessing some serious jealousy.  These Telco guys want to do something about it.  They want to charge Google or the customers of Google (ie us) for the privilege of that delivery.

The Telco's had their chance back in the mid 90s to develop all these value added services to run on their networks.  They didn't do it.  They bought back stock, built golf courses, defrauded their shareholders, took on enourmous debt, and generally did everything other than take advantage of the incredible opportunity that they had with the coming of the Internet.  Bottom line - the screwed up.

Robber barons of the internet

The big, old phone companies are trying to act like monopolies again. There is only one cure for a monopoly: competition.

Anyone who forgot the comments of AT&T’s Ed Whitacre and BellSouth’s CTO Bill Smith, this is just a reminder. The argument is that the phone companies are going to charge for better performance for say games, or movie downloads or software downloads. It is not a bad thought, though only in cases where latency is a big issue. The argument of better network performance, as many in the business would tell you, is a bit of chimera.