on net neutrality

Verizon and Bell South have been firing shots in the "net neutrality" war lately. In a 14 May AP story, High-Definition Video Could Choke Internet, Verizon's Tom Tauke and Bell South's Henry Kafka announce that "today's access and backbone networks simply do not have the capacity to deliver all that customers expect." (More of Tauke's comments are here. Kafka crunches some numbers here.)

The gist is that somebody will have to pay higher fees for all of the future high-speed services we'll be using in our homes. The unstated message is that if consumers don't want to pay an extra $100 a month for their broadband connections, someone is going to have to pick up the tab.

The unstated message includes this little stick of dynamite. Why should cable and phone companies allow ad-fed Google and eBay-fed Skype to come in and compete against the their products? How much revenue would cable lose if the NFL could take advertising dollars directly and send its games to you over the pipes you rent from your cable provider? How much revenue do the phone companies lose to Vonage? Why build fast pipes? This war is less about fast connections, and more about who is providing services over those connections, who is getting paid for it, and how much.