Wouldn’t it be nice to get paid twice for doing the same work?
Dirty cops know the feeling, and politicians on the take. So, apparently, do large telephony companies that own a lot of internet backbone. Or, at least, they want to.
I’m talking particularly about Bellsouth, whose CTO Bill Smith wants to start charging large web companies for “their” use of Bellsouth’s pipes. The same pipes, of course, that Bellsouth’s customers – dial-up and broadband subscribers – are already paying for.
I wrote about this previously with regard to HP’s new videoconferencing product, and it hasn’t gotten any less pungent with the passage of a few weeks.