Internet No Longer Free?
Two stories in the news of late are a bit alarming because if these actions take place they could change the economics of the Internet, which is famous for being mostly free.
The first story is the news that Yahoo! and AOL plan to charge a small fee for companies sending emails to their email customers, with the benefit of guaranteed delivery bypassing their anti-spam filters. To me, this doesn't really accomplish anything in the war on spam, since the spam emails will keep on coming, just maybe a little slower. This seems to be an attempt for email providers to skim more cash off their email services while not directly charging their email customers. This is being criticized by quite a few people, and there is a good article in Red Herring blasting the proposals.
The second story is about proposals from AT&T (formerly SBC) and other high-speed ISPs that they might start charging businesses money for running on their pipes. AT&T, being a merger of two old-economy companies, is looking to generate its revenue from old-economy services instead of adapting to what consumers are willing to pay for. Comcast, Time Warner, and Yahoo! are realizing that Content is King and are moving the focus of their businesses to this area. In most cases, US consumers are willing to pay for something they see, but not for a commodity that delivers them what they want. A great illustration of this concept is toll roads in the US, which tend to stifle the movement of people and materials since Americans prefer to pay for tangible goods they can keep rather than a delivery mechanism. Comcast understands this, and is strategically moving to provide VOD and to owning the content traveling on its pipes. Cell phone providers understand that they can make more money off of ring tones and videos than on people's service plans. Yahoo! realized that people are not willing to pay for searches, but if they owned the content people wanted to access from their search engine, they could generate more revenue from this content than with their search engine. It makes sense, why would a goods-focused society be interested in paying for a transparent, non-tangible network? Here is a link to the Washington Post article.