Charge E-Mailers, but Keep Pipeline Open

[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Rob Pegoraro]
[Commentary] Another take on the Net Neutrality debate -- It comes down to notions of ownership and boundaries: A company has every right to treat its mail server as its own territory, to bar some from accessing it or to charge others for that access. But the same principle doesn't quite apply to the issue of accessing a larger piece of the company's total Internet pipeline. That's because in only the first case do you have a problem of trespassing that requires putting up gates or levying tolls. E-mail is unique among the Internet's core applications in that it comes unsolicited. You don't get to choose whose mail will land in your inbox. As a result, it's the most abused Internet utility. Companies such as AOL, AT&T, Comcast, Google, Verizon and Yahoo spend vast sums of money to receive and sort out messages that, in most cases, their subscribers never asked for and never wanted. The cost of inaction isn't just a glut of ads for drugs, porn and get-rich-quick cons, but the real risk of losing the ability to employ e-mail for any productive or worthwhile use. Internet service providers have taken a variety of measures to try to deal with that, such as automated filtering of incoming mail, combined with an outright refusal to accept mail from sites on blacklists of known or suspected spammers. But when some of the largest, most deeply entrenched Internet service providers in the United States alternate between griping about how other firms sponge off their bandwidth and suggesting that they'd merely give Web sites the chance to buy higher-priority access, we have a different situation. The first idea, as articulated by Verizon's deputy general counsel, John Thorne, this week -- that a company like Google has been "enjoying a free lunch" by not paying any share of Verizon's costs -- is transparently ridiculous. Google and all the other high-traffic sites aren't getting anything free. They pay -- heavily -- for bandwidth at their end. Second, these mainstream Internet service providers should think about what, exactly, their customers are going online for in the first place. To use the great search engine Verizon's developed? To get directions and satellite photos using AT&T's brilliant mapping site? To buy songs at BellSouth's wildly popular music-download store? Oh, wait: None of those things exist!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/09/AR200602...
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See Also --
* Quality of Service: A Quality Argument?
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=973