A war AT&T, others don't seem to want to fight

[Commentary] Randall Stephenson sounded like anything but a rapacious monopolist about to squeeze billions in new revenue out of his Internet services thanks to the end of network neutrality. "The industry has come a long way since then," the AT&T CEO said about a Federal appeals court ruling which suggested telecom companies could demand higher fees from bandwidth-intensive content providers like Netflix, Amazon, or Google. He was responding to an analyst during his company's quarterly results conference. "In the last couple of years, the industry has worked and agreed to a framework for Net Neutrality. So the court order really changed nothing." Why so conciliatory in what should have been a moment of triumph? Perhaps it is because Stephenson knows that for AT&T and its telecom peers to begin exploiting this potentially huge new revenue opportunity, they'll have to overcome a much bigger challenge than the Federal courts or regulators. Actually two challenges: Apple and Google. The implicit threat behind all this activity is that any move by the likes of AT&T, Verizon, or Comcast to throttle or charge more for Google services like YouTube will result in an all-out war. Apple hasn't yet threatened to go down this road, but it certainly has the sort of cash hoard to participate in the fun if it wants to.

[Chip Bayers is a journalist covering technology and business]