That’s a nice website you’ve got there.  It’d be a shame if something were to happen to it.

Once again, a Verizon executive is bellyaching about not getting enough fees out of Internet traffic.

A Verizon Communications Inc. executive yesterday accused Google Inc. of freeloading for gaining access to people’s homes using a network of lines and cables the phone company spent billions of dollars to build.

The comments by John Thorne, a Verizon senior vice president and deputy general counsel, came as lawmakers prepared to debate legislation that could let phone and cable companies charge Internet firms additional fees for using their high-speed lines.

“The network builders are spending a fortune constructing and maintaining the networks that Google intends to ride on with nothing but cheap servers,” Thorne told a conference marking the 10th anniversary of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. “It is enjoying a free lunch that should, by any rational account, be the lunch of the facilities providers.”

Verizon is spending billions of dollars to construct a fiber-optic network around the country for delivering high-speed Internet and cable TV services. Executives at other telecom companies, such as AT&T Inc. chief executive Edward E. Whitacre Jr., have suggested that Google, Yahoo Inc. and other such Internet services should have to pay fees for preferred access to consumers over such lines.

Frankly, this is a daft load of bollocks (sorry, been reading too many British mystery novels lately).  Google may be using “cheap servers,” but they pay for the bandwidth they use in their datacenters.  And I pay for the bandwidth I use on my end of the link.  Verizon isn’t having its lunch eaten for free by other players.  All of us who use their broadband services have already paid them for it.  If they’re not making money on their backbone operations, then maybe they need to negotiate better deals with their peering partners.  But it’s time to stop bleating about this.  No one is getting a free lunch here. 

There also appears to be some confusion about just how these networks can be used.  It sounds like Verizon is complaining that all its bandwidth is being eaten by services offered by providers other than itself, and that makes their new fiber build-out unprofitable.  This is an obnoxious obfuscation on their part.  They have built capacity into their network for their own services, and then provide broadband access to people using the remaining bandwidth.  Their own video offerings are in no way threatened by Google or Yahoo, at least from a bandwidth standpoint.  And I see nothing wrong with them using QoS tools to guarantee bandwidth to their own IPTV offering (should they ever actually start offering it; right now, at least here, their TV service uses an RF overlay on the fiber).  After segementing out their own traffic, they’re offering me a certain amount of bandwidth.  It’s really not up to them what I do with that bandwidth.  But this sort of talk sounds a lot like they’re wanting to charge me more depending on how I use that bandwidth.

I think a lot of this is simply sour grapes on the part of telephone providers who can’t stand the idea that data is the new game and the old (and very lucrative) telephone system is on its last legs.  Verizon and the others are trying to find ways to reach into the data stream to pull out new sources of revenue, rather than being relegated to being providers of commodity bandwidth.  Verizon had better be careful about this sort of talk.  We’re already getting rumblings of “net neutrality” legislation in response to these sorts of proposed schemes.  Millions of people now use broadband, and those people have come to depend on the net working a certain way.  They will never stand for additional per-site charges and sites like Google will not likely stand for being charged.  I would expect a player like Google to segregate traffic from providers who demand payment so that the end-user knows exactly who is to blame (i.e. if you’re on Verizon and Verizon demands payment from Google, Google could simply redirect you to a page that explains that you are experiencing slow performance because Verizon is demanding that Google pay extra for you to use the bandwidth you already paid for).  Just how much bad press and customer enmity are Verizon, AT&T, and the other network providers really willing to incur in this battle?

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