They’re starting by talking about VOIP, but AT&T and other broadband providers want to charge content providers for access to their networks. 

Well, the traditional phone companies are at it again, looking for pounds of flesh that they can extract from the feature-rich Internet-based services and sites that want carriage over their networks.

Just yesterday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (I’m there) Verizon Communications CEO Ivan Seidenberg talked of willingness to strike up deals with unnamed sites and services. "We have to make sure they (services) don’t sit on our network and chew up our capacity," he said.

Of course, this is where the distinction between a deal and a shakedown starts to get a bit blurry. After all, it was AT&T (formerly SBC) CEO Ed Whitacre’s controversial statement last fall that free carriage of high-bandwidth services would be "crazy" that started this fiirestorm.

William Smith, chief technology officer of BellSouth, told the Journal today that he envisions charging content providers a fee based on the volume of material they send over BellSouth’s network, as well as the bandwidth the content takes up.

As I see it, there’s just one tiny little hole in this “logic.”  Broadband subscribers are already paying for access to the network.  This sounds suspiciously like double-dipping by phone companies that are afraid of losing their lock on the phone business.

It’s technically feasible to determine the ISP of the user based on their IP address.  It would be a simple thing for Yahoo! or Google to deny access to AT&T/SBC users by redirecting them to an alternate page with a very simple explanation of why their carrier is blocked.  I suspect that most people would be rather upset with their ISP for doing something like this.  With enough customer outrage, I’d expect that something like this wouldn’t last long. 

I noticed that Verizon was among those contemplating this sort of thing.  Despite the fact that cable can’t offer me the speed of Verizon FIOS, I’d drop Verizon in a heartbeat and go back to cable if Verizon were to pull this sort of stunt.  I pay Verizon for a certain amount of bandwidth.  It should be irrelevant to them what I use it for.  If they think I’m using too much, then they should reprice their offerings. 

Further, I don’t like the idea that Verizon decides which services gets better performance on their network.  Any way you slice it, it looks like end users get screwed under that kind of deal.  Instead of getting the bandwidth and performance we pay for, we get the bandwidth and performance that someone else pays for.  If they’re going to do that, then they’d better knock some off of the price I pay.