So what's with U.S. telecom carriers suddenly getting all hot and heavy about charging fees to Web sites and service that ride over "their" networks? The latest "Show Me The Money" entrant is BellSouth CTO William Smith who believes Web sites such as Yahoo should have the ability to pay a fee to carriers to ensure their traffic gets higher priority than their competitors. His comments come shortly after a similar statement by SBC CEO Ed Whitaker. I guess these demands should not come as a big surprise given telecom carriers are under growing financial pressure because their core, high-margin local phone businesses are under siege from cablecos and other players such as Vonage and Skype. Rather than develop creative new services, many carriers have decided to take the easy way out by charging additional Internet fees on top of the access fees that customers now pay each month. This proposal/lobbying effort/trial balloon is far from a cut and dry issue because it raises all kinds of issues on whether the Internet is a shared resource or just a series of private networks controlled by different entities. Does SBC or BellSouth or any carrier/cableco have the right to stake out parts of the Internet as their own and charge tolls for any traffic that travels on them? Is this what the founders of Arparnet and the Internet (Vinton Cerf, Robert Khan, etc.) were thinking when they created the technology, systems and architecture back in the 1960s and 1970s? As someone who has used the Web for 10 years and loves how buying access gives you access to mountain of information, I find proposals to implement traffic levies a violation of the Internet's basic principles. Then again, I'm not a senior telecom executive who is watching is business deteriorate at an alarming rate. The question is whether traffic levies are the way to go or whether they need to focus on selling services other than connectivity.

 

I was hoping to provide a mini-review of Firefox 1.5 after rushing to download it after it became available yesterday. (Here's a list of new features) Unfortunately, I soon discovered v. 1.5 doesn't support many of my extensions, particularly Roboform, which is an essential part of my day-to-day surfing. As a result, I'm going to have to sit on the sidelines until Roboform comes up with a hack for v. 1.5. I was somewhat annoyed with having to uninstall v. 1.5 and hunt around for a version of v. 1.0.7 but I guess that's what you get for rushing into something new without checking the fineprint. For a snapshot of v. 1.5 reviews, check out Blogs for Firefox. PC Magazine has a full review.