Most of the discussion of RBOC “threat” to tamper with IP traffic – and any attempt to favour some traffic requires disadvantaging other traffic – misses some key points. First, SBC can do all it wants and it will have little or no effect on Google’s performance. The intelligence of Google’s design has always been that it is a simple, lean website. Given the limited amount of bandwidth needed to serve a customer, there isn’t much to gain or lose based on the carrier actions. The performance of many websites is largely unchanged even if you switch from a 256K line to a 10M line. Second, VoIP doesn’t require significant bandwidth and doesn’t impose any strain anywhere in the carrier network. The VoIP challenge is not bandwidth, but latency and jitter. While the RBOCs can certainly interfere with the quality of a VoIP connection, they take on the significant risk of getting caught (as some did when they tried to block Vonage). Preferential treatment for their own, or a paying partner’s, VoIP service only adds value if the “best efforts” delivery is poor. Not a serious issue today, and likely not one on the future without deliberate sabotage. (In fact, reducing bandwidth taken by P2P services could actually improve VoIP performance.) Third, total network usage remains heavily dominated by P2P file transfers. In this case, the RBOCs simply have no one to charge to deliver better performance. They can take steps (as some probably do already) to throttle P2P traffic, but P2P is something to run in the background. If a download takes 3 hours instead of 2, most people won’t notice. The RBOCs may interfere with commercial video streaming services or VOD businesses, but we are still some way from any of them being significant drivers of Internet traffic. (Besides, I have iTunes download my podcasts automatically while I sleep. So again, the speed doesn’t matter much.) Fourth, this type of strategy only works when customers are dependent on a single carrier for Internet access. Many people (most?) have at least two points of connection – home and work – with multiple networks and technologies between themselves and the service providers. Unless a single carrier (or a group of affiliated carriers) can manage the entire end-to-end connection, there is no guarantee that paying any one for “premium” service will add value. Fifth, these schemes are dependent on the cable companies following suit. While this is possible, and the cable companies have a solid record of gouging customers wherever possible, they have much less incentive to do so. Cable Internet services are already quite profitable, they generate more revenue, and have larger market share. The status quo is acceptable for cable and leaves them well-positioned to rapidly grow share in telephony. Cable could choose to go along, or they could decide to use “neutrality” as a competitive advantage. (They will eventually start to screw around, but not until Internet distribution -- not the RBOCs IPTV -- begins to impact their core business; actually, if they were smart, they’d scream and yell in Washington to force the RBOCs to open up the 80% of the IP pipe they plan to dedicate to their IPTV services.) Finally, all these plans assume the RBOCs have some kind of “tollgate” on consumer Internet access. Right now, they have a significant share of high-speed access at home, but not even half if cable doesn’t go along. Over the next few years, they will face WiFi, WiMax, EVDO/ HSPDA, and possibly BPL. Will everyone go along, or will someone see free access as the means to establish a place in the market? More important, even if everyone tries to control the traffic, what are the odds that no one will figure out a workaround? (After all, wasn’t Skype’s principal accomplishment devising means to bypass all the firewall/ NAT issues that had limited previous IM/VoIP software?) In conclusion, the RBOCs may try this (although, I’m still not sure technically how they differentiate between Google and Yahoo packets), but it is unlikely to be successful. In fact, they might be much better off taking the money they will invest in interfering with IP and using it to improve their networks and customer service. If their service were better, they wouldn’t have to discount their service ($12.99?) so heavily to keep competitive with cable. The extra revenue (from their actual customers) might address their financial problems.