So imagine if turnpikes charged when you got on the road, and then again when you got off. This is exactly what some of the telcos are trying to do with internet access. They see that internet access is a commodity and decreasing revenue from the cash-cow that is circuit based voice service and are looking for new sources of revenue. The increasing usage of VoIP is directly eroding their circuit based voice service income and it’s only going to get worse as Vonage/Skype/FWD/Gizmo/PhoneGnome reach into the main stream.

Jeff Pulver, who has been a thought and action leader in VoIP for years, writes at some length about it.

The Journal story warns of a looming battle between Internet companies, who create the valuable things we do with the Internet, and the phone companies who want to control access to it. The phone companies, who continually seek new ways to apply telephone access charges to Internet communications, apparently now want to take the next step by creating and applying access charges to all forms of Internet traffic (not just voice anymore).

This idea is BAD, BAD, BAD! There already exists ‘tiers’ of internet access; you can buy your bandwidth from a backbone provider, or from someone that connects to a backbone provider, or from someone who connects to someone that connects to a backbone provider or.. you get the idea. The closer you get to the backbone providers, and, in turn, better throughput to your customers, the higher the cost of bandwidth. In essence, the ‘fast lane’ for commercial traffic already exists.

There is no logic behind this idea, only greed.

The Jeff Pulver Blog: My reaction to WSJ’s “Phone Companies Set Off A Battle Over Internet Fees”