Google, Amazon and Ebay tell AT&T to make their day, punk! About time. So, in case anyone wasn’t aware the large telcos like AT&T wanted to blackmail the large web traffic generating sites to pay them to bring customers to them. Nevermind they are already payed to do this, the greedy telco dinosaurs now wanted premiums from Google and Amazon and EBay, three hugely wealthy companies. The worrying issue here is that with Washington being what it is, the telcos are lobbying hard and might just get their way with the FCC being almost as bad as the Irish Telecoms regulator.
Imagine charging people a road toll and then charging them differently depending on which shop they’ll be visiting, even if all shops are in the same location. That’s what AT&T want. The Networking Pipeline I referenced above is now speculating that Google, Ebay and Amazon might just route around AT&T and buy chunks of wireless spectrum and provide customers with an alternative way of getting online. Kinda cool that a principle of the ‘net is to route around damage and that’s what Google et al might just do. Google has already been buying up a lot of dark fibre and hiring dark fibre experts. They have also been investing in broadband over powerlines (won’t happen) and they are playing now with wireless networks in San Fran and Mountain View. GoogleNet is much closer than we thought.
Why aren’t power-lines an option?