The Internets

I saw this yesterday but was in meeting most of the afternoon. One would think that Bellsouth would have enough to do fighting city hall but a week or so ago the CTO started talking about charging for access to certain sites:

"William L. Smith, chief technology officer for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., told reporters and analysts that an Internet service provider such as his firm should be able, for example, to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc."

I admit i just don't understand that in so many ways but today - or yesterday - there is more:

"The proposal supported by AT&T and BellSouth would allow telecommunications carriers to offer their own advanced Internet video services to their customers, while rival firms' online video offerings would be transmitted at lower speed and with poorer image quality."

The guys at techdirt don't really understand it either, and other sites are chattering about it; /., Boing Boing and Broadband Reports. Luckily the folks at Boing Boing break it down for us:

Translation: "We like everything about the internet, except the way it keeps us from locking out the competition, so we want something just like the net, except less useful to the user, but with more pricing power for us."