Daniel Berninger: Net Neutrality and Right-of-Way

Daniel Berninger has a guest post at Om's GigaOm today on how the net neutrality debate could come back to haunt the Bells.

From the post:

"Ed Whitacre might want to pay fair value for the public and private property utilized by the telephone network, before asking “…why should they be allowed to use my pipes…” when explaining to a Business Week reporter why Google, Yahoo, and Vonage should pay new usage based fees. There will be arguments Internet access represents an “incidental use” allowed by state laws, but these arguments will succeed only at the cost of the Bell’s much promised transformation plans. The desire to extinguish net neutrality does not arise from worries about incidental use.

The Bell companies need to stop the neutral Internet from erasing the legacy telephone network’s voice revenues. Price discrimination enables metering of Internet access by keeping per bit price of low bandwidth voice relatively high while offering relatively lower per bit prices to initiate a video revenue stream. Net neutrality stands in the way of their becoming digital economy toll collectors."