All this sounds vaguely alarming. The general outcry seems to be that the telco, et. al., will prohibit traffic that hasn’t had this additional fee applied. In other words, you dear visitor wouldn’t be able to visit SlowLink unless we ponied up (even more) money.

In fact, this appeared to be AT&Ts original stance, but they’ve since backed off. Especially when it was pointed out that they are already being paid for access, by you the user, and by us, the provider.

The current statement is a bit more measured. Essentially, they’re saying that if there’s congestion then websites that pay extra get priority. That almost makes sense. Strangely, there doesn’t seem to be a shortage of bandwidth. In fact, there’s quite a bit of what is called “dark fiber” – bandwidth that isn’t being used at all. The telcos are saying they need to charge extra to pay for the additional buildout.

There’s no guarantee they will build out, though. By charging extra, and doing nothing, congestion will increase and the only traffic getting through will be that which has been paid for. All while the telcos go back to their fat-profit days (which is what all this is really about).

The email situation is a bit better. AOL and Yahoo are saying that mail that is paid for will not be processed by their spam filters, guaranteeing that the mail will be delivered to the recipient’s inbox. Again, this sounds reasonable. Again, there’s a catch. There’s nothing keeping AOL and Yahoo from cranking up what they consider to be “spam” until only paid-for mail reaches your inbox.

The potential profits for this are huge. Oddly, Microsoft comes off looking like good guys. Instead of charging per-message, they charge a flat fee to bypass their filters.

Like most things, we SlaveDogs know what’s gonna happen. The tiered internet is inevitable, unless regulation continues to intervene. The big players will be all promises about how its to improve service, and they need the money to further improve that service.

Then they’ll spend it all crushing out anything that looks like a threat to their bottom line, assuring us mediocre technology, and letting the rest of the world continue to pass the US by.