Bellsouth’s Big Board

Small, innovative companies won’t be able to compete in a pay-for-performance Internet, said Mark Cooper, research director of the Consumer Federation of America.

Yeehaw .. that’ll show them uppidy college educated eggheads a thing or two.

The model of the Internet, until now, has been for providers to charge for access and for innovative companies to provide products people want to use on the Internet, Cooper said at a recent net neutrality forum. You havent innovated anything that you want to charge these customers for, Cooper told Verizon and BellSouth executives.

He’s accusing us of stealing or trying to. Aint that right? He can’t talk to us that way. We have the ‘big board’.

Cooper and some net neutrality advocates say tiered service is acceptable — broadband providers should be able to charge more for 10 gigabit service than 1 gigabit service. But if customers pay for 10 gigabit service, they should be able to run whatever Web applications and services they want, he argued.

Can’t somebody shut this guy up?

Instead of worrying about how customers use bandwidth, broadband providers should focus on bringing faster service to U.S. customers, argued Douglas Van Houweling, president and chief executive officer of Internet2, a consortium providing high-speed access to U.S. universities. Internet2, launched in 1996, experimented in its early days with ways to segment traffic, but found that creating a tiered network was too �complicated and expensive,� he said.�A well-designed, high-bandwidth network does not need quality of service [limits] on advanced services,� Van Houweling said. �We think the best way for providers to make money is explosive growth of the Internet.�

ITworld.com – Fight brewing in Congress over net neutrality

Technorati Tags: bellsouth, telecomunications+policy, FCC, Direct+TV,