geek ramblings

The chairman of AT&T has a tunnel-vision problem:

Ed Whitacre, AT&T’s chairman and chief executive, warned on Monday that internet content providers that wanted to use broadband networks to deliver high-quality services such as movie downloads to their customers would have to pay for the service or face the prospect that new investment in high speed networks “will dry up.”

[...]

“I think the content providers should be paying for the use of the network – obviously not the piece from the customer to the network, which has already been paid for by the customer in Internet access fees – but for accessing the so-called Internet cloud.”

Soooo, let’s break down how dumb these statements are.

First of all, the content providers are paying for service already, in the same way that the end-users do. [...]