{"id":65,"date":"2005-10-31T18:06:40","date_gmt":"2005-10-31T18:06:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=10"},"modified":"2005-10-31T18:06:40","modified_gmt":"2005-10-31T18:06:40","slug":"sbc-to-internet-we-own-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2005\/10\/31\/sbc-to-internet-we-own-you\/","title":{"rendered":"SBC to Internet: We own you"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ed Whitacre, CEO of SBC Telecommunications, tells Businessweek magazine that as far as he&#8217;s concerned, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.businessweek.com\/@@n34h*IUQu7KtOwgA\/magazine\/content\/05_45\/b3958092.htm\">telecoms and cable companies get to control the Internet<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Q. How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google, MSN, Vonage, and others?<\/p>\n<p>A. How do you think they&#8217;re going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain&#8217;t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there&#8217;s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they&#8217;re using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can&#8217;t be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s a nice try, Ed.  You may not be <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ipdemocracy.com\/archives\/000656bellsouth_we_might_want_to_block_ports.php\">the only one to try that kind of thing<\/a>, but let&#8217;s see you try to block access to Skype or Gmail unless someone pays up.  And don&#8217;t large bandwidth users pay for traffic carried on a cable or telecom network already? SBC&#8217;s new business model sounds a little bit like extortion to me. Former Release 1.0 editor Kevin Werbach says <a href=\"http:\/\/werbach.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/10\/the_telco_minds.html\">we should be afraid<\/a>. More discussion <a href=\"http:\/\/www.interesting-people.org\/archives\/interesting-people\/200510\/msg00437.html\">on the Interesting People list<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><b>Update:<\/b> The Washington Post has a story criticizing Ed, in which an SBC spokesman does <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/content\/article\/2005\/11\/03\/AR2005110302211.html\">some serious backpedalling on the whole arging-chay for andwidth-bay thing<\/a>.<\/p>\n<div class=\"syndication-links\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ed Whitacre, CEO of SBC Telecommunications, tells Businessweek magazine that as far as he&#8217;s concerned, telecoms and cable companies get to control the Internet: &#8220;Q. How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google, MSN, Vonage, and others? A. How do you think they&#8217;re going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2005\/10\/31\/sbc-to-internet-we-own-you\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;SBC to Internet: We own you&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}