In an interview at CES, Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg stated that he feels web application vendors such as Google and Microsoft are not paying enough for the bandwidth these applications use.
“We talk to them [Google] all the time, and they understand the issue,” said Seidenberg, in a question-and-answer period following his keynote speech Thursday at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). “We have to make sure that they [application providers] don’t sit on our network and chew up bandwidth,” Seidenberg said. “We need to pay for the pipe.”
The talk of “paying for the pipe” is curiously reminiscent of the comments from SBC CEO Edward Whitacre’s comments about Google and Microsoft last November, where he was quoted as saying:
“So there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?”
The similarity of these two statements by supposed business competitors to the “talking points” so often heard from paid political hacks on cable news networks is eerie. The issue, it turns out, is indeed political. The US Congress is scheduled to begin talks early this year to redraft existing telecom laws for the new era of broadband. The two major network providers, Verizon and SBC, recently had their mergers with MCI and AT&T approved by the Federal Communications Commission. Ever since, the two giants have been talking like a single unit, rather than the competitors the original Ma Bell breakup was supposed to create.
