claus - 12:37 am on Jun 30, 2006 (gmt 0)

>> How will it affect the small business person?

As far as I can tell this has no influence on the ordainary mom 'n pop business. I am willing to take a bet that 90%-99% of webmasters here will be unaffected.

Some of the big guys with lots of marketing muscle would like to have it look that way. It's just hype to protect their own interest.

This will mean increased costs for the big guys, like Google, Yahoo, MSN, but probably also for smaller bandwith hogs like YouTube, internet radio, Skype, etc.

>> Is this just another way for the phone companies to screw us?

Of course this opens all kinds of theoretical possibilities. And telcos are greedy by nature. But then no more than most companies are.

But I wouldn't believe the hype myself. Telco's have learned the AOL lesson; no customers today would want a walled garden for common web content. Multimedia-content is something else (sofar, but that may change)

So, this is not for regulating traffic to your standard HTML pages. Not even if they feature a shopping cart, or ads.