blaze - 9:39 am on Jan 24, 2006 (gmt 0)

Complicated problem.

All this 100s of billions of dollars they spent on creating these networks in the first place (and went bankrupt in a lot of cases doing) was because they all expected to profit off of the internet.

Will, they bided their time, and their time has come. Money is flowing and now they want a piece of it.

They could just up the subscriber / server fees .. but that would just kill the internet.

So, they're trying to be more selective - go after the high flyers like Google, Yahoo, Ebay, and Amazon,.

It is a really hard problem. On one hand, I think the carriers need to be paid their fair share and the government should not be allowed to intervene.

On the other hand, there is a lot of potential for abuse here. The message *IS* the medium. We must not forget that.

Hopefully a thoughtful balance will be struck. In any case, I'm believe Google should pay the piper.