I see that Bell South wants to start charging content providers on a per service basis:

Bill Smith, chief technology officer at BellSouth, justified content charging companies by saying they are using the telco's network without paying for it.

"Higher usage for broadband services drives more costs that we have to recover," he said in a telephone interview.

Interestingly enough, the first company he mentioned was Apple, and their iTunes store. Wow, it's almost as if music companies called Smith up and asked him to carry water for them. And he thinks we should like the idea:

"It's the shipping business of the digital age," Smith said, arguing that consumers should welcome the pay-for-delivery concept.

Yeah, I just love the idea. I really want every single ISP in the chain marking my content up by a nickle as it passes by - I don't pay my ISP enough, so I should be happy to have my monthly bill jacked up in anticipation of how much content I'll be incrementally responsible for. I'm sure they won't guess on the high side.

It's one thing if ISP's want to offer better QOS for higher fees, or even for one off services - that wouldn't be any different than pay-per view, and I expect most people would be fine with that. Whether they can actually deliver that to the home is another matter entirely. What won't be fine is what I think they'll actually do - try to ding a micro-payment from every packet that flies by, and push monthly service charges up based on perceived future usage.

The funny thing is, I keep seeing people claim that the net is going to collapse tomorrow is something isn't done - Mark Cuban is the latest chicken little to see the packets falling. Odd how time goes by, and the internet keeps working, isn't it?