• by Tom Hespos , February 14, 2006

No, of course it's not. But judging by the behavior of certain companies out there, you'd think that some decision-makers in high places believe that consumer choice is a thing of the past.

Some would like to charge companies money to ensure their e-mail gets through to their customers' inboxes. Others would like to charge Web sites to ensure that people who try to connect to those Web sites do so at an acceptable speed. What these companies fail to account for in their value equation is just what the heck the end user thinks about all this.

We're used to typing a URL into our address bar and being taken to the Web site we specify. We also expect that page to load within a reasonable length of time. If it doesn't, either the problem lies with our own ISP or with the hosting provider of the site. Now, telcos and access providers want to be able to charge individual Web sites money for delivering content to their users.

That's right, not satisfied with collecting money from the people who pay for access, they'd like to charge content providers as well. Of course, this will be camouflaged as a choice for content providers--either they can pay nothing and take their chances, or they can "upgrade" so that their content delivery will take precedence over that of others. So the big boys who can afford such enhancements will enjoy faster delivery to the consumer, while the guy developing the next Fark.com in his basement will have people waiting in line for his packets, most likely experiencing decreasing quality of service over time. Doesn't sound very compatible with the original spirit and intent of the Internet, does it? Certainly it would deal a nasty blow to the citizen publishing movement.

Similarly, we're used to signing up to receive e-mail updates or newsletters from companies and actually receiving them in our inboxes. That's what we expect. But what would happen if the newsletter or update never arrived because the content provider didn't pay your ISP a per-mail charge to deliver that newsletter to you? Wouldn't you be angry, considering you pay your ISP for access?

I can appreciate wanting to derive revenue from content providers who send traffic out over ISP and telco networks. But looking to B2B deals to take up the revenue slack because e-mail and Web access have become commodities is not smart at all, especially since the concerns of the customer are completely ignored in such scenarios. No one is going to be happy with lightning-quick access to the Big Three if the cost involves crawling along at a snail's pace on independent content sites. No one is going to be happy with e-mail as a distribution channel if the only commercial entities who can send e-mail reliably are the bulk senders who can afford to pay the fee.

Think of these situations as incredibly regressive taxes levied on content providers. The big ones will get bigger while the little ones will be at a huge disadvantage. I shudder to think what's going to happen to the long tail--such fees would chop it off.

Then again, the customer is king and these things do tend to correct themselves. Would alternate networks emerge to rebalance the value equation? Perhaps. We'll have to wait and see.