Techdirt: Why Aren’t The Telcos Paying Google For Making Their Network Valuable?. A little while back verizon said that sites like google and msn get a free lunch from carriers because they don’t pay for the traffic. This is a pretty dubious claim even for an industry as stupid as telco, but techdirt goes so far as to argue that telco’s should be paying google.
Why? Well, all that bandwidth the telco’s own is completely useless unless there’s something filling it like compelling content (read: sites like google). The post also makes an interesting point about how verizon already pays for the right to play video content on cell phones. Really, verizon should just be happy that search engines aren’t a cartel like the MPAA/RIAA and that they can serve that content for free.