charge us for the services that we want. If you want to make a clear phone call, then pay. If you want to download large amounts of data, then pay. Quoting the article "That's something operators of the Internet highway, the major U.S. phone companies, want to change by effectively adding a toll lane: They want to be able to give priority treatment to those who pay to get through faster."

Of course, this would not make ISP's and current major players happy, and it has the potential to change the major player landscape, where "free services" could get very expensive. We may actually have to "look up" in a book type dictionary what a word means for example, or buy a subscription to do it online.

According to the AP article here is what would happen. "On the Internet, information is carried in "packets," small chunks of data. An e-mail might be divided into several packets and travel different routes to the destination, much like cars have multiple ways of getting somewhere. The packets may arrive out of order, a few even late, but data can be reassembled to reconstitute the e-mail.

This design grew out of the military's desire for a network that was both simple and reliable. And as the Internet became more widely available, this equal treatment of traffic was part of what made it attractive; individuals, startups and big corporations were on the same footing.

Now, however, the Internet is being used for things the engineers of the 1960s and 70s couldn't have envisioned, like video, telephone calls and Internet games.

It doesn't matter if an e-mail gets where it's going half a second late, but a half-second's delay in a phone call is annoying, and a half-second's delay in a fast-moving game can mean a missed shot.

Thus, the telecommunications companies want to be able to provide "tiered service," guaranteeing that, for a price, some packets will get to their destination on time."

As the 'range' of the Internet keeps expanding, this is bound to happen. Its just a matter of time before email and other types of messages are beamed to outer space-based, geo synchronous hotels in orbit, and perhaps, in about fifteen years time to Moon basis and after that a colony on Mars. As the Internet keeps expanding it's just a matter of time that certain services that you and I haven't even dreamt about would have to be charged for on a dramatic basis. For myself, this was a forgone conclusion that the "free party" was not going to last. That is why most of the system that I have designed are done with the idea that eventually things will have to paid for, at every corner of the world.

Going further, AP summarized the current environment by saying "The carriers are under "tremendous pressure" from customers to provide more reliable service, said Shawn White, director of external operations at Keynote Systems Inc., which tracks the performance of Web sites and the Internet.

Brief delays, for instance, could result in stuttering video, unacceptable to advertisers, White notes.

Whether they tier their service or not, telecommunications companies need to expand capacity. To do so costs money, and the telecoms argue that Internet users will have to pay, one way or another. They say it's preferable that the money come from those who need and are willing to pay for better service, rather than spreading the cost out over all users.

"We do have to recover the cost for building the new capacity out there that the content providers are expecting us to provide," said Jim Cicconi, AT&T Inc.'s senior executive vice president of external and legislative affairs.

AT&T already provides connections between offices of the same company, or between government offices, using AT&T's own lines rather than the public Internet. This allows AT&T to guarantee a certain quality level.

By prioritizing packets, AT&T could extend that service to the connection between a Web site and a surfer at home." End of AP note.

The bottom line is that most Internet services should be paid for in some manner, and many of the abuses will then go away. At one point there were a handful of people that were sending out a billion emails daily to their SPAM list to get back a few orders. Some of the order processing data showed that the spam senders were getting one order per every million emails sent. But, in the process 999,999 others had to live with the agony of sorting through hundreds of emails daily, and in my case, my original email address from 1994 had to be shut down when I started getting 1000's of emails daily. What a pity.

Often many individuals don't truly appreciate a service until they have to put a price tag on it. Below is another excerpt from the AP article: "To the opponents, abandoning the "network neutrality" principle opens up the prospect of the carriers blocking sites that don't pay up or that compete with the carriers' own services -- for instance, by providing phone calls.

The carriers have stoked those fears with some hard-line rhetoric. John Thorne, Verizon Communications Inc.'s senior vice president and deputy general counsel, was quoted by The Washington Post as telling a conference that Google "is enjoying a free lunch that should, by any rational account, be the lunch of the facilities providers."

Ed Whitacre, AT&T's chief executive, has raised eyebrows with similar statements to the effect that Google and Yahoo Inc. are freeloading on the Internet, a remarkable assertion considering both companies pay millions of dollars in Internet access fees, and their visitors pay for Internet access as well.

Brasil Telecom SA, Brazil's third-largest phone company, said in mid-February it had installed the first system that can identify information by type -- say, a voice call -- and bill the company providing it, addressing what the company calls "revenue leakage." The company would not give further details on its plans.

The implications for Maxsimo.NET:

I think that the implications for our services is that the content provided by network has to be the best so that the viewer received exactly what they are looking for. In the case of http://www.biig.com that will roll-out tomorrow, the searches have to provide the best results for the key words searched.

Furthermore, the work has to be done by humans, because any attempt to use a crawler or robot to gather the information leads to web site owners using programs and other cheating processes to find their way into the directory.

I also think that when the Internet is not truly "free" then there will be more services that are depending on the paying customer as oppose to those that are depending on advertisers to pay while providing free content. Fundamentally, I don't see the Internet changing all that much, except for the fact that many abuses of colossal downloading and mass email will come to a halt, except for some extreme cases.

Ok, my thoughts are over. I'll get back to last minute stuff. Sam out. Carpe Diem.

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