A few days ago ETNO, the European lobby organisation, has proposed to make content providers such as Google or Facebook pay for their activities on the networks of their members. What this boils down to is a pay for access model which favours monopolists.

The basis of the problem for the telcos is that they have to invest a lot of money in order to be able to offered a service their customers expect from them. Customers expect high-speed Internet access on their mobile devices. Given the possibilities of their mobile devices this is not an unreasonable amount to make.

The question should be whether the price being asked is the right price. I think that the telcos which are used to verify profit margins on services like SMS are expecting too much from their customers in terms of revenue. Back in the day when SMS was hard and mobile Internet was not really being used by the public at large, the telcos could make wads of cash without having to invest much in their networks. somehow we telcos thought that they could pull the same trick off with the mobile Internet. The actual cost of running the mobile Internet service is not very high, only a few cents per megabyte at most, but the investment in the network that needs to handle the traffic from their mobile sites to the Internet itself (for appearing agreement with someone who can handle the traffic for forum at an Internet exchange) might be a different story, but not one which is unmanageable for telcos.

However, at the moment the telcos are being squeezed on the stock markets for not being as profitable as they were in the past. In order to achieve higher profits the telcos made up a scheme where content providers have to pay to get “preferential” access to their networks. Preferential access is of course a misnomer, as the limitation of Internet speed for those who have not made an agreement with telcos will suffer in the number of clients they have due to lower speed. So what this boils down to in the end is a situation where if one does not have a contract you’re screwed because you will not be able to reach customers at the speed they expect. This hinders the work of start-ups who are dependent on an open network in order to rule out their services without much money. It therefore can be argued that this proposal hinders innovation and the development of our economy.

But on a more fundamental level this is also incorrect. There is no place for preferential treatment on an open Internet. Once we begin to prefer certain types of Trappist traffic or certain websites the door to censorship will be wide open. Internet has always been a place where freedom of speech has been paramount, and I believe it should remain that way.

I think that the telcos should face up to the fact that these are different times from the days when SMS was all the rage and money came in for free because of the relatively low need for investments. It seems that the telcos are going the way of the recording industry, where the people are clinging onto all business models which are no longer viable. Their landline based counterparts have never put forth these strategies, so I see no point in the telcos doing it for the mobile web.