Again, it is their backbone, bought and paid for out of their meager corporate profits (6.7% for 2005).
If they are losing money on a service I hope to hell they charge more for that service so that they can earn the revenues to improve it, otherwise THEY WILL drop an unprofitable service, as well they should.
I have no moral right to demand they provide any service to anyone at a loss or at less than what the market for that service will bear. If you think they can create unbreakable cost fixing monopolies on anything then you understand neither markets nor technology. Any such attempt by them will only gender additional technological innovations that will, at some time, bypass any such monopolies. That's how markets work.
Again, congress should not be trying to "regulate" anything about any of this. Get out of the way and let the competition compete.
The telcos, and for that matter the cable co's, job is to transmit bits over a wire or fiber. I have paid for their service already in my DSL subscription fee, which I might add is already capacity limited by my ISP-Verizon to around 728 kb download and 128 kb upload.
It is not their job (Verizon, etc.) to look at the bits and see if they can charge more for some of them. I have already paid for this telco DSL service and it is not their job to look for Amazon's, Google's, or any other bits and slow them down if Amazon et al doesn't pay their vigorish. BTW, vigorish is the exact correct choice of their proposed procedure.
I have no moral right to demand they provide any service to anyone at a loss or at less than what the market for that service will bear. Au contraire: I have every right to expect them to deliver any bits I choose without discrimination or vigorish, thank you very much!
If Verizon tries this, I will switch to someones VOIP just to screw them out of a line charge! I suppose your next argument will be that poor Verizon has the right to screw up another provider's VOIP?
Anyone who has spent any time on a 1G Ethernet network understands it.
Let's take http://maps.Goggle.com as an example.
When you "click and drag" the map around, the adjacent part of the picture loads so fast in a cable connection that it's almost like it was on your hard drive, in other words latency is less than ~50 ms.
This is no big deal today, each little image is not that big, and it is transfered so fast and reliably that it's taken for granted by the user. The Telco and not google, has delivered latency so low that it makes their "application" run fast, and google makes a lot of money from it.
If every time you clicked and dragged you got a flickering add-vert from SBC, you'd know who was delivering the content.
As we scale from Meg to Gig to Peta speeds, the value of latency in the software development world goes up.
If the telco was smart, they would edit the google HTML on the fly and insert their own advert into every other frame of the redraw for 0.01 second and then start negotiations for it's removal.