VoIP carriage fees? What's a "deal" to some could be "shakedown" to others

Well, the traditional phone companies are at it again, looking for pounds of flesh that they can extract from the feature-rich Internet-based services and sites that want carriage over their networks.

Just yesterday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (I'm there) Verizon Communications CEO Ivan Seidenberg talked of willingness to strike up deals with unnamed sites and services. "We have to make sure they (services) don't sit on our network and chew up our capacity," he said.

Of course, this is where the distinction between a deal and a shakedown starts to get a bit blurry. After all, it was AT&T (formerly SBC) CEO Ed Whitacre's controversial statement last fall that free carriage of high-bandwidth services would be "crazy" that started this fiirestorm.

Add to that, a shot across the bow fired by BellSouth spokesperson Jeff Battcher.

In this morning's Wall Street Journal, Battcher fired this zinger:

"During the hurricanes, Google didn't pay to have the DSL restored," he huffed. "We're paying all that money."

And this isn't just a p.r. person talking. William Smith, chief technology officer of BellSouth, told the Journal today that he envisions charging content providers a fee based on the volume of material they send over BellSouth's network, as well as the bandwidth the content takes up.

Don't expect these high-bandwidth services to take all this lying down, tho.

"They want to charge us for the bandwidth the customer has already paid for," Vonage CEO Jeff Citron told the Journal this morning. Customers who already pay a premium for high-speed Internet access, he said, will end up paying even more if online services pass the new access charges to consumers. "The customer has to pay twice. That's crazy."

Oh, did you know that Vonage added three Washington, D.C. lobbyists just last year? Guess this will be a busy year for them.