Verizon Threatens Google's 'Free Lunch'

ILikeRed writes to tell us the Washington Post is reporting that Verizon is becoming much more vocal about internet firms using "their" lines to do business without paying extra. From the article: "The network builders are spending a fortune constructing and maintaining the networks that Google intends to ride on with nothing but cheap servers," Thorne told a conference marking the 10th anniversary of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. "It is enjoying a free lunch that should, by any rational account, be the lunch of the facilities providers." This, as lawmakers are approaching new legislation that could let telcos charge internet companies much more for the use of high speed connections.

Comments

Re:Free Lunch?

[coolgeek]

I can think of acts more stupid than posting your phone number on /., but not many. Hope you don't end up having to change your number.

Re:Free Lunch?

[Kickboy12]

I get 6mbps for under $60 a month. (sonic.net)

Re:Free Lunch?

[ottothecow]

My college gets great fucking internet (University of Chicago). Unfortunatly my dorm room is wired to a 10mbit switch (and I have a 10/100 switch in the room with a few devices on it). It is not rare for me to saturate the ethernet link when I know there is tons of bandwidth left on the world link. A kid down the hall has a 100mb port activated and it runs great.

Now I know that I shouldnt be complaining about getting ONLY 10mbit as it is still way faster than the cable I had at home (especially upload) and it is capable of downloading faster than the speeds a lot of sites give me but the real problem is transfers on the local network. I bought the switch initially because transfers between my laptop and desktop were just as slow on the wired ethernet as they were on the wireless.

Re:Free Lunch?

[techno-vampire]

America's the most expensive area in the world to live. Just look at the prices in New York City!

That's not really a good comparison, because prices in New York City are almost always higher than anyplace else in the country. An accountent once told me that some of his clients had franchises in several states and the ones in NYC had special menus with higher prices. He explained that unions there had made it so expensive to do business that there wasn't any other choice if you wanted to have an outlet there. Don't know for sure it it's still true, as it was about twenty years or so ago, but I'd not be surprised if it is.

Re:Mushrooms

[lennier]

>and have your sites on once again taking the throne back

SIGHTS. Sights. Not "sites". Sights.

Site, n. Geographic location, place. As in: building site, or (by analogy from topology to geography) Web site.

Sight, n. Device used to optically align a firing mechanism. As in: gun sight.

"To have one's sights on" or to "have in one's sights" is a military analogy meaning "to make plans for the acquisition, domination or control of".

"To have one's sites on" is not a fluent English construction but would imply something about locating real estate or selecting web server operating platforms.

Seriously, this kind of casual disregard of language pisses some of us off. How can you get a job in an industry where 'rm -rf ~*' is very definitely NOT the same as 'rm -rf ~ *' and have no comprehension of basic spelling and grammar?

Presumably you've only ever heard the word 'sight' said, never spelled? The sheer immensitity of illiteracy required to make such an error astounds me. And yet you possess the minimum competence with a Qwerty keyboard to access the World Wide Web and post to a forum? How is this possible? Do kids of today live in some kind of pre-literate, oral-mythology, audio-only culture? Was the entire invention of script from the Sumerians through Gutenberg a dead end? Is the American education system to blame, or the morass of mind-numbing, pictorial pop-culture under which the global mental environment reels?

Words have different spellings for a reason. LEARN THEM.

Oh wait, this is Slashdot. Never mind.