Not only US telcos are supporting such claims, but also some European ones. The obvious question which comes to mind is, if a content provider like Google is not paying usage of telcos’ network, then what are the telcos’ customers paying for?

The truth is that telcos wish to forget, when it’s useful for them, the working, in force model “Bill & Keep” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_and_keep, according to which at the networks interconnection each telco pays its side of the network.

This implies that they can require payment to only one of the subjects: either the customer of their access network or the customer of their transit network. Not necessarily a content provider belongs to those categories (surely not Google).

If the cost of the transit could vary according to the size of the object, the time needed for the object to reach the receiver, the distance and/or any other parameter, we would have a carrier (the telco) which interferes with the object, i.e. a discriminatory carrier. This is exactly the aim of such declarations of “Google free rides” and similar nonsense: to create the framework to justify a discriminatory behaviour (some would say non-neutral) in order to predate the economic revenues both of the sender and the receiver.

If this idea were to infiltrate the minds of the policy makers, a telco could freely decide, whenever there’s a party which is raising a substantial income from its commercial activities on the Internet, to discriminate that party’s contents (deprioritization, filtering, blocks etc.) in order to force the party or the end-user or both to donate part of the income, in the form of an “additional tariff”, to the telco itself.

In this way, a telco potentially can become an “imposed commercial partner” of any and each economic activity on the Internet.

In the European Union such practices are at the moment impossible to be implemented (they would violate the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, artt. 102 and 103, for anticompetitive practices, and would also raise some serious problems with e-commerce Directive (2000/31/EC) and Access & Interconnection Directive (2002/19/EC)) but there’s no doubt that there’s a lot of pressure to find alleged “loopholes” which tend to justify a discriminatory, non-neutral behaviour. It is important to inform and raise awareness on the policy makers, on both sides of the ocean, about this sinister plot.

I think his point is not that consumers don’t pay for bandwidth, but that the heavy users don’t pay their share for the bandwidth they use.

Why should Grandma pay the same amount for the little bandwidth she uses up every month while a file sharer uses up 1,000 times the bandwidth while paying the same bill?

Of course, I don’t ever expect Grandmas bill to actually go down.