Executive Wants to Charge for Web Speed, Shoot Self In Foot

Do you remember last month when the CEO of SBC AT&T was showing his bulging manhood to anyone who would look? Well it seems that one of his lackies is continuing to test these waters and word on the street is Executive Wants to Charge for Web Speed. The money quote for me is:

his firm should be able, for example, to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc.

Which is just asking for trouble. I can see Larry and Eric and Sergey sitting around the table, reviewing AT&T Satan's latest proposal:

Larry: "Says here that they think we should pay them 10 cents for every page."
Eric: "Interesting. I wonder what sort of results we should return ..."
Sergey: "First 10 links for your search for AT&Rape? AT&Nazi-abortion-paedophilia?"

ISPs are so cute when they think that we care who provides our bandwidth.

As an aside, I thought this quote from the article was interesting:

Legislating otherwise "would be the same thing as saying to Google, 'I think we ought to have regulation on Google that says when I enter a search term, the top search result is always a random event,' " Smith said, claiming that Google allows clients to pay to influence the ranking of search results. In fact, Google does not allow payments to influence general search results, although advertisers pay for top billing on the lists that run on the right side of Google's pages.

I don't remember seeing the memo about journalists having some backbone and actually pointing out lies, do you?