Bill Smith, chief technology officer at BellSouth justified charging content companies by saying they are using the telco's network without paying for it.

"Higher usage for broadband services drives more costs that we have to recover," he said in a telephone interview.

WTF? Bellsouth's users are requesting the content. The content providers are already paying for their outgoing bandwidth. Smith wants to charge content providers for the bandwidth their content uses inside someone else's network!. This is ridiculous.

He suggested that Apple Computer might be asked to pay a nickel or a dime to insure the complete and rapid transmission of a song via the Internet, which is being used for more and more content-intensive purposes.

Smith: Thats a nice looking music store you have there. Nice and pretty. Be a shame someone reduced your traffic to a trickle wouldn't it? Now I'm not saying that will happen, I'm just saying you should pay us to keep an eye on it for you. Real neighborly like.

Smith basically saying there are a lot of interesting and popular services on the Internet. So popular that BellSouth's users want them. These services do require larger amounts of bandwidth than say web browsing. Because BellSouth doesn't want their users to go to another ISP, BellSouth won't block access to the services. Instead, they will just charge the owners of the interesting services. If you don't pay your service might not function properly on BellSouth's network.

This is so fucking silly.