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No sooner do I start writing about net neutrality than Ed Whitacre, the CEO of baby bell company SBC, energizes the debate with a juicy interview:

Q: How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google, MSN, Vonage, and others? A: How do you think they’re going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can’t be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!

This is a pretty dumb thing for him to say, for several reasons. First, it shows amazing disrespect for his home broadband customers, who are paying $40 or so every month to use SBC’s pipes. If I were an SBC broadband customer, I’d be dying to ask Mr. Whitacre exactly what my monthly payment is buying, if it isn’t buying access to Google, Yahoo, Vonage, and any other $%&^* Internet service I want to use. Didn’t SBC’s advertising say I was buying access to the Internet?

Second, if somebody is going to pay somebody in this situation, it’s not clear who should be doing the paying. There is some set of customers who want to use SBC broadband service to access Google. Why should Google pay SBC for this? Why shouldn’t SBC pay Google instead?

Sure, SBC would like its customers to have free access to Google, Yahoo, and Vonage. But as Mr. Whitacre would put it, the Internet can’t be free in that sense, because Google, Yahoo, and Vonage have made an investment and for SBC or anybody to expect to use those services for free is nuts!

My point is not that SBC should necessarily pay, but that there is no rule of nature saying that one layer of the protocol stack should pay another layer. If SBC gets paid by Google, it’s because SBC faces less competition and hence has more market power. As Susan Crawford observes, Mr. Whitacre speaks with “the voice of someone who doesn’t think he has any competitors.”

At this point, economists will object that it’s sometimes efficient to let ISPs levy these kinds of charges, and so requiring net neutrality from SBC may lead to an inefficient outcome. I appreciate this point, and will be writing more about it in the future.

For now, though, notice that Mr. Whitacre isn’t speaking the language of efficiency. He wants to extract payments because he can. There’s a whiff here of the CEO-tournament syndrome that infected the media world in the 1990s, as documented in Ken Auletta’s “mogul” stories. Can Mr. Whitacre make the CEOs of Google, Yahoo, and Vonage genuflect to him? Is he really the man with the biggest … market power? If there are to be side payments, will they reflect business calculation, or just ego?

It’s one thing to argue that a policy can lead to efficient results. It’s another thing entirely to show that itwill lead to efficient results, in the hands of real human beings.