With the dot-bomb bust of internet providers in 1999, there are only a few high speed options left out there. And now some of those internet providers are looking to protect their interests. BellSouth would like to be able to charge internet sites for the priviledge of reaching BellSouth customers. Does this sound like a service you'd want to pay for?

William L. Smith, chief technology officer for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., told reporters and analysts that an Internet service provider such as 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.

Or, Smith said, his company should be allowed to charge a rival voice-over-Internet firm so that its service can operate with the same quality as BellSouth's offering.

Network operators can identify the digital "packets" of content moving through their wires from sites and services and can block some or put others at the head of the stream.

But Smith was quick to say that Internet service providers should not be able to block or discriminate against Web content or services by degrading their performance.

Riight. BellSouth would never disrupt Vonage packets to protect their telephone business. At least that is what they are saying this week. And isn't promoting! Yahoo! packets! over Google packets a way of discriminating against Google by degrading their performance?

I'm not expert, but as I understand the internet BellSouth cannot promote some packets without demoting others. Since the packets all travel at the same speed over any given internet hop, the limitation has more to do with how wide the pipe is. In other words, the limitation is the quantity of packets that are permitted to flow across a wire at any given time. And when you're bandwidth is limited by the size of the pipe, allowing more Yahoo! packets to flow would mean you have to slow down everyone else. So if you're searching Google and your neighbor is searching Yahoo!, he gets his results back quicker.

"Prioritization is just another word for degrading your competitor," said Gigi B. Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, a digital rights advocacy group. "If we want to ruin the Internet, we'll turn it into a cable TV system" that carries programming from only those who pay the cable operators for transmission.

Amen to that.