MIT Technology Review has a nice piece about the issues surrounding the drive for "toll lanes" on the Internet. Service providers are looking for new ways to boost revenue in a maturing marketplace. Accessees are paying for usage of their gateway, makes only sense that content providers should pay too? The cable TV business model is being pushed as a future vision for the Internet. All the hollering over VoIP service blocking, by ISPs, is part of this mess. See Michael Geist. Hopefully this will be nipped in the bud, in any case video content will eventually push up prices for accessees as ISPs upgrade capacity to deal with the load.

Imagine a world where access is fragmented into so many categories: ISP bandwidth service levels, ISP 3rd party content partnerships, etc. Sounds like a tech support worker nightmare. "What ISP are you using?...oh, I've never heard of them, not sure if they support that content provider, I know Rogers does and Sympatico no longer does..."..."try the web access on your mobile phone, hopefully it's web browser is compatible with the web site's encoding..."