From the "we're terrified of becoming a dumb pipe" and "that ad revenue sure looks tasty" departments comes news that AT&T is developing their own web browser, dubbed Pogo. The new browser is Mozilla based and includes 3D visual technology developed by Vizible, which AT&T has a stake in. The private beta just launched last week and a video demo is available here.

The browser's "3D" GUI is a bit of a system pig (for a browser), requiring a 1.6GHz processor, 2GB of RAM, and a video card with at least 256MB of VRAM. Tabs are instead called "cells," and the browser requires XP or Vista. Judging from this Forbes report, the primary goal is to grab a bigger slice of the advertising pie, and to further burn the AT&T brand into your consciousness:Of course if you give users a piece of bloated crap painted blue and tied to the AT&T brand, that idea may backfire. Early impressions aren't exactly stellar. While it's only in early beta, major complaints include the high system specs, slow performance, bookmark import issues and a generally unintuitive interface.

The idea of an AT&T browser may leave some pining for a world where the money put into mediocre, also-ran content portals and browsers is instead put back into the network or customer support. How many FTTH installs or support training courses would the AT&T Blueroom and Pogo budgets fund? How many 50Mbps DOCSIS 3.0 installs could Comcast afford with the money used to buy film portal Fandango and develop Fancast?

It's literally a pipe dream. For years, telecom industry executives have believed that the money being made by dedicated content operators belongs in their pockets. It's fairly clear that in AT&T's ad-dollar dream world, AT&T offers the browser, the content, and the bandwidth. Unfortunately, if the content and browser don't top the competition and flounder, they might regret not spending that money on their core business. Last I checked, that business was running a network they claim lacks ample capacity.