Early last year we noted that AT&T, the company that really started the network neutrality debate to begin with, had come up with yet another awful new idea: charging app makers a fee if they wanted to send data to consumers without impacting their usage caps. While AT&T presented the idea as akin to a 1-800 number for data or "free shipping," what it actually is a troll toll imposed by AT&T allowing them to rake in new cash -- and impose their power on a content ecosystem and app marketplace that operates better with companies like AT&T out of the way.

Obviously Verizon would also love to get in on the action and start charging completely unnecessary tolls; Verizon CFO Fran Shammo saying on the company's recent earnings call that they're still working out the kinks on how to do that. Shammo (like AT&T), still keeps insisting that some unnamed, phantom content companies have been clamoring to pay Verizon a completely arbitrary fee when both consumers and content companies already pay plenty for bandwidth:

quote:

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In an appearance at the Oppenheimer Technology, Internet & Communications Conference, Shammo said "there are content providers who have come to us and said, 'We would be willing to pay for content to your end user.'" However, he said the difficulty of such a plan lies in capturing exactly how many subscribers viewed such content and when so that content providers can then turn to their advertisers to monetize the content.

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