AT&T Poised To Fulfill Ed Whitacre’s Vision? Charging Aps For Customers and The Future of Wireless.

[Commentary] It has been just over 6 years since Ed Whitacre, then CEO of AT&T, kicked off the Network Neutrality movement by famously declaring that rival services would not “use my pipes for free,” neatly side stepping the fact that customers were actually paying to “use [his] pipes” already.

Because why just collect money from one side of a platform when you can collect the same money again from the other side? Well, it appears that AT&T may finally be on the verge of realizing Whitacre’s vision — at least for the wireless world. While details remain sparse, the Wall St. Journal broke a story yesterday that AT&T may “allow” application providers to pay the overage charges for customers who exceed AT&T’s arbitrary “bandwidth cap.” As my colleague John Bergmeyer pointed out over at Public Knowledge there is not much functional difference between simply charging both sides of the platform directly and giving you the first 2 GB/month and then charging you for access. So the Federal Communications Commission (and possibly the Federal Trade Commission as well) should finally take that “hard skeptical look” I and others keep asking them to take. What AT&T proposes is a radical change in pricing for a critical piece of our information infrastructure on which our economy increasingly depends. But we understand virtually nothing of how these prices and policies are set. The FCC has tremendous authority to investigate what is going on, whatever ultimate authority it may have to regulate in this area.