A leading Spanish ISP is reportedly mulling a serious change in the way the internet works: Telefonica may soon seek network use fees from Google and Yahoo.
Telefonica CEO Cesar Alierta told Spain’s El Pais newspaper that "search engines use our network, without paying anything for it," according to John Daly at online news site Tech Eye. The major search engines have not responded to Alierta’s comments.
Search engine optimization (SEO) practitioners and other online marketing experts say that Alierta’s proposal is driven by greed and would spell the end of net neutrality in its present form. Daly writes that "apparently Alierta forgot to mention end users pay for the traffic."
Doug Caverly at Web Pro News responded in a similar vein, writing that "considering that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are sure to ignore (or perhaps laugh off) this idea, it’s necessary to consider where Alierta will go from here." Caverly goes on to suggest that the kind of punitive traffic shaping that Alierta could enact might well draw outraged responses from consumers and the search engines alike.
