Don Tapscott And Anthony D. Williams

William Smith, chief technology officer of BellSouth, has already proposed to charge fees in exchange for giving one web vendor's traffic priority over the traffic of a competitor. If Yahoo pays the freight, BellSouth users find Yahoo's search engine works faster and better than Google's. So, in effect, BellSouth becomes a gatekeeper for the types of services that thrive on the Internet - an Internet where bandwidth and content-delivery rights are auctioned off to the highest bidders. This poses a grave threat to the Internet - a threat that could extinguish the fire of innovation that has spurred countless new businesses, including most of the examples discussed in this book. This is not just a war against the open Internet; it's a war against competitiveness, and a war against innovation. In short, it's a war against the future.