Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

William L. Smith, CTO for BellSouth, wants to be able to charge a company like Yahoo more for the ability to have their site load faster than another company such as Google. He also thinks that he should be able to charge VoIP companies more to allow them to provide the same quality of service. But he doesn't think it's ok to block or degrade other services.

Others aren't so keen on the idea:

"Prioritization is just another word for degrading your competitor," said Gigi B. Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, a digital rights advocacy group. "If we want to ruin the Internet, we'll turn it into a cable TV system" that carries programming from only those who pay the cable operators for transmission.

This is akin to suggesting that some customers could pay more to have their telephone calls go through faster. What Mr. Smith neglects to mention is that if some companies pay for better services, everyone else gets poorer service by definition. And if everyone pays for better service, then everybody is equal again, but BellSouth is a lot richer.