OK, slightly tongue in cheek.... but I continue to be amazed by the whole network neutrality / deep packet inspection thing. "Don't use my pipes for free" and all that nonsense.
How about extending the concept from broadband "pipes" to voice telephony? Surely carriers should be able to monitor the content of conversations and extract some value from them? I mean, if I book a flight on the phone, shouldn't British Airways pay a commission to my operator? If I'm the CEO negotiating the acquisition of another company for $10bn, surely the poor telephone company should get more than 2 cents per minute for enabling the deal?
So, I reckon the answer is live, real-time voice recognition and parsing. Differential pricing for conversations about the weather, or meeting at the pub, versus "business-grade" QoS-guaranteed conversations about more important & valuable things. And if you dare to try & encrypt the speech and maintain your privacy, you automatically pay top rates.
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We already have a de-facto system of getting users to declare the metacontent of their calls with freephone, national, "0870" non-geographic and premium rates.
ReplyDeletePlus, if there was broad availability of competing access to multiple voice applications, I don't see the problem. It's just that the real world has certain bottlenecks that wouldn't provide users with those choices (yet). PSTN and mobile access comprise >99% of the voice world still.
How can you be 100% sure that the telco's privacy-less voice calls can't be sweetened with some deal that the user would net-net actually want this service?