Sometimes the best defense is a good offense.

As previously feared, the battle for the future of the commercial Internet is underway in early January, 2006. Given the war cry from Bill Smith, BellSouth's CTO, in Marketwatch yesterday to the effect that BellSouth would be justified in charging content and application providers because they are using the telco's network without paying for it. The time has come to either put up or shut up.

To the extend that BellSouth wants to take on Google and other Application Service Providers, now is the time to call their bluff and go "All-in" (while you still have a couple of decent hole cards), and put this issue to bed once and for all. While there will be other fights that will break-out during the war, this is one battle that should be over quickly, if the right weapons are used.

Given the market power that Google has today, they are more relevant to the Internet community than BellSouth. Given that, if I were running Google today, I would choose to implement a BellSouth Boycott and stop offering access to Google to BellSouth customers and would start advertising Cox Cable service on any requests that came from BellSouth customers in their regions. I'm willing to wager that by Q3 2006, BellSouth's DSL group will feel the effects of their grave error in judgment.

While it is inevitable that our "friends" in Washington, DC are, at some point, going to get fully engaged on this issue when it affects them, we don't have the time to wait for this to get on the national agenda of Congress and then weigh in with their approach.

As the battle between the Internet Access Providers and Internet Application Providers rages on, it is the customers who will be hurt more than any of the underlying companies selling access or offering applications. Welcome to the game of Internet Chicken and the race to mutually assured destruction. Who will flinch first before it is too late?