Not if, but when Google becomes Pay-to-Play

Whether it's 'Big Banks', 'Big Oil', or 'Big Pharma', a handful of mega corporations control the technologies and resources without which modern day Americans would find themselves living in the stone ages, like many of their sub-Saharan-African counterparts.

In this context, if 'Big Com' defeats Net Neutrality, which in our corporate-legislative environment is a given, internet-goers will be facing a fee for every search they conduct on search engines like Yahoo and Google.

Should the likes of AT&T and Verizon Communications have their way, any network owner would be able to, say, create a kind of commuter lane to guarantee a speedy delivery to customers.

That would mean a new expense for the likes of Google, Yahoo, AOL and other Internet firms, which will surely pay up in order to remain competitive.

Eventually, the expense could become so burdensome, the folks in Mountain View, Calif., and elsewhere would be forced to pass on some, or all, of it to customers.

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[A] day could come when the Google bill goes in the mail, or you'll be Googling per hour at wireless Internet hot spots, and cable operators add $5-a-month unlimited Googling to their steeply discounted quintuple play of services.

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For argument's sake, say Google has to pay Comcast a penny a search. That translates to a fee, just to Comcast, of about $5 million a month. There are a dozen or so major Internet providers in the United States alone, and scores, if not hundreds, worldwide.

So the price of a speedy Internet delivery in the United States for Google and Yahoo, the two major search engines, would amount to an annual fee in the hundreds of millions of dollars. That's a burden, even for these two revenue machines.

This is how fiefdoms are made. Charge working people a PREMIUM for access to MONOPOLIZED products or services that if available freely would level the economic playing field and eliminate social divisions.

The premium doesn't go to production, or maintainence, or even to research and development - all of which would be legitimate and necessary costs. NO. This fee, or royalty, or interest payment, goes to pay the privileged few a bonus for granting us peasants the privilege of using the monopoly that our government bestows on them only by virtue of the authority vested in them by US.