Very nice post from Om Malik about Bells losing control over the voice market here.  So AT&T is racing to roll out that ol' AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet U-verse Enabled before it's too late -- and they want to make sure it doesn't have to be neutral.  It's their plan for a revenue stream.

The cable guys don't seem to have the same prioritization plans for the internet that the telcos do, but they're also not saying they won't prioritize, and soup-to-nuts network management is in their DNA.  They're upgrading to higher download speeds (15 Mbps! sigh) but uploads remain a low priority for them.  Which will keep us all in the basement of progress.

The history of technology adoption tells us that the old guys will always see something new through the lens they know.  Telegraph guys became "new" telephone guys, and as a result the telephone wasn't marketed (or treated) like a social medium for thirty years after its introduction.  So now that telcos and cablecos are "new" internet guys they're treating it like a cell phone delivering content.  If there was another reliable way to get online quickly and symmetrically we wouldn't care, but at the moment there isn't.

Last throes or serious threat?  It's hard to tell.  But it's clear that the AT&T, at least, is just desperate to find ways to make new forms of money.  This isn't about "incentivizing broadband deployment."  It's about staying alive.  There's no guarantee that the money (if any) made from "IPTV" monetization will go into greater broadband deployment.  They'll need it to fund their pension plans.