Maybe its not what the Internet is, but how it gets used. I've been watching the 'tiered' internet calls from various telcos. Honestly, when is comes down to actually making it work the way the AT&Ts, the TimeWarners, and the MCIs want it to work so they can charge for enhancing network service XYZ (voice, video, etc.), here's one way to look at it: Lets say for example RoadRunner wants to charge extra so my VOIP or Internet streaming (or is that steaming) video works better. To accomplish this, they set the QOS - Quality of Service - settings on my VOIP and streaming video traffic frames so those packets get higher priority than web traffic packets, for example. QOS allows for a number of settings on a packet to determine a number of levels of prioritization. IP also supports TOS - Type of Service - that can be used with QOS to get certain types of traffic to take precedence of other type of traffic. The problem is that because of how the Internet actually works, the QOS/TOS settings on those packets would have to be honored on each leg of their journey in order for the QOS settings to actually result in better service. That means if my VOIP traffic travels at times over AT&T or UUNET(MCI), which is more than likely, then AT&T and MCI will have to give priority to those packets or frames the same priority as RoadRunner originally gave them. But, what if AT&T has also sold 'enhanced' VOIP or streaming video to some of their own customers? Whose packets get priority then? I would guess that the answer is that AT&T's internal QOS tagged packets will get priority over RoadRunner's. I don't see the tiered Internet failing at a the home consumer level, since home consumers are accustomed to paying for something that doesn't end being as good in use as it looked at purchase time. Where the tiered Internet will run into some serious problems is with business customers. If TimeWarner, for example, were to sell some kind of 'priority video' or 'priority vioce' service over the wild Internet with an SLA that specified a minimum amount of bandwidth or response time, they would find themselves paying out refunds a significant amount of the time. Again, the problem is how the Internet works. Once packets are launched onto the Internet, they will very likely traverse someone else's network, who won't honer your QOS the same way they will honor their own QOS. It just seems to me that the outcome of a 'tiered' Internet as having traffic providers fighting with traffic providers in turn fighting with content providers. The Internet is, in more ways then one, like the seas. There doesn't seem to be one provider out there that can tame it.