'Informed sources party to talks taking place in Washington have confirmed in the last hour that big players Google and Verizon are about to announce an agreement to effectively end free information flow on the Internet.

It seems that the pair are close to an agreement whereby 'premium' services will be available to those who pay and/or pay more; basically, it would allow Verizon to speed some online content to Internet users more quickly if the content's creators were willing to pay for the privilege.'

This ain't Rupert trying to make us pay to see a daily newspaper!

Same thing happening with TV; HD is going to be almost all subscription if not PPV. The new ITV HD channels are going to be exclusively on Sky satellite, where they can tap into the revenue stream.

There's a degree of this going on already on the net: high bandwidth sites have to pay for faster content delivery over dedicated links. If they didn't they'd rapidly become unusable.

The problem chiefly occurs at the consumer end where ISPs are effectively subsidising the process. The iPlayer trick is to offload the distribution onto other people using Bit Torrent technology. That begs the question of whether some of the licence fee should be redistributed to UK ISPs, as the Beeb is sidestepping its traditional role of transmitting its own material.

As long as I still have easy access to some quality hack, they can do what the heck they like.