Google Is About To Be Ed Whitacre's Worst NightmareGoogle Is About To Be Ed Whitacre's Worst Nightmare

Bully boy Ed Whitacre, Jr., the CEO of AT&T, got two messages from Google yesterday, and they both amounted to "up yours." One came in the form of an appearance by Vinton Cerf before the Senate Commerce Committee, and the other was an announcement that Google and Skype, the VoIP vendor, are among the investors putting $21.7 million into a Spanish startup called Fon that's building a global network of WiFi hotspots.Translated in full, the message is, "Dear Mr. Whitacre, Google will not pay you a single red cent of extortion, and if you push us we will become your biggest competitor and worst nightmare."

Whitacre picked this fight back in November when he put the big, rich, bandwidth-consuming Internet companies like Google and Yahoo and Vonage that they were going to have to pay him if they expected to be carried on his network to their Internet customers.

A few weeks ago when I wrote about this I focused on the "big, rich" part of that description and concluded that Whitacre was just behaving like a schoolyard bully shaking down kids for their lunch money.

Google's move reminds me, however, of the importance of voice-over-Internet in all of this. I'm old-fashioned enough that I haven't quite got used to the idea that there is literally no difference between the Internet and the telephone. I'm not exactly trapped in the last century — my telephone service comes into the house over a cable line — but it doesn't make that much difference to me. I'm just a consumer.

And that's exactly what's probably keeping Whitacre up nights. He just bet his company's future on a takeover (he was CEO of SBC, the former Southwestern Bell, and he bought its former parent, AT&T). And that may have been almost as bad a move as Time-Warner made when it bought America Online: Whitacre invested big just as all barriers to entry into his new company's business are crumbling.

My colleague, Network Pipeline Editor Preston Gralla summed it all up in a recent blog post, "The rumors have been rife for a while. Google has quietly been buying up fiber and deploying infrastructure. Many people have speculated it's in preparation to roll out a global backbone."

If Google rolls out its own end-to-end network, solving the last-mile problem with community WiFi provided by its Fon relationship, what would your choice be: Comcast or AT&T or Verizon broadband Internet service without Google, or Google broadband Internet service with Google? Yeah, me too.

At that point the only hope of AT&T and Verizon and the other big telcos, and even the big cable companies like Comcast, is to persuade ("persuade" is a word derived from the Latin for "write really big checks") Congress and the FCC to outlaw the technology. Look for that effort to start very soon.