Posted 10:29 AM

Free, as in "pay me money for it"!

You really should expect the CEO of any company you've invested in (either as a stockholder or an employee) to understand the basic business the company is in, shouldn't you? Yet SBC Telecommunications' CEO Edward Whitacre evidently doesn't have a clue. In a recent Business Week interview, he was asked: "How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google, MSN, Vonage, and others?" To which he replied:

"How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!"

Please Ed, tell me how I can switch my $60/month DSL service for one of those free broadband pipes?