I’ve been saying that Sending Party Pays will come one day, ever since pal Martin Geddes explained it over dinner. Well it looks like that day is about to arrive.
With Sprint now adding 4G roaming, this makes the model a lot more attractive to the carriers.
Just because the carriers want this self-destructive billing model doesn’t mean they’re going to get it. Their argument that the external web sites are using “their network” for “free” is absolutely ludicrous.
And the threat is idle too. Unless they all want to collude, nobody is going to be the one network that says, “Sorry, customers, no Google for you on our phones because we asked Google to pay for it and they wouldn’t.”
If they all collude they will face both anti-trust and customer revolt.