The Washington Post has a story today about a BellSouth proposal to allow ISPs to charge content providers for the privilege of getting their content to users more quickly. They claim that they won’t be slowing down the non-privileged traffic, only speeding up the privileged traffic, but I have a hard time understanding how that would work in practice. If the network normally makes its best effort to get content to me as quickly as possible, then how can they offer even faster access to some content providers without slowing down others? To me, this looks like a way for ISPs to extort money from content providers.