I’ve mentioned the truly boneheaded and potentially disastrous idea put forth by bandwidth providers to offer some kind of tiered access scheme to companies wherein they would not only offer connectivity but also the right to have their data delivered to the customer faster by paying more. Of course, as I explained, what this would really mean is slowing down everyone else’s traffic just a little bit. Anyway, Tim Bray has caught Washington Post writer Christopher Stern parroting the spurious arguments of the telcos.

I have to acknowledge that a Marginal Revolution article on fair trade coffee shaped my thinking on this matter. His explanation of how price discrimination works in the coffee market works perfectly well for bandwidth as well.