From AmericanFreePress.net, a story of a new pricing model for the Internet:

Bell Canada and TELUS, Canada’s two largest Internet service providers (ISPs), will begin charging per-site fees on most Internet sites, reports anonymous sources within TELUS.

“It's beyond censorship, it is killing the biggest ecosystem of free expression and freedom of speech that has ever existed,” I Power spokesperson Reese Leysen said. I Power was the first group to report on the possible changes.

Bell Canada has not returned calls or emails.

The plans made by the large telecom businesses would change the Internet into a cable-like system, where customers sign up for specific web sites, and must pay to see each individual site beyond a certain point. Subscription browsing would be limited, extra fees would be applied to access out-of-network sites. Many sites would be blocked altogether.

The idea would be implemented in 2010. 

There are a lot of reason to think this story is just so much paranoid fantasy.  There are powerful interests, such as the major search engines, that would lobby against such a drastic limitation to site access by Canadians.  But then Canada is a small market, so the lobbying might not be as vigorous as it might be in other places.

And yet you can easily construct a list of suspects who would think this is a great idea.  Essentially anyone in Canada's cultural community, either artists or the bureaucrats charged with ensuring Canadians are exposed to sufficient levels of Canadian content.  Imagine how happy they would be if Canadians were forced to visit this.

Nooooooo!

As anyone who has cable or satellite TV knows, Canadian content rules trump market sensibilities.  Especially if it means restricting access to American content.

In any case, the result would be an Internet of only a few hundred sites for the majority of Canadians who access the Internet through Bell or TELUS:

“The Internet will become a playground for billion-dollar content providers just like television is,” said Leysen. “It won’t be possible for a few teenagers in their parents’ basement to start a small site like E-bay that then grows out to be the next big thing anymore. Right now the Internet belongs to those with the greatest ideas. In the future, it’ll belong to those with the biggest budgets.”

With plans in Canada uncovered, I Power thinks that companies in the United States and other nations are also planning similar actions.

No evidence is offered that any ISPs anywhere else are planning to switch to similar business models.  No specific ISPs are named, for example, but for Bell or TELUS.

But the idea is that ISPs would want to go to this model:

Why would the ISPs institute such a plan? One word: money.

“This new subscription model is commercially far more beneficial to them than how it is now,” Leysen said. “If Fox wants to launch a new television show online, they’ll have to pay big money to all major ISPs to ensure that their new show will be offered and pushed in the ‘standard package’ of sites/services/channels that people will get through their Internet access. Plus ISPs will also gain extra revenue out of people trying to access the rest of the Internet, as they’ll pay extra subscription fees for every web site they visit.”

But it’s not just the big ISPs that stand to gain.

“Marketing and big budget ‘content-pushing’ just doesn’t seem to work on the Internet, and this is something that several industries want fixed. ISPs know this and will benefit greatly by fixing this for the marketing and entertainment industry,” Leysen said.

I have no idea if any of this is true.  It just seems so far out in left field.  Rogers is not mentioned, so can Bell and TELUS pull this off if Rogers is not onside?  Bell lease lines to smaller ISPs.  Can Bell apply this access model on other ISPs that are using Bell lines?  If not, then why wouldn't customers switch to these other ISPs for unlimited access?  And what about access to non-commercial sites?  Sites for charities, or for government agencies like NASA?

Nah.  But then...