A huge merger highlights the forces reshaping the telecoms industry.The question is whether telecoms operators should be able to offer premium services—such as building “fast lanes” across the internet for video delivery, or charging big websites and content providers fees for faster, guaranteed delivery of their data. Mr Whitacre is one of the strongest advocates of this idea, not least because it would open up new sources of revenue which AT&T could use to pay for its new network. But backers of net neutrality object, saying that to favour some data packets over others would violate the long-standing principle that telecoms operators should promise equal treatment to all traffic that passes over their networks. Allowing operators to play favourites might also hamper innovation, warns Vint Cerf, who now works at Google and is one of the internet's founding fathers.