At the TelecomNEXT conference in Las Vegas, AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre, Jr. dismissed critics of the AT&T/BellSouth merger. Whitacre also spoke about the issue of net neutrality. This issue stems from the fact that AT&T, like other major Internet providers, is pushing for a tiered Internet pricing system, in which consumers would pay for different levels of service.
According to the article AT&T dismisses BellSouth merger critics in BusinessWeek Online, Whitacre said that, "There's been a lot of talk about this in order to scare people into thinking that access to the Internet is somehow at risk, or that the Internet as we know it is a thing of the past. AT&T will not block anyone's access to the public Internet, nor will we degrade anyone's quality of service."
