T-Mobile wants Apple and Google to start showing them the money

At some point telecoms and cable companies begin to look more like the highway robbers of the past as they continually find new ways to make more money for what is essentially a dumb pipe service. If they aren’t triple dipping on their service charges to subscribers they are doing everything they can to provider lower services via caps and metering for more money.

Well word is, via Janko Roettgers at GigaOM, that T-Mobile wants companies like Google and Apple to start paying T-Mobile for carrying those company’s video and music offering.

T-Mobile is planing to ask companies like Apple and Google to pay for their mobile offerings, according to an interview that René Obermann, CEO of T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telekom, gave the German Manager Magazin. Obermann said the company could charge more for offering better quality of service or high transfer rates for mobile video or music, which should be “priced differently.”

He added that well-produced and successful online platforms should not be able to use the mobile Internet for free. Deutsche Telekom is already in discussions with Google about this very subject, according to Obermann.

If you are surprised by this move then you need to take off those rose colored glasses because this effort by T-Mobile is just the opening salvo. What is even less of a surprise is that these types of moves are happening right at the point when video is set to explode on the web, mobile or otherwise.