I seriously have to wonder whether or not most communications industry executives would ever pass Lemonade Stand 101. The reason I say this is the plague of declining average revenue per user (ARPU) that numerous bright people inflicted on the entire communications industry. It’s almost as if the industry went through a rebellious phase, partying all night, going to raves…and the rest of us have the cold sores to prove it.

Because nothing says race to the bottom like dropping prices and hoping to make it up in volume.

I bring this up, because lately, several major communications companies — that are also internet service providers (ISP, for those of you who’ve recently awakened from a 20-year slumber) — have claimed that the only way they can make money in the internet access business is by spying on their users and selling that information to marketers.

Now before we go down this absurd exercise in market valuation, let’s just remember that maybe people find this downright creepy. And I’ll add that the last thing we need (especially after all this Layer 4 switching, load balancing and everything else we’ve done in the past decade) is another set of network boxes in the data center serving absolutely no purpose other than driving additional (what I’d call meager) incremental advertising revenues at the expense of the trust of…the entire world.

I know that Andrew Jaquith will soon weigh in with his utter abhorrence of this practice. Yes. It’s creepy. And yes. It’s of arguable value. But I’ll throw in a link to the Wired blog post that mentions BT’s recent efforts in this area. I’ll leave the privacy discussion to Andy, and I’ll ask the obvious question:

Why not charge more?

’cause if you can’t make money at the current prices, you should raise them. That’s what the five year-olds on my street would do.