Yeah, but we all know who they'll pass it onto - The poor, long-suffering customer. And since EVERYONE in the ISP game will have to start paying to peer with TC/TCNZ, the costs will be uniform so no one ISP would be able to benefit. The other alternative, and one that's probably fairly unpallatable, would be for the rest of the ISP community to just stop passing traffic for TC/TCNZ. Lock them out of the national traffic pattern, even if they come in through international links. Refuse to route to them. There're enough customers attached to the other players at APE/WIX to make this a credible threat - Fine, TC/TCNZ both have massive customer bases, but throw together Orcon, IHUG, CallPlus group, ICONZ, etc and suddenly you're coming in on a fairly equal footing. And since TC/TCNZ do not have any kind of monopoly on providing connections for major sites (NZ Dating and TradeMe, two of the major NZ sites, use providers other than TC/TCNZ), the outrage of their clients might see sense prevail.
Unfortunately the current situation looks more like the endgame of a great game of chess - one the little guys couldn't even see was being played. I think that responding to the threat when there's only two moves to checkmate is not really possible. Ofcourse, I would love to be proved wrong :) --- James Whatever My niece called me "Uncle Robot" on the weekend! Giant Robot Ltd, http://www.giantrobot.co.nz/