After much fulmination in newspapers and in the blogosphere, on Monday Google and Verizon announced a proposed "legislative framework" to "preserve the open internet." The announcement was greeted with enormous interest because it had been alleged that Google was preparing to make a deal that would compromise its longstanding commitment to net neutrality, the principle that no content traveling along the internet should be treated differently because of its source. Early reports of the negotiations, including some in the New York Times, were clearly mistaken. This was no mere deal by Google to buy preferred access for its own services on Verizon's networks, an individual violation of the principle of network neutrality by one of its most ardent prior proponents. It was a proposal that would legislatively gut that principle in general for everyone. The newspaper accounts thought too small.
Google presented the deal as a way to "save the open internet." But in fact, it abandons it in three ways. First, goodbye to network neutrality on wireless networks -- the place everyone, including Google -- believes to be the future of the internet. Second, goodbye to network neutrality for "additional" or "differentiated" services. If you can't drive a coach and four through that loophole, you were not paying attention in English class. Third, and missed by most of the commentators, goodbye to the FCC's role as a regulator of network neutrality. The Google-Verizon proposal settles the FCC's disputed power to regulate the net by removing all but a vestige of it -- leaving an entity that can adjudicate on a case-by-case basis, but cannot make rules. This is a telephone company's vision of network neutrality - not over our wireless networks, not when we want to sell something else on top, and not subject to effective regulation, just enough to act as a barrier to entry for potential competitors. In other words, not network neutrality.
The question is, why would Google do this?
Is it a matter of corporate naivete? Verizon is, at base, a telephone company; it thrives in the interstices of state regulation the way small marine organisms thrive inside the nooks and crannies of a coral reef. That is its preferred habitat. Its organizational culture evolved there and it is brilliantly adapted to it. Google is a company built by engineers. The initial reaction of engineers to regulation -- and I speak as someone who has had to explain legal rules to computer scientists many times -- is simply to reject large amounts of them as "stupid" and thus obviously not real. Their second reaction, when the "that's just stupid" defense fails to cause legal reality to conform itself to their beliefs, is to use technology to design around the rules. (Google something in a foreign country and you will realize this immediately. Geolocation allows tailoring of content based not just on national interest but national rules.) Their third is to make a deal, in the hopeful -- and utterly laudable - belief that there is a possible agreement hidden in the details, a technologically mediated compromise that can make everyone better off. Those two different organizational cultures were on display in Monday's announcement. Unfortunately, the announcement was about... regulatory schemes (and how to gut them). That is playing to Verizon's strengths, not Google's. And it showed.
Is it not naivete but realpolitik? Google has been a passionate advocate of openness -- not coincidentally, because its business model is built around it, but also because it has hired some of the leading visionaries with that point of view. Google has defended open networks -- where new entrants will have the power to disrupt existing businesses just as Google did to Yahoo and Alta Vista's search services. And it has defended open platforms - such as the Android phone -- not proprietary closed systems like the iPhone ecology. One way to read Monday's announcement, perhaps the saddest for those who believed that Google had a real principled commitment to openness, is that Google has decided to ditch the first principle and concentrate on the second. It is now rich enough that it can buy preferred treatment over wireless networks and premium services. And it needs the phone companies to have Android succeed and carry Google onto the mobile web. Net neutrality got Google where it is, but now it is time to pull up the ladder behind it.
Finally, does Google genuinely believe this "compromise" is the best that can be achieved? That this is the best place to start negotiations over the future of the open net? That strains credibility. Google may or may not be evil, but it is filled with some of the smartest people I have ever met. The howls of disappointment from the blogosphere reflect the jilted hopes of legions of netizens who -- against their better judgment -- had come to romanticize Google, to believe in it as a reliable force for good, not just a profit-making corporate structure. Whether out of naivete or craftiness, that little dream has now been dispelled.
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Larry Magid: Verizon & Google Proposal Is Just a Proposal Not (Yet) a Federal Law
We already have a tiered internet. We already have no neutrality on Wireless. We already pay by the bit for wireless. We already have to pay extra for differentiated services (QOS video conferencing , etc).
WiIthout some agreement there will be no expansion of internet capacity, hoggish applications will eat up all the bandwidth and nobody will get anything done. A neutral net that is unusably slow is useless. As is a net that doesnt extend to everyone in the country.
We are already at best a second world country in internet terms, and on our way to being a third world country.
Competition is the answer not regulation. If I had a choice of 10 internet providers, I am sure that one of them would be willing to give me what I want at a reasonable price.. Instead, I have one choice and I have to take what TW gives me.
What this has to do with is two words: Cloud Computing.
Google has a pretty good cloud computing platform and a strong position in the field in general with Google Apps. How hard would it be to get the next generation of Google Apps and its cloud computing platform reclassified as a 'differentiated service'? Since apparently the network provider can make this determination on their own then almost certainly they get the reclassification.
Cloud Computing is very sensitive to bandwidth issues. No quantity of efficient coding or computing power on either end can make up for a traffic bottleneck on the network connection. So with Google Apps and their cloud computing platform exclusively having the highest QOS and every other cloud computing vendor having to fight it out with everything else on the internet then Google gets to OWN cloud computing. Nobody else would be in a technical position to compete in cloud computing against someone with the advantage of a higher QOS.
Google has already made it clear that they see cloud computing as the route to have Chrome OS become dominant on the desktop. From there it is a logical step to engineer Android as the best platform for running mobile versions of Google cloud computing apps.
So all it takes is that 'differentiated services' loophole and Google gets to own the desktop OS, the Mobile OS, and all the applications running on both of them. Enough of a motive?
Frankly, this agreement scares me more than rabid "Christian" fundies polluting our politics. Without net neutrality, any hope of combating powerful voices is doomed. Any hopes of small online businesses succeeding is doomed against the onslaught of the virtual giants. Just like Wal-Mart killed the neighborhood stores, so does this kill the millions of small online businesses over time.
Historians, given the ability to write the truth, will mark this as the tipping point to an American Plutocracy. Google has just become plain, old Goo.
When I first saw this story was true, I went to my browser options and changed my default search away from Google. If everyone that wants net neutrality did that, Google's main income of ad revenue would crash, and poof, goodbye evil plans. Microsoft , Apple, Verizon, T--Mobile, etc would be terrified to try it again.
But apparently GOOGLE FIGURED OUT PEOPLE WON'T USE THEIR OWN POWER OF CHOICE TO SOLVE THIS, instead THEY WILL WHINE TO MOMMY NANCY PELOSI TO MAKE EVERYTHING OK FOR THEM. And we know how that always works out, another win for corporations, another loss for consumers.
naive, crafty, stupid ??????
how about:
megalomaniac, greedy?????
.
Great article. One thing I would note is the this pattern is - and I think will always be - universal. From what I have read about game theory, the pressures to cooperate with principles of openness are greatest on upstart companies like Google WAS, and the pressures to betray those principles increase rapidly as a company gets established, and joins the "big boys".
I think this is the pattern we saw playing out in the healthcare debate: Obama cut deals to attempt to get the largest coalition at the beginning of taking on the insurance companies and Republicans. Then as he starts battling the main opposition, he tosses the most undesirable groups - those who might be most innovative, or ideological, or who can't be bought or bamboozled - under the bus. In the healthcare debate, those groups included the Single Payer advocates, and eventually the Public Option. Then, at the end, it is heralded as a big step forward, ignoring the expense of the many steps back.
This is the way that power yields the right to join the club. It demands payment. Google has made that payment by selling net neutrality out.
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/citizensclass/2006/09/citizens_class_4.html
The telecoms have failed us miserably as has our government. Consequently, we are now a third world country as far as internet services go and we will remain one it seems.
Let's make somebody huge. Who's the next university student with a search engine?
Anyone still using Lycos or AltaVisa.... I jest.
Corporations only care about the bottom line. If Google notices a sharp decline in people using their search engine due to opposition to this proposal, they might think twice about pushing it.