Google and Verizon have hammered out a joint proposal for the FCC and internet industry in the hopes of ending the roiling network neutrality debate.
For our sake I hope it fails.
“We both recognize that wireless broadband is different from the traditional wire-line world, in part because the mobile marketplace is more competitive and changing rapidly,” the joint statement said. “In recognition of the still-nascent nature of the wireless-broadband marketplace, under this proposal we would not now apply most of the [Net Neutrality] wire-line principles to wireless, except for the transparency requirement.”
That’s fancy language for: Verizon and the nation’s telecoms have yet again won, Google officially became a net neutrality surrender, and we have lost. If what Google/Verizon propose goes through there are two massive problems facing us as Americans.
1.) Wireless (a.k.a. cell phone providers) will not be regulated at all. The fact of the matter is that the internet, especially Wireless is evolving to the point that cell phone companies are no longer needed. We do not need calling plan’s or texting plans, you know the part of the plan that Phone Carriers make the most money on. Anyone will see that Google Voice works just fine on android handsets. But VoIp companies like Vonage are bullied out of market by the phone companies in hopes to save there huge profit margins. This anticompetitve behavior should not be allowed to last, And Google of all companies should not be chearleading for it.
2.) It leads to the Corporatization of the internet. It will allow, for all practical purposes 2 different internet’s. There will be one for the giant corporations that can pay huge fee’s (this tier is obviously including Google) this will be basically a superhighway with a huge backbone and nearly unlimited throughput. The other version would be basically what we have now. The obvious problem is that these major companies will have a vastly unfair advantage.
How will the next Google currently being ran in someone’s basement ever get discovered when it is throttled by the data speed and unfair advantage that the current Google has. I personally would not be so upset with Google if it were not so amazingly hypocritical. Aside from the “Don’t Be Evil” mantra, Google has been a huge advocate of real net neutrality for years now. It even attempted to outbid Verizon years ago for the privileged of freeing up the wireless spectrum. A privileged they would have had to pay over 5 billion dollars for!
But now through the success of the Android operating system, and the cash they have on hand to pay major fee’s to have a better faster internet, Google has abandoned principle for cash. This is something I would have expected from any other company out there, but somehow not Google.
If net neutrality were a game of chess, though, the industry players may have outwitted the FCC and dodged increased regulatory oversight of wired and wireless broadband simply by dragging things out. If the Republicans win back seats during the mid-term election–as is widely expected–corporations with deep pockets will have more friends in Congress and the FCC will have a more difficult time making the case for doing the job it was chartered to do.
