Kenny Hemphill
Google may claim it’s against a two-tier net, but its deal with Verizon seems to be the opposite of everything neutrality campaigners are fighting for.
The campaign for so-called net neutrality took a blow to the solar plexus earlier this month when The Washington Post reported that multinational giants Google and Verizon were days away from signing an agreement on ‘how network operators can manage web traffic’.
The concept of network operators managing traffic is the very antithesis of net neutrality, of course. In case you haven’t been keeping up, the story goes something like this: a number of organisations, such as the public interest group Public Knowledge, have become increasingly concerned in recent years that the very foundations of the Internet are under threat.
They believe, with some justification, that the relatively small number of companies who have it in their gift to exercise control over how, or more precisely, how quickly, we access online content, do not necessarily have the best interests of users at heart. It would be relatively straightforward, as things stand, for companies that provide the infrastructure and those who provide the content to enter into a commercial arrangement which gives preferential treatment to traffic accessing company 2′s content using company 1′s network. That would immediately change the Internet as we know it, and for the worse, according to campaigners.
In the US, the government has been wrangling over legislation to enshrine net neutrality in law, but so far the best that it has done is to commit the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to act as referee in negotiations between organisations like AT&T, Skype, and the Open Internet Coalition.
Google, unsurprisingly, refused to comment when asked by The Washington Post, though Verizon was a little more forthcoming, confirming that it had been ‘working with Google for 10 months to reach an agreement on broadband policy’. It also said that it was committed to the negotiations with the FCC – rather like a footballer asking his agent to find him a new club, while kissing the badge on the shirt of his current team after scoring a goal.
If all this seems rather irrelevant to you and I, consider the implications as reported widely following The Washington Post’s story. The Guardian, for example, interpreted the deal to mean that Google would pay Internet Service Providers a fee to fast-track YouTube content to customers, at the expense of other traffic. It also said that it increased the likelihood of a two-tier Internet where ‘users would be likely to have to pay more for premium services from ISPs looking to make a greater return on expensive investments in broadband networks’,
Google, whose motto is still ‘Do No Evil’, has previously claimed that it is a supporter of net neutrality. At the Mobile World Congress in February, CEO Eric Schmidt told his audience that ‘if you have a content category like video, we want to make sure that the operator does not favour one video [provider] over another because that would then allow the operator to pick winners in the category’. And when asked whether Google would ever pay to have its content given priority, his answer was an unequivocal: ‘We wouldn’t.’
That stance was confirmed in a submission to the FCC earlier this year from Google, which said the company supported a ban on ‘prioritising Internet traffic based on the ownership (the who), the source (the what) of the content or application.’
So, what gives? How can the company on the one hand claim to favour legislation that would enforce net neutrality, and on the other do a deal which would appear to be the precise opposite of everything neutrality campaigners are fighting for? You could, if you wanted to be generous, argue that Google was merely being pro-active in order to protect itself. That, while it favours the principle of net neutrality, it’s smart enough to understand that any legislation is some way off and that it won’t be long before its competitors start doing deals. You could also argue that it’s better that Google does these deals than, say News Corp or Microsoft. But you would have to be in a very generous mood indeed. There’s nothing in Google’s recent history that leads me to believe that the company has the best interests of you, me and every other Internet user on the planet at heart.
It’s more likely that the search giant knows that Internet neutrality hasn’t a hope in hell of surviving and that it’s determined it will use its very deep pockets to make sure that it is Google, and not its competitors, who reap the benefit.
