Google-Verizon plan: Why you should worry

[babylonsister]

Monday, Aug 9, 2010 13:10 ET
Google-Verizon plan: Why you should worry
Ominous references to the "public Internet" inescapably suggest something else entirely
By Dan Gillmor


So Google and Verizon had not, in fact, cooked up a special business deal for their mutual benefit. But what they have cooked up, as announced today, may be no great deal for you and me: the idea of a parallel network that could, in the long run, become the default network -- at the very least for entertainment and truly advanced services.

At first glance, no one could argue with what the companies' CEOs, Eric Schmidt and Ivan Seidenberg, announced on Monday: A "joint effort by two companies to offer a suggestion" to public policy makers, as Seidenberg put it. (Both CEOs denounced last week's media hyperventilating, based on stories in the New York Times and Bloomberg News, as bogus journalism, though they didn't use that precise phrase. "There is no business relationship," Schmidt said on a conference call.)

Their suggestion? Essentially, it was to insist that the Internet should remain open and freely available, with enforcement teeth to ensure what most people would call network neutrality, the idea that carriers can't discriminate against one content provider in favor of another.

But the proposal went further. It would promote the expansion of new services, not part of the Internet as we know it now, that would go beyond anything we have today. These new services, if Congress and regulators enacted the companies' proposal, could not be designed to be end runs around net neutrality; they would have to be genuinely new.

But here's the rub: You should not trust Verizon or other carriers, or Google for that matter, to follow through in ways that are truly in the interest of the kind of open networks the nation needs. Throughout the conference call, we kept hearing references to the "public Internet" -- an expression that leads inescapably to something else.

more...

http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/08/09/google_verizon_deal/index.html

[Pharaoh]

1. Just Leave it alone!!

It works fine the way it is!!!

[woo me with science]

2. Start beating your plowshares into swords, people.

We knew this would happen. At least we have a heads up.