Squashed: The Verizon-Google proposal isn't bad
hmwt:
On another note, it really chaps my ass when average Joes defend greedy capitalists, even when they are just playing Devil’s advocate. Capitalism is named such as it is the art of capitalizing on your fellow man. Recognize patterns.
While I’m normally happy to play devil’s advocate, I’m really not doing it here. I think Google has done a fine job of taking net neutrality from near-dead-in-the-regulatory water to near-guaranteed for the wired interet—which will set the pattern for how the wireless internet develops.
The thing that’s hard for me to wrap my brain around is this: as Richard Gaywood cogently asks, “Reword Google’s announcement for 10 years ago and to say ‘broadband’ instead of ‘wireless’. Come back to today. Do we still have Skype?” Now, the logical rebuttal would be to say that we didn’t have net neutrality legislation for wired broadband ten years ago, and Skype came up just fine, without being squashed out of the running. So, what’s so wrong about the telecoms and the big businesses proposing to limit the FCC’s regulatory authority on wireless?
Well, my answer is this: in the past ten years, the telecoms and the huge corporations have learned some hard-won lessons about when and where they’ve left money on the table. Ten years ago, the Internet was barely in its infancy, and none of these companies had a handle on how best to build (or work) the system in ways that would best benefit them for the long haul. Today, they are far, far smarter, and they are very clearly angling for leverage on the platform that will be the most important of the coming generation.
They’re cutting bait on the old technology, by proposing net neutrality legislation for the system on which they’ve already staked most of the claim they’re likely to ever get. But that juicy wireless market…boy oh boy, is that ever ripe for cordoning off lucrative little “sub-internets” in which they can generate false scarcity, exclusivity deals, and “prioritized” bandwidth sold to the highest bidder (which, to my mind, basically boils down to modern-day payola). Of the very small list of positive reviews of the Google/Verizon proposal, every last one of them has pointed out that it is about 50% great! Fantastic, even! But that other 50%? Hu-hu-hoooo boy, that shit’s pretty sketchy, and barely anyone’s swallowing it.
Broadband internet access needs to be subject to network neutrality regulation, whether it be wireline or wireless. Implementing net neutrality for only one and not the other only serves to open a window for telecoms and big corporations to help each other maximize their own bottom lines, and for small companies and startups to be left out in the cold.
