Thoughts on Neutralitygate

There has been a lot of sound and fury today (well, technically yesterday) surrounding Verizon and Google’s joint net neutrality policy announcement. I didn’t really know about it until Tim brought it to my attention. He wanted to know my thoughts about this, and blogs are practically designed for uninformed opinions, so why not?

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve worked at Google in the past. Several friends of mine are either current or former Googlers. Money from Google’s generous intern salary paid for all the furniture in my living room. I’m totally biased, I freely admit. The rest of this post will also probably reveal my profound ignorance, but that’s why there are comments.

Frankly, I’m surprised at the amount of rage that I’m picking up about this announcement. This isn’t a net-neutrality-crushing alliance between Google and Verizon. It’s not binding. There’s nothing in the language that says that it’s not open for discussion and feedback. This is basically these two companies saying, “This is how we think we’re going to deal with the net neutrality thing right now.”

The notion of allowing carriers to “offer new types of services that are not part of the open Internet” is also not all that surprising to me. In my view, net neutrality says “if two computers on the Internet want to talk to one another, the carriers providing Internet access to either of the two shouldn’t be able to stop them”. Under “shouldn’t be able to stop them”, I mean that my computer shouldn’t be unable to talk to Google’s computers because I’m on a “Microsoft-friendly” ISP. What Google and Verizon seem to be proposing here is that companies should be able to create services that don’t operate over the public Internet as long as those services don’t circumvent net neutrality. It’s not really clear what they mean by “not part of the open Internet” here; are we saying that the computers making up this service aren’t world-routable? If so, then companies are already doing this internally. Large corporate intranets could be seen as an example of a service that operates separately from the open Internet. Do they mean creating a parallel network over which these services run? In that case, data center networks seem to fit that description pretty well and clearly companies are providing dedicated networks for data center networks, or just buying their own. Again, on the face of it I’m not too terribly distressed.

Most of the rage seems to be directed at the fact that they don’t think that wireless access to the Internet should be protected in the same way that wired access is. Judging by Google’s blog post on the subject (see how biased I am?) their justification seems to be that they don’t know what the mobile Internet really looks like yet. It seems to me that this is basically a political compromise; Google caves somewhat on the wireless issue so that Verizon will agree to come on board with the agreement. Notice that the transparency requirement opens the door for any company that tries to pull any pro-neutrality funny business to be publicly reamed by their customers (you need only look at the Comcast P2P filtering scandal to see how much good press anti-neutrality practices generate for the telcos that implement them). Google promises to not be non-neutral in access to its properties, and it and Verizon get to be great friends; everybody wins.

Are Google and Verizon both huge multinational corporations that are interested primarily in pulling in a lot of cash? Absolutely. Does the language of this announcement open up the possibility of abuse, corruption and rampant mismanagement? Of course, but so does every other agreement between more than one person. Does this announcement violate Google’s “Do no evil” mission statement? Hardly. To me, this just sounds like Verizon and Google getting all buddy-buddy and announcing the sort of long-term, under-defined recommendations that make PR people all warm and fuzzy because they don’t actually require you to promise to do anything. Everything I’m hearing from Google indicates they’re really self-conscious about this whole thing (“it’s not an aggreement”, “we are still committed to net neutrality”, “we’re not sure what the mobile market looks like, so we have to keep our options open”), which gives me some comfort; the second you get a “so what?” announcement out of a company Google’s size (see Comcast’s P2P shenanigans, Antennagate), it’s time to be concerned. Yes, I know I’m totally defending Google here. I told you, I’m biased.

It might sound like I don’t care about net neutrality, but nothing could be further from the truth. People are absolutely right when they say that the Internet is the most democratic medium ever conceived, and it’s really important that it stays that way. The Internet is big business, and these days it’s dominated by big businesses with a lot of influence and a lot of money. As citizens of a democracy, we have every right (and, some may argue, the responsibility) to be outraged when a large, powerful entity looks like it’s trying to gain control of a fundamentally democratic communications medium like the Internet. I just don’t think that this announcement represents anything close to such a power grab.

And that is my opinion on the subject. Release the trolls!

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