Google’s media counsel Richard Whitt used the blogosphere to defend the deal that his company and carrier Verizon struck last week.
The US Federal Communications Commission abandoned closed-door talks it had organised between the US’s major telephone,…
Google’s media counsel Richard Whitt used the blogosphere to defend the deal that his company and carrier Verizon struck last week.
The US Federal Communications Commission abandoned closed-door talks it had organised between the US’s major telephone, cable, television and internet companies over the issue of net neutrality last week when details of a secret deal between participants Verizon and Google emerged.
Whitt argued that Google had not “sold out” on net neutrality: “We decided to partner with a major broadband provider on the best policy solution we could devise together. We’re not saying this solution is perfect, but we believe that a proposal that locks in key enforceable protections for consumers is preferable to no protection at all.”
Efforts to figure out how US regulators should or could keep internet service providers (ISPs) from giving preferential treatment to some data at the expense of other bytes of information have been fruitless.
In April, a US appeal court inflicted a major setback to the FCC’s efforts to force ISPs to treat all Web traffic equally, ruling that the regulator had not been granted the legal authority by Congress to regulate the network management practices of ISPs.
However, many fear that the Google-Verizon deal could pave the way for a two-tier system of handling data on the internet, setting up ‘virtual toll-roads’ where some users pay to gain preferential treatment and get to where they are going on a faster, smoother path; whereas the rest have to make do with a slow, winding, badly-maintained track of bumper-to-bumper traffic.
