Google Prepared to Sue over Net Neutrality
According to this article:
Google is prepared to file antitrust complaints against Internet broadband providers if Congress fails to pass effective net neutrality legislation, Google Vice President Vinton Cerf … has told a press conference in Bulgaria. Cerf suggested that the claims could be based on service providers exploiting their control over their infrastructure to interfere with services provided by competitors. After Google filed a grievance with the Department of Justice (DOJ) …, the DOJ would have to consider whether to file a complaint against offending broadband providers, likely under the Sherman Antitrust Act.See here for an expert opinion on net neutrality and how the internet really works. (All your tubes are belong to us.)
Technorati Tags: antitrust, google, net neutrality
RSS Feed
July 8th, 2006 at 10:33 am
As the Wiki article makes clear, the underlying problem is an antitrust problem. We simply don’t have enough competition in the broadband ISP market. We should be encouraging ATT and BellSouth to enter each other’s markets, not allowing them to merge.
I have to agree with the Congressional testimony of American Antitrust Institute Senior Fellow Jonathan Rubin: “in the presence of sufficient competition and consumer choice a network neutrality rule would not be necessary.” The problem is that at best most consumers face a duopoly shared by a single cable company and a single phone company.
July 11th, 2006 at 5:23 pm
[…] Following up on a previous post about Google’s announcement to fight packet discrimination in court, here’s an excellent primer on the technical issues of net neutrality by Ed Felten. Ed’s observations about the broader policy context are particularly insightful: The Internet is unusual among networks in putting most of the intelligence in the computers at the edge of the network, rather than in the infrastructure at the heart of the network. The routers in the middle forward packets with only minor processing—all the heavy lifting takes place on the transmitting and receiving computers. This approach of putting intelligence at the edge of the network is known as the end-to-end principle, and it is one of the keys to the Internet’s success thus far. … In a sense, the net neutrality debate is a fight between the edges and the middle over control of the network. Neutrality regulation is generally supported by companies that provide services at the edge of the network, and is generally opposed by companies that manage the middle of the network. Each group wants the part of the network that it controls to have most of the intelligence, because more opportunities to innovate—and profit from innovation—are available to those who control the intelligent parts of the network. […]
October 12th, 2006 at 7:33 pm
[…] Google is uniquely positioned to monetize the YouTube traffic, which is certainly one major reason (among others) for the acquisition. But that’s not all. Google is also buying leverage in the net neutrality battle. Compared to Google’s core search services, YouTube is a major bandwidth hog. As such, it is a natural candidate for tiered pricing by infrastructure providers. However, assuming the introduction of different levels of service and Google refusing to pay for speedy delivery of its packets, consumers may well consider switching from a “slow YouTube ISP” to a “fast YouTube ISP.” So if offering “fast YouTube access” is, in effect, an essential requirement for a successful ISP, and if YouTube traffic accounts for a significant percentage of packets served by “fast YouTube ISPs,” then the business case for tiered pricing of other content providers might be hard to sustain. As a result, net neutrality might remain the default, even without intervention by Congress. […]