WIRED:A proposed deal with US firm Verizon portrays Google at its most geekily idealistic, writes DANNY O'BRIEN
I’VE ALWAYS found those who criticise Google for having a “Don’t Be Evil” guideline a little misdirected. What are we supposed to do, prefer our companies with a “Be Evil” or “Just Disregard that Whole Evil Thing” take on life? Hypocrisy is bad, but it’s not as bad as acting in an actively immoral fashion.
On the other hand, while it’s vaguely reassuring that some companies have an internal guideline, it’s what they do that counts. Last week rumours began to emerge of Google’s private negotiations with Verizon, the American telecommunications giant. The discussions were about “network neutrality”, the somewhat hard-to-pin-down idea that internet providers should not choose favourites when it comes to what content they send down their pipes.
The internet, as it is right now, is relatively neutral. You pay your service provider a fixed charge, and it mostly keeps no eye on who you connect to, or who connects to you. In a non-neutral world, the ISP could block your access to a popular website until you paid an extra fee (like extra satellite or cable channels). It could even charge those running those websites for access to you. Or it might be a little subtler than that: perhaps the phone company might slow down traffic on its internet DSL connections for voice services such as Skype that compete with the phone companies’ own services.
Google has been seen as one of the strongest corporate advocates of network neutrality. The Google founders emerged and made their millions in an age of a neutral network, and the idealism of the company, that very idea of “not doing evil”, revolves around the beneficial effects of a universally egalitarian network.
Not coincidentally, the most obvious institution to charge a bit of a premium is the multibillion-dollar Google. And the company whose business model most relies on the future internet keeping the same broad structure as the old internet is also Google.
It came as a shock, then, to advocates of net neutrality when Google, after fervent denials, came out with a joint proposal with Verizon that seemed to compromise the very idea of net neutrality in pursuit of a deal. The document was submitted to the Federal Communications Commission, which is pondering how best it might enforce net neutrality in the United States.
Both companies agree that net neutrality is important on the “broadline internet access service”, but said wireless internet providers (such as Verizon) should be allowed bend the rules because that market is “still developing”.
Similarly, companies can offer value-additional online services that do discriminate, as long as they’re offered separately from the standard internet. On the public internet, companies can perform “reasonable network management”, and consumers can only send and receive “lawful” content, allowing telecom companies to filter based on the perceived legality of their users’ actions.
The document reads like a somewhat tactless division of empire between two battling consuls, especially when it starts to discuss the (limited) role that regulators would have to play in deciding all of these matters. The FCC, Google and Verizon suggest, should judge issues on a case-by-case basis, and should only be able to fine companies $2 million for breaches.
But if this was the end of the debate, these rules look pretty close to what one could expect the FCC’s final negotiated agreement to look like.
Activists express outrage that Google capitulated on the wireless internet, but everyone knew the mobile market was going to present a much bloodier fight than that over DSL or cable broadband, simply because the mobile companies have no history of net neutrality – but they do have a furious determination to control the destiny of their own, expensive networks.
It’s shocking to see Google prefix the term “lawful” on every mention of “content” – but only because, in the final smoky backroom deals, it would be the music and entertainment industries who would demand that terminology be included.
And while it looks arrogant and self-aggrandising for companies to spell out how little their own regulators should control them, it’s almost certain that somebody – Congress or the courts – would try to limit the FCC’s reach in ways not dissimilar from Google and Verizon’s stance.
Google’s pre-emptive compromise has been seen as a realpolitik sell-out. But to me it seems to be the opposite of Machiavellian; instead, it portrays Google at its most geekily idealistic. Everyone knows, it seems to be saying, how this will play out, so let us cut to the chase.
But we are not, however, at the end of the debate. And Google is not a disinterested observer intent on creating the best possible law: Google was a powerful voice, on one side of a pitched battle, at the very beginning of a long fight.
In this long game of political poker, it has announced at the outset how it intends to bid for the rest of the hand. At this point, then, it is, in effect, out of the game. All it takes for evil to triumph is for the good to do nothing, goes that other motto. Google can do nothing more in the neutrality fight but sit and watch its modest proposal be torn to pieces by both sides.
