The mobile revolution hidden in net neutrality

[Commentary] At the Mobile World Congress, Google's Sundar Pichai took the stage to talk about Google's plan to run its own tiny mobile carrier "in the coming months" -- not to compete with the big guys, but to push them on network innovation. "I think we're at the stage where we need to think of hardware, software, and connectivity together," said Pichai. "We want to break down the barriers on how connectivity works." And that's really the revolution when it comes to net neutrality -- putting mobile networks under the same rules as wired networks will be a total game-changer.

When the Federal Communications Commission rolled out a largely similar net neutrality plan in 2010, it explicitly excused mobile from the rules because of a "spectrum crunch" that turned out to a be a total head fake. And I'm still not really sure what the hell this was supposed to mean. But what's clear now is that mobile internet access is actually just internet access, full stop. A huge number of Americans use mobile phones as their primary internet device, and phones are often the only internet device for poor people and minorities. Those numbers aren't going to swing back towards wired access -- mobile is too important. And that means enforcing net neutrality on mobile networks is more important than ever.