Internet Proposal From Google and Verizon Raises Fears for Privacy

Is there reason to worry about the Google-Verizon network neutrality proposal?

"The people who are pushing for a nonneutral world are pushing it for monetary purposes," said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which advocates for privacy online. "Interfering with packets," she said, "creates the space for this kind of surveillance." The fact is that monitoring Internet users is increasingly crucial to online business -- whether by e-commerce sites that recommend purchases or by search engines that remember what you looked for in the past to improve results or by e-mail services that place ads based on words in the messages. Eben Moglen, a professor at Columbia Law School who is an advocate for free software and online privacy, sees frameworks like the one proposed by Google and Verizon as emphasizing the business of the Internet at the expense of the privacy of the Internet.

"As the network does more to adapt to what commerce needs, it becomes more and more about knowing what's inside the head of the user, about what the person is doing and buying," he said. Rather than a neutral Internet -- with its implied competition between rival businesses -- the people at Riseup -- a nonprofit collective based in Seattle that hosts e-mail and e-mail lists -- would seem to be wishing for a "plain" Internet that would merely facilitate communication and connections, and minimize the role of commerce.