What the Google-Verizon deal really means for the wireless future

[Commentary] Historians will conclude that the unraveling of the network neutrality movement began when the iPhone appeared, instigating a tsunami of demand for mobile Web access.

They will conclude that an ancillary role was played when carriers (even some non-wireless) began talking about metered pricing to meet the deluge of Internet video. Suddenly, those net neut advocates who live in the real world (e.g., Google) had to face where their advocacy was leading -- to usage-based pricing for mobile Web users, a dagger aimed at the heart of their own business models. After all, who would click on a banner ad if it meant paying to do so? Thus Google and other realists developed a new appreciation of the need for incentives to keep their telco and cable antagonists investing in new broadband capacity. They developed an appreciation of "network management," though it meant discriminating between urgent and less urgent traffic. Most of all, they realized (whisper it quietly) that they might soon want to pay out of their own pockets to speed their bits to wireless users, however offensive to the net neutrality gods.