Google's 'open Internet' proposal looks disappointingly conventional

[Commentary] Google is a conventional company: It's trying to monopolize a market just like a conventional Bigfoot like Microsoft would, and it's trying to do so with the conventional corporate weapons of guile and misdirection.

What prompts my disillusionment is a document Google issued a few weeks ago jointly with Verizon, the nation's biggest wireless communications company and therefore a very conventional company. Their "joint policy proposal for an open Internet" posed as a defense of network neutrality the principle that Internet service providers can't discriminate in transmitting anyone's data to users over anyone else's. In other words, no special deals by which, say, Google pays Time Warner Cable a fee so that its search pages get to subscribers faster than Yahoo's. Or by which Disney pays for its video streams to load faster than Fox's. Buried in there, however, were a couple of "buts." But, they said, network neutrality shouldn't apply to "wireless broadband" — which happens to be a market in which Verizon already leads, and where the phone company and Google expect to make gobs of money in the future. But, they also said, even in wired broadband, which is the flavor that comes into home computers via cable or DSL modems, there should be an exemption for service providers to offer new, "differentiated" services — assuming the providers otherwise comply with net neutrality. The companies didn't say what they thought these new services might be, other than that they might include entertainment or gaming, or life-saving functions such as health monitoring. But, they said, it should be kosher to give these novel apps priority on the network.