Verizon Executive Calls for End to Google's 'Free Lunch'

[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Arshad Mohammed]
John Thorne, a Verizon senior vice president and deputy general counsel, yesterday accused Google of freeloading for gaining access to people's homes using a network of lines and cables the phone company spent billions of dollars to build. "The network builders are spending a fortune constructing and maintaining the networks that Google intends to ride on with nothing but cheap servers," Thorne told a conference marking the 10th anniversary of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. "It is enjoying a free lunch that should, by any rational account, be the lunch of the facilities providers." Verizon is spending billions of dollars to construct a fiber-optic network around the country for delivering high-speed Internet and cable TV services. "The only way we are going to attract the truly huge amounts of capital needed to build out these networks is to strike down governmental entry barriers and allow providers to realize profits," Thorne said yesterday. He described two obstacles to building such networks: the task of getting thousands of local franchise agreements to offer cable television; and what he called "Google utopianism," a concept he likened to "spiked Kool-Aid."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/06/AR200602...
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