Can someone explain to me how they think less than full net-neutrality benefits Google? I didn't understand that argument in this article, or any of the previous ones.
In addition, now that Android sales have taken off Google isn't an outsider looking in at an industry whose gatekeepers could easily shut them out from mobile search and advertising. They own the #2 platform, and they've got enough pull to ensure that Google gets a piece of the mobile pie - which means that net neutrality isn't worth as much to Google as it was two years ago.
This article is spot-on. Google was enthusiastic about net neutrality when it was essential to their financial success. Now that it has a cost, they're discovering the virtues of compromise... which wouldn't be an issue without the relentless Google PR about how principled they are. As pg said once, the trick with declaring that you're not evil is that people will hold you to it.
Which is probably a few more months. Yes there have been iPhone/Verizon rumors forever, but I get the impression they're real this time.
Gosh, it's almost as if Verizon has just recently made some kind of strategic deal to achieve a position where Google needs them more than they need Google, and has therefore begun dictating terms.
(Replying to parent since we cannot go beyond Level 4 nesting)
Before agreement: - wired: unregulated - wireless: unregulated.
After agreement: - wired: net neutrality - wireless: unregulated but reviewed yearly
We all benefit from wired NN. Google didn't gain any special privilege here.
Olive branch?
A fig leaf is a token cover-up gesture that doesn't fool anyone.
No part of this agreement creates any business relationship between Verizon and Google. I'm still not understanding.
Since Google dominates current services, it doesn't need to monopolize them, just ensure that anything new coming along has some hurdles to clear.
It is bad for small players and startups who would like to compete with the established players on equal terms.
Once you are at the top, and you got the majority of the market, your best actions (in monetary terms) is to stop entrants.
It's not like Google is going to go ahead and say "well let's squash the competition by paying for prioritized traffic for all of our properties." It will be more like something along the lines of "hey let's get android OS updates onto user's phones faster, we can pay to have that "updating service" have higher priority than normal http traffic." Updates are big files, and people don't want to wait hours for an OTA download, so bump up the speed a bit. But from there it is a slippery slope.
As it is, if any of the telco's started seriously violating net-neutrality, that could actually become a catalyst for real legislation. That is a check on the isp's. If we adopt this suggestion into law, it gives the giants something to hide behind. "Oh, you don't like that we are selling a "video service" that pipes youtube to your phone? Well, bring it up at our review a year from now." A year is a long time in this industry. Perhaps a year from now they claim that they can't afford to pay for the LTE infrastructure being utilized for this youtube pipe without the special service fee, or people will just dislike having their youtube run at a slower bandwidth. so it continues.
By saying "anything goes" we are letting the isp's set the terms of net neutrality. And the isp's have a terrible history when it comes to treating customers right.
Everyone always forgets how vulnerable Google is to competition. Best case for Google is net neutrality, second best case is to have signed deals with the top ISPs to prevent its competitors from signing google-harming deals with them.
Verizon's network performance makes QoS an issue. Imagine facetime over the mobile network, etc. Chances are Apple is very concerned about the Facetime experience and wants non-neutral QoS to benefit it.
Further, Google is making tons of money on mobile ads, etc. All Apple needs to do is direct search traffic to Bing (or to Apple's own search engine) and that's a significant revenue boost.
Search is no longer a hard problem. Microsoft cloned Google search fairly quickly and is very likely to help Apple by offering a good deal on revenue sharing.
These factors combine to suggest that Google is VERY worried about an Apple/Verizon deal.
Imagine if tens of millions more iPads are sold, each with Verizon 4G and non-net-neutral search redirects.
Does anyone really think consumers would care? Bing and Google return almost identical results, and Apple is probably less than two years away from being able to engineer its own Google caliber search engine.
I think that what people forget about Google is that in spite of all the brilliant engineering (which is surely unrivaled) most of the actual revenue comes from simple search which is very much threatened by net non-neutrality.
Google was forced to backpedal on its previous stance out of the necessity to stop Apple from making a google-killing deal with Verizon.
All this is speculative and based on speculation about how successful Apple's devices will be on Verizon (and how little customers care which search engine handles their searches). But Billions of dollars are enough to make any company change course on a dime.