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Comment by chengas123 | Hacker News Reader

This article is absolutely awful. I've never read anything more factually incorrect.

"Free Press is concerned that Google's deal with Verizon to secure special internet privileges on its broadband will lead to other internet providers brokering deals with major companies. First Verizon and Google strike a deal, then AT&T and Microsoft have a deal ... here comes Comcast who cuts a deal with Yahoo"

There was no "deal". It is only proposal. And it would grant no special privileges to either party.

That being said, it is good people are beginning to reorganize in favor of net neutrality and hopefully will make their views known to their Congresspeople.

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I'm 100% certain you've read things that are more factually incorrect. Also, you're quoting a quote from the article, whose alleged factual incorrectness doesn't make the article itself incorrect. Granted, the article's author also refers to the Google-Verizon proposal as a "deal" just above to the quote, but here's the thing:

I actually don't think it's unfair to call the proposal a deal, since Google themselves describe it as a compromise. This is very much a deal between Google and Verizon over what position they could jointly support. The tricky thing is that this is a political deal, not a formal business deal, which is what you typically expect a "deal" between two companies to mean. The person you've quoted, Craig Aaron, may actually recognize the distinction (e.g., the first sentence is about the political deal, the second about subsequent business deals), but using the same word for two distinct meanings can easily give the opposite impression.

Agreed. And the lines between a business deal and a political deal are blurry at best.

>"deal with Verizon to secure special internet privileges on its broadband"

Regardless, this sentence is entirely false.

"It is only proposal". You make it sound like a proposal, in this case, is much better than a deal. Believe me, it's not. What Google is proposing is ridiculous and goes against everything we worked for in the last 20 years.

Who is the 'we' in your statement?

Except it doesn't substantially differ from the FCC's NPRM from back in 2009, the one everyone was so happy about. It's the NPRM for wired networks, and a "wait and see" approach for wireless networks.

Well they had to come to some sort of deal in order to both agree to this proposal. Money does not have to change hands, for example, in order for a deal to have occured. Simply a multi-party agreement. "If I back this will you back it too? You will? Great. We have a deal. Let's shake."

No special privileges... yet. Some people might be jumping the gun but this proposal certainly lays the groundwork for it -- at least on wireless. So often these days we're aware that the other shoe drops eventually. I think people are wising up to these old manipulations that used to work so well. We just assume the worst.

In-factual to hacker news crowd yes. To the average person does it matter? They need to be told in a dumbed down fashion. Like, "If you disliked iPhone on AT&T only, this Google/Verizon pact is going to making using the Internet suck; make your Internet feel as its Cable TV!" Something like that, but either way it needs to be sold to the average joe so they can understand and take action.

That's pretty disrespectful. Sloganeering has its place. The very term "net neutrality" was a brilliant capture of the semantic high-ground.

But it can turn on you in an instant, as we're seeing with Google's "Don't be evil" slogan.

As far as I can tell Google are trying something nuanced, to impose some rules, where before we had an uneasy Mexican standoff. And they are getting crucified for it.

Ask the average joe (the majority of Internet users) if they know what a web browser is, also ask them what Net Neutrality is. Do you think 15% would know and explain what either is?

If all of us care about the Internet and are appalled at this proposal then for this type of protesting/campaigning to be effective it needs to be better sold(marketed) to the majority. More so then 50 to 100 people standing outside Google protesting.

This is the key point. Users don't care.

Back in the days of Alta Vista, Google offered better search. Today, search is a solved problem and easy for many companies to clone. I'd estimate that 80% of internet users would fail to distinguish between the search quality of Google search and a pagerank-based index of the top 20 websites (which could be hosted on a laptop).

This is why Google attempted to innovate via legislation by trying to get net neutrality passed to prevent its competitors from taking market share via deals that shared profits with ISPs.

Google has failed to stop it, so it must now engage in its own dealmaking to block its competitors from "taking" search traffic (and ad revenue) via non-neutrality ISP deals.

The biggest threat to Google would be a deal between Apple or Microsoft and Comcast or Verizon.

Google's deal with Verizon is an attempt to scuttle any such deal. I'm surprised Verizon found a win in it, but who knows. We will soon see what sort of QoS Verizon gives FaceTime on iPhone 4.

That's a very interesting take. I hadn't considered Google being worried about getting commoditized out of the market. That's a very strong motivation. Another is that if speed is a do-or-die feature, then they want to be able to control all of the factors which will make Google faster or slower. They can compete on tech, and so of course they want to compete on that footing.

Whether you think of them as evil or not, corporations rarely act out of one motivation. There are usually many many desires that get advanced or thwarted in the course of a particular act.

A company may buy a startup out of a desire for the tech or team, to work out the bugs its M&A pipeline on a relatively unimportant acquisition, to encourage other startups to focus on the acquirer's platform, to deny a competitor use of the tech or team, and to give a department within the parent a unsubtle hint that they are not doing their jobs. All at once.

> This is the key point. Users don't care.

That is no point at all. Users are not familiar enough with the problem space to be able to care (or not).

Hence it's not a problem for them. Problems are what create business opportunities. In the Alta Vista days, I had a search problem (search sucked) but today I do not. If Google went away I would still not have a search problem.

Obviously, if something arcane like QoS became a problem for users, then an ISP would have a more difficult cost/benefit decision to make about how neutral it wished to be.

It isn't about search, it is about pay-per-click ads.

Could Apple, Microsoft, Comcast, or Verizon create an advertising platform as functional as Google Adwords?

That is where the money comes from. It is in Verizon's best interest to replace all Adwords advertisements with content from it's own ad network, and same with Comcast.

Cable television replaces nationally broadcasted commercials with local versions. Why couldn't last-mile ISPs do this as well?

Also, this is so US-centric. Any other country that adopts a net neutrality policy will have an advantage over the United States, not a disadvantage.

Well, search is most of Google's pay per click ad revenue (and probably the ideal use case for pay per click advertising).

I agree with your take on the strategy for last mile ISPs.

But I don't see how it amounts to much of an advantage or disadvantage.

> The very term "net neutrality" was a brilliant capture of the semantic high-ground.

I suppose it does, but for the longest time I understood the two sides of the issue, but I didn't know which was pro-net neutrality, and which was anti-net neutrality. Internet freedom is my idea of a better term (although ISPs wouldn't have the freedom to filter/prioritize their traffic, so my term has problems, too)

As much as I disagree with false reporting, paul9290 might have a point here. The same issue exists with software patents, mainly the sad fact that no one other than us really cares. I'd vote for a proper explanation but no one really sits through and listens to those before being nagged for 30-some years, movies being made, books being written (example: the environmentalist movement).

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