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January 21, 2007
Net Neutrality, Google, and Hard Ball
GigaOm's carrying a piece on the continuing Google / telco dramabomb over network neutrality. They point out, very rightly, that Google seems naive about Washington politics, projects an image of "new-age foofiness," and have an apparent monopoly over search, all of which add up to an easy target for telco lobbyists. However, those same properties seem to have blinded Paul Kaputska, the piece's author, to Goog's actual apparent strategy which rests upon a pair of facts: they have a huge warchest to fight individual telcos with and they are the largest controller of fiber in the world.
What happens when the telco's collectively try to jack up access costs for Google? Google falls back onto their own, currently dark, fiber network to route around the offending backbone lines. They blacklist the telco's sites. They charge punitive access fees to telco traffic that traverses their network. Google actually has the upper hand in this fight, and so long as they don't sell-out the "common man" network neutrality has a real chance of remaining the law of the land in fact if not on paper.
Because most pundits want Goog to be a "good guy" they discount the possibility of hard ball game strategies on their part. But I would posit that Google must play as hard their suppliers and customers if they're going to avoid losing margin to the upstream and downstream chunks of their supply line. And because Google really can implement a monolithic strategy while the telcos will be forced to compete individually, if only due antitrust laws, they can bring enormous resources to bear upon each telco individually over a period of time, knocking them down like dominoes in a line. No wonder the telcos feel the need to lie to congress and their customers - they're actually in danger of losing their monopolistic pricing power completely.
Posted by ashusta at January 21, 2007 08:54 AM
Comments
While advocacy groups such as the one I consult for, Hands Off the Internet, are transparent (we plainly state right on our website who our coalition members and contributors are), who's behind the Save the Internet group? Where does it's money and backing come from?
Personally, I worry that this entire mess will wind up hurting the consumer the most, as Congress attempts to do something and fumbles the entire issue.
Posted by: Hands Off at January 21, 2007 09:58 PM