Does Google Really Want Net Neutrality?
According to a report in the Wall Street Journal today, Google has approached major broadband providers in an attempt to get a "fast lane" for its content over the Internet.
If true, the Father of the Internet, Vint Cerf may be reconsidering his views on net neutrality given his statement of three years ago that "a lightweight but enforceable neutrality rule is needed to ensure that the Internet continues to thrive."
The WSJ report comes as a surprise to many who believe this may prove that the 'do no evil' motto of the company is nothing more than carefully selected words. But to others, Google already has a fast lane courtesy of their countless data centers around the world.
Richard Bennett believes the plan would simply put Google on an equal footing with Akamai, who already has a footprint inside major ISP networks, and that network neutrality is nothing more than a myth.
"The Internet is not a network, it's a complex set of agreements to interconnect independently owned and operated networks in various ways. There is no standard agreement, and this story doesn't report on a new one. What it simply shows is that money buys performance in the technology space, and that should come as no surprise to anyone. Google has to do something like this to avoid being clobbered by ISP-friendly P4P as well as by Akamai.
Om Malik, who has contacted Google in an attempt to get more information, suggests that Google would essentially put the majority of its content closer to the service providers' infrastructure.
"It is not clear how this is different from the kind of deals Akamai has for its CDN network. Of course, Google could go for preferential arrangements that mimic the deals it has cut in the wireless arena with T-Mobile, which makes it easy to access Google services on its mobile phones."
While the WSJ article points out that cable and phone companies are supposed to treat all traffic the same, and what Google is doing risks net neutrality, it also describes how Microsoft and Yahoo have already forged partnerships with the phone and cable companies. So it appears that in this instance that it's okay for Microsoft and Yahoo to get involved with providers, but Google? Not so much.
Regardless, Google has always been a huge supporter of net neutrality. In a letter to the Committee on Energy and Commerce dated November 8, 2005, Vint Cerf writes:
"Enshrining a rule that broadly permits network operators to discriminate in favor of certain kinds of services and to potentially interfere with others would place broadband operators in control of online activity. Allowing broadband providers to segment their IP offerings and reserve huge amounts of bandwidth for their own services will not give consumers the broadband Internet our country and economy need."
More recently, at the San Fran Music Tech Summit in October this year, ReadWriteWeb spoke with Google Policy Analyst Derek Slater on net neutrality, copyright and other public policy issues (video below), and once again we heard Google reiterating the importance of net neutrality:
"I spoke about net neutrality today and that's been a fundamentally core issue for us. Google's story starts in the garage; starts with two people Larry Page and Sergey Brin being able to create a search engine without having to ask ISPs permission first. Being able to innovate and put that technology out there for millions of users. And that's the story for all sorts of startups - us eBay, YouTube, Wikipedia - all started from small beginnings and grew to large enterprises""Net neutrality is about: what are the principles that allow that sort of innovation to thrive? How do we protect that sort of free and open innovation as the Internet moves forward? And the worry is that parties who are not really gatekeepers before ISP's may take more of a gatekeeping role and create bottlenecks to innovation."
So, what do you think? Is Google creating bottlenecks to innovation itself or is this something Google must do as suggested by Richard Bennett?
An Interview with Google Policy Analyst Derek Slater from alex williams on Vimeo.
Update: In an attempt to clarify the WSJ story, Richard Whitt, Washington Telecom and Media Council, Google, wrote a blog post explaining Google's stance. You can read it here.
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Independent of this news coming out, I was working on a post this weekend about GOOG and net neutrality, and how their use of ad words as the arbiter of commerce on the Internet actually put their business in stark opposition to the tenets of net neutrality.
http://www.manyniches.com/entrepreneurs/google-net-neutrality-and-the-curious-case-of-lets-make-a-deal/
The main difference is that with Akami, anyone can get their content on the Akami servers, and, more importantly, Akami is not the gating factor with regard to access to that content. With GOOG acting as a gate through their ad business model, they are already in a position to create wild disparities for businesses.
In this article you quoted Bennett:
"Google has to do something like this to avoid being clobbered by ISP-friendly P4P as well as by Akamai."
Do you even know what P4P is? Can you explain how P4P in any way threatens Google?
Google makes 98% of their money on adwords. Can somebody explain how Akamai will "clobber" Google?
I think it is interesting to cover Google's Net Neutrality backtrack, but misguided sensationalism sounds like a lack of thought went into this story.
Travis
Bennett may have invented twisted pair wiring, but he's wrong on this one.
Google isn't like Akamai at all.
Akamai has no content of its own, so it's best interest is to deliver everyone's content as fast as possible.
On the other hand, Google DOES have its own content, giving it a huge incentive to make its services faster, while slowing down competitors.
Google caches in ISPs could make Picassa twice as fast as Flickr. Orkut substantially faster than Facebook. Blogger faster than Wordpress. Google is a competitor to the most popular services.
Hey, you might have decided against the embedded vimeo above, if youtube were twice as fast.
- Will Google let Yahoo or MSFT put their content in Google’s cache servers?
- Will they let me put my content there?
Even if they do make it available to others, would Google content be given a “preference”? i.e. would they let their own content live longer in the cache?
Will Google’s edge cache have APIs the rest of us don’t know about? (i.e. differential updates, on-the-cache processing for dynamic content, bigger size limits, smart expiry preferences, etc. for them vs. standard dumb caching for the rest of us?)
Finally, there’s the basic dilemma that when competitors have to use Google’s cache to be as fast as Google, then google can effectively spy on any competitor’s traffic.
This is simply too much power to give any company, despite how seemingly "benevolent" google has been in the past. There are good reasons why we shouldn't let dominant content providers turn into critical transport companies.
I still think that google has every right to get what info the can about us...After all they've made our lives soo much easier!! Even though adsense compensates for this I still think they have every right to go ahead with it
Even if Google were an advocate of net neutrality, Google is no longer a source of *search* neutrality. The way a Google search works these days, is, the first results likely to pop up are usually ads.
Commercial enterprises seek dominance in search results. Google is an ad portal. Ads litter search results, and the search result reader must dredge through mounds of ads to retrieve desired information.
Obviously, Google must make a living. This is how. "Monetization" is Google's "doing no evil." Is monetization conducive to net neutrality?
@fjpoblam you are engaging in some pretty crazed conspiracy-making there. There is no evidence I have seen anywhere that Google specifically favours ads or AdWords-payers higher in its search rankings. Quite the opposite, there are many examples of overly commercially rapacious or ad-choked link-farm sites getting DOWNgraded in Google's rankings, they are always complaining about it.
What you're perceiving is that there is an arms race going on between Google's algorithms, which are designed to make search results *more* relevant, and SEO (Search-Engine-Optimisation) consults, who work for those who pay big bucks to fool Google's algorithms into ranking them highly despite the fact that they are actually not very substantive and are intending to essentially prey on the searching herd. Google doesn't win every battle. But they are definitely fighting it, and at least once a year there is a huge upgrade to Google's algorithms and all the SEO sharks start whining their asses off that they can no longer game the system.
So this theory that Google is some kind of ad placement shady trader, is totally bogus. However, the theory that they really believe in net neutrality, is equally bogus, as they have just shown by their attempts to get favoured traffic status. It's clear now that what they object to is the idea of favoured traffic status being negotiated with the ISPs by OTHERS, to Google's detriment.
The conceptual problem here is thinking that the Internet is one thing. Google and everyone should be encouraged to build out in part of the internet that serves their business need and best serves their customers. Any party can buy a higher level of service. This is additive improvement.
Net neutrality is preserved until some middle man tries to prioritize our traffic, in effect not delivering the service that we have bought. This is subtractive.
Google's position is consistent.
@Rick - When Google starts shutting out competitors due to their unfair advantages in ISP caches, Google will still have a consistent position.
Dangerous and antagonistic, perhaps. Borderline illegal. But consistent. Hurray!
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/net-neutrality-and-benefits-of-caching.html
See also: http://lessig.org/blog/2008/12/the_madeup_dramas_of_the_wall.html
http://www.savetheinternet.com/blog/2008/12/15/net-neutrality-in-the-front-seat/
http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/12/wsj-wtf.html
Hot air, hot air, that's the web 2.0 way!
Dear Thank you very much for such participation
I still think that google has every right to get what info the can about us...After all they've made our lives soo much easier!! Even though adsense compensates for this I still think they have every right to go ahead with it