Google's political head-fakeRichard Bennett
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
The devil's best trick is to persuade us that he doesn't exist, but Google only has to convince us that it's not evil. Nearing an agreement with Yahoo to grab the ailing company's search business, Google scripted a series of dramatic public events apparently designed to distract from the pending deal. These events emphasize network neutrality, an ever-changing regulatory ideal that Google thrust into the political spotlight two years ago. As entertaining as this spectacle is, regulators should not be fooled. They should apply traditional anti-monopoly standards, blocking the Google-Yahoo deal.
The deal, as currently structured, substantially alters the Internet economy. Advertising is the prime revenue stream for social networks, news sites and Internet aggregators of all kinds, and it's closely linked to search. Instead of a search market where three players compete vigorously for eyeballs, this deal would create a status quo where the top dog enjoys an 85 percent market share and the ability to set prices for search ads with no fear of being undercut by its much weaker sole competitor. This should set alarms clanging wherever antitrust and personal privacy concerns are held dear, but it hasn't.
The centerpiece of Google's net neutrality misdirection campaign, a new initiative to bring faster broadband at lower prices to American consumers, was book-ended by Google CEO Eric Schmidt's visit to Washington and a public endorsement of heavy broadband regulation by Internet pioneer and Google Vice President Vint Cerf. The initiative, Internet for Everyone, is virtually identical to earlier network neutrality organizations, It's Our Net and Save the Internet. Each of these organizations was fronted by rock-star intellectuals such as Lawrence Lessig, co-founder of the Google-funded Stanford Center for Internet and Society, and his protégé, Tim Wu, the new chairman of the advocacy group Free Press.
Net neutrality is largely seen as an obscure but noble cause, so it's a safe issue for an image-conscious corporation to embrace. Google had largely abandoned it in the months before the recent publicity blitz, probably because of how the issue had morphed in the preceding year.
Initially, network neutrality was the demand that network carriers ignore the Internet's fundamental inequality. Google had good reason to advocate this, because it is advantaged by a status quo in which money buys privilege. Any move by carriers to selectively boost speeds for fees dulls the advantage Google has secured for itself by building huge complexes of hundreds of thousands of computers.
These complexes exploit a flaw in Internet architecture that enables them to seize more than their fair share of network bandwidth, effectively giving their owner a fast lane. A richly funded Web site, which delivers data faster than its competitors to the front porches of the Internet service providers, wants it delivered the rest of the way on an equal basis. This system, which Google calls broadband neutrality, actually preserves a more fundamental inequality....
This article could not be more wrong. It's wrong about what Google has been doing (and not doing). It's wrong about the political architecture of the Net. It's wrong about the history. It's wrong about the present.
It's pretty stunning to hear that Google thrust Net Neutrality into the political sphere two years ago. Those of us who were pushing to preserve it and speaking out about don't remember Google taking a central or organizing role in the movement.
If anything, Google laid back and let expert public interest groups like Publicknowledge.org and The Future of Music Coalition take the lead in these battles. Two years ago Google had an ichoate public policy presence. It's better now. But it's hardly influential.
While folks like Tim Wu, Larry Lessig, and myself were making the case on the radio and in print, Google had very little to do with the movement. It was nice to know that Google supported it, as everyone agrees that on a level playing field, Google always wins.
Net neutrality is one of the founding principles of the Internet itself. Google had nothing to do with the founding of the Internet. Nor did Google fund much of the early work on Net Neutrality.
The article also claims that Net Neutrality is an "obscure but noble cause?" Uh, no. Noble, yes. Obscure, no. Many high-profile writers and musicians have joined the cause. And it's deeply important to the future of democratic culture and media -- and thus democracy.
I am as concerned as anyone about the Google-Yahoo advertising deal and the anti-competitive potential of it. But this argument is simply silly and uninformed.
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