The Cloudy Future of Net Neutrality & Its Effect on Retail
With the Google/Verizon deal, your site could be dumped in a “slow load” zone.
December 2010 By Joe Dysart
Google’s recent move to forsake Net Neutrality—the premise that all content on the Web should be distributed even-handedly—threatens to have serious consequences for imaging and mobile retail websites, especially if other Internet titans follow suit.
Slower-loading websites and bidding wars for preferential treatment from Internet service providers (ISP) could all become a sobering, new reality for those in the imaging and mobile retail industry, as the Internet’s current democratization gives way to enhanced service for those with the deepest pockets.
”This is completely unfair and would hurt smaller content providers (like imaging and mobile retail sites) who didn’t have the resources to pay the fees,” says John M. Simpson, director, Inside Google Project, Consumer Watchdog (http://www.consumerwatchdog.com): “Content would be dominated by large mega corporations, much like cable television is today.”
Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, sees the threat similarly, explaining, “Verizon could say to Google: regardless of what you pay your own ISP to get your bits launched on the Internet, pay us more, and we’ll make sure your YouTube videos get to our subscribers all the more quickly as they come in for a landing.
“Google might well be able to pay,” Zittrain adds. “And then leave poorer content providers behind...” including the legions of imaging and mobile retail websites that play many leagues below Google in terms of working capital.
Not surprisingly, these first murmurings of Google’s abandonment of Net Neutrality already has some insiders talking mass protest. “Many of the giant global communication networks tend to facilitate reactionary political agendas,” says Julian Jackson (http://www.julianjackson.co.uk), a digital imaging/Internet marketing consultant. “This would be one of the reasons why many individuals and organizations all over the world will fight very strongly, and probably campaign together, to overturn any attempt to monopolize the communications channels.”
Google-Verizon Deal
Google has countered that its move to abandon Net Neutrality is a necessary “compromise” it needed to make with its ISP partner, Verizon, which has long loathed Net Neutrality and which also promotes the Google Android operating system on its Verizon phones.
Essentially, ISPs like Verizon have long complained that a concept like Net Neutrality makes it impossible for them to charge higher rates for people and companies that consume more bandwidth than others.
Slower-loading websites and bidding wars for preferential treatment from Internet service providers (ISP) could all become a sobering, new reality for those in the imaging and mobile retail industry, as the Internet’s current democratization gives way to enhanced service for those with the deepest pockets.
”This is completely unfair and would hurt smaller content providers (like imaging and mobile retail sites) who didn’t have the resources to pay the fees,” says John M. Simpson, director, Inside Google Project, Consumer Watchdog (http://www.consumerwatchdog.com): “Content would be dominated by large mega corporations, much like cable television is today.”
Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, sees the threat similarly, explaining, “Verizon could say to Google: regardless of what you pay your own ISP to get your bits launched on the Internet, pay us more, and we’ll make sure your YouTube videos get to our subscribers all the more quickly as they come in for a landing.
“Google might well be able to pay,” Zittrain adds. “And then leave poorer content providers behind...” including the legions of imaging and mobile retail websites that play many leagues below Google in terms of working capital.
Not surprisingly, these first murmurings of Google’s abandonment of Net Neutrality already has some insiders talking mass protest. “Many of the giant global communication networks tend to facilitate reactionary political agendas,” says Julian Jackson (http://www.julianjackson.co.uk), a digital imaging/Internet marketing consultant. “This would be one of the reasons why many individuals and organizations all over the world will fight very strongly, and probably campaign together, to overturn any attempt to monopolize the communications channels.”
Google-Verizon Deal
Google has countered that its move to abandon Net Neutrality is a necessary “compromise” it needed to make with its ISP partner, Verizon, which has long loathed Net Neutrality and which also promotes the Google Android operating system on its Verizon phones.
Essentially, ISPs like Verizon have long complained that a concept like Net Neutrality makes it impossible for them to charge higher rates for people and companies that consume more bandwidth than others.
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