Richard Bennett Op-Ed in the San Francisco Chronicle

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Richard Bennett [richard () bennett com]


Here's my piece on Google, Yahoo, and net neutrality from today's San Francisco Chronicle.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/08/EDBH11LNQS.DTL

Google's political head-fake

Richard 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.

The latest turn in the network neutrality debate - emphasizing the fair management of bandwidth-intensive file-sharing 
applications - left Google on the sideline. Cooperation between peer-to-peer networks and carriers enhances the value 
of both, and creates a more powerful and less expensive alternative to private networks - which is counter to Google's 
interests.

Despite its carefully crafted public image as a naive and squeaky-clean innovator, Google is a public corporation 
managed by professionals, some of them longtime friends of Washington power brokers and fully capable of understanding 
the problems the Google-Yahoo deal poses.

The tech press has been too busy reprising its Internet Bubble era cheerleading and cooing about Google's network 
neutrality "idealism" to raise questions about the demise of Yahoo as a search competitor. Fortunately, the Justice 
Department is investigating, and Congress has planned several hearings, including one today.

Any anti-competitive concerns motivating the net neutrality movement are theoretical, as no single carrier today has 
the power to fix prices. Consumers have an increasing menu of options for broadband networks, many of them wireless. A 
search monopoly is, however, a true gatekeeper, directing Web surfers toward some sites and away from others. When that 
power is combined with the ability to set prices for advertising, it's a disaster not only for the Web but for 
democracy.

Senate hearing

What: Public hearing before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation to consider the state of the 
online advertising industry

When: 10 a.m., today

Where: Room 253, Sam Rayburn Building, Washington

Why: There is concern that tracking individual's Internet activities violates their privacy

To learn more: Go to links.sfgate.com/ZECG<http://links.sfgate.com/ZECG>

Richard Bennett is a Bay Area network architect and inventor. He was an expert witness at the FCC's February field 
hearing on net neutrality and a frequent conference speaker.




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