Google and Verizon have recently made a net neutrality agreement, and this can effect what kind of information we'll be receiving through their services in the near future. the companies agreed that net neutrality was a good thing and that the FCC should be able to enforce fines for companies that don’t abide by it, and that carriers should be forced to share information on how they route traffic for transparency. They also created a lot of loopholes and exceptions, which is why a lot of people are all bent out of shape by it. Two of the major loopholes are as follows: 1) exempts wireless carriers from all the rules except transparency. In other words, they can play favorites and route traffic however they want, as long as they tell us how they’re doing it. Only wired carriers would be subject to net neutrality principles, and even they would have some creative leeway. 2)allows for “differentiated managed services” that would be exempt from the neutrality given to other traffic. The document gives the examples of “health care monitoring, gaming, smart grid, and advanced educational services.” Although it explicitly claims these could not be use to circumvent rules, it provides no guidelines for which types of services warrant exemption and which belong in the same stream as everyone else.
The SaveTheInternet.com coalition says “Google is about to cut a deal with Verizon that would end the Internet as we know it.” Putting it more bluntly, “this deal puts the company in bed with the devil.”
Public Knowledge, a public interest group concerned with digital issues, has made “Google sold you out” its war cry. “This agreement would, among other things, allow Verizon to prioritize applications and content at whim over its mobile broadband network,” the group claims.
And what happens if we lose net neutrality? Well basically, as an end user, that might mean that Mapquest and Bing Maps now load much slower than Google Maps. Hotmail and Yahoo mail load slower than Gmail. Yahoo and Bing searches take longer than Google searches. The plethora of choices you take for granted on the Web begin to evaporate when the biggest player in any space is able to pay for priority handling, shutting out competitors.
Jump to the article yourself for more information about this agreement and how if will affect us...Verizon & Google's Net Neutrality
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