There’s been a lot of talk about Google and Verizon’s net-neutrality proposal to the FCC. Net-neutrality in concept states that all content should be treated as equal and ISPs should not have the ability to throttle bandwidth depending on content type or origin.
Google and Verizon’s proposal seems to take the same view, EXCEPT that they make an exception for some ‘differentiated’ content to be throttled as providers see fit, and oh yes, none of these rules apply for wireless content.
Quite how this is sold as ‘net neutrality’ is anyone’s guess once you read between the lines and read the exception clauses – the proposal is more like a trojan horse to pave the way to be able to throttle content and offer preferential data rates for any type of content that can be pushed under the banner of ‘differentiated content’, or anything across a wireless connection.
When you think about it, there’s not much money to be made in treating all data and all data types equally. Where the money is to be made is in offering ‘differentiated content’. If you’re offering premium content at a price, of course you want your content to be able to stream to your customer and not be held up by ‘lesser’ or free content. Verizon knows this, Google knows this. What they’re doing is ensuring they have an open door which allows them to offer premium content and make money from these services, paving the way for future business.
If content providers want to offer premium content to consumers then maybe this needs to be provided over a pipe other than the internet – if you want it you pay for it. The rest of the internet should be left alone as it is though – I for one don’t want someone else to tell me that content I’m consuming is less or more important than other content.