Net neurality amendment stings search companies with own tail

Stan Beer
Friday, 09 June 2006 14:39

Your IT - Home IT

Internet companies, led by search giants Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, may well regret they ever started the debate about so-called Net neutrality if a US Democratic Congressman has his way. The content providers want the US Government to regulate broadband network operators so that they can't discriminate between content providers by introducing a tiered pricing structure for piping content through the internet.

Now House of Representatives member from Texas, Charles Gonzalez, has put forward an amendment to the proposed Network Neutrality section of the Communications Act, which seeks to brings content providers under the very same regulatory legislation that they want to impose on broadband network providers. A sample of the amendment is as follows:

"It shall be the duty of each broadband network provider and content aggregator not to block, impair, degrade, discriminate against, or interfere with the ability of any person to use a broadband connection to access, use, send, receive, or offer lawful content, applications, or services over the Internet; to operate its broadband network and content aggregation website in a nondiscriminatory manner so that any person can offer or provide content, applications, and services through, or over, such broadband network and content aggregation website with equivalent or better capability than the provider extends to itself or affiliated parties, and without the imposition of a charge for such nondiscriminatory treatment; and if the provider or aggregator prioritizes or offers enhanced quality of service to data of a particular type, to prioritize or offer enhanced quality of service to all data of that type (regardless of the origin of such data) without imposing a surcharge or other consideration for such prioritization or enhanced quality of service."

Basically what the above amendment is saying is that what's good for the goose is good for the gander. If the search giants and other major internet content providers want to stop the broadband network operators from charging different prices for different levels of access to their data pipes and from choosing which traffic they want to carry, then they themselves must be governed by the same rules. In other words, Google must take ads from Yahoo and Microsoft and vice versa.

The content providers, including Google, have reacted indignantly to the new amendment claiming that there is a monopoly held by internet carriers which creates huge barriers to entry for new players, while no such monopoly exists for content providers. Opponents of that view, however, say that the large content providers have also created huge barriers to entry for new players. Google has about 50% search engine market share, while Yahoo and Microsoft have an additional 30% to 40% between them.

The amendment proposed by Representative Gonzales threatens to derail the intent of the original proposed Net neutrality legislation and raise the level of the debate to what monopolization of the internet actually means. While the largest content providers argue that the only monopoly that exists is at the physical carriage level, others believe that the ability of just one content aggregator to direct 50% of internet traffic is a budding monopoly in its own right.