Google net pioneer raises anti-trust bogey against carriers

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 05 July 2006 09:36

Your IT - Home IT

Search leader Google has issued a strong warning to broadband providers through one of the early internet pioneers, who is now a Google executive.

Having failed to persuade the US Congress to force providers to guarantee a one-tier equal access internet through net neutrality legislation, Google vice president Vint Cerf warned that the company will not tolerate abuse by carriers.

Cerf, a former Stanford Computer Science Professor, worked on the internet fore-runner the ARPANET and was a key developer of the TCP/IP protocol on which internet traffic is conveyed. According to Cerf, who addressed a news conference in Bulgaria, if Google detects abuse by carriers it will lodge a case with the US Department of Justice's anti-trust division.

Carriers and their suppliers, such as Cisco, argue that enabling them to offer premium quality internet access at higher prices will make possible the provision higher quality communications services in areas such as datacasting, VoIP and videoconferencing.

However, opponents, including the major internet content providers, such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, believe that a tiered access structure will create internet access barriers to entry and damage the powerful viral nature of internet marketing upon which they rely. The big internet players rely heavily on smaller internet players for their traffic and vice versa.