UPDATED:Verizon Cracks Telcos’ United Front on Net Neutrality
Posted on October 22, 2009 |
UPDATE As expected, the FCC today adopted the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that begins the process of formalizing network neutrality rules for the Internet. Here's a link to the full text of the notice (PDF). Comments are due Jan. 14, 2010.
On the eve of a Federal Communication Commission vote that will start the formal process of imposing network neutrality rules on Internet service providers, the seemingly united front of the big telecommunications companies is showing cracks. The big development was a joint statement by Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam and Google CEO Eric Schmidt expressing their commitment to the idea "that the Internet remains an unrestricted and open platform" and pledging to work together to find common ground on the issue.
The shift is more symbolic than substantive. Google and Verizon still differ sharply on the question of how neutrality rules should apply to wireless services. And shortly before the Schmidt-McAdam statement was released, Ivan Seidenberg, CEO of Verizon Communications, which owns 55% of Verizon Wireless, attacked "proponents of net neutrality [who suggest] that network providers like Verizon and applications providers like Google, Amazon and others occupy fundamentally different parts of the Internet ecosystem - a binary world of 'dumb pipes' on the one hand and 'smart applications' on the other." (Courtesy of FierceWireless.)
