weierstrass's Journal: network neutrality

My feeling is that the Network Neutrality wars will be won by Google, which means apparently that the first Net Neutrality war, the current one, will be won by the pro-neutral side. You see after being among the only major web players to escape the dotcom crash fairly unscathed, Google took advantage of the subsequent telco crash to start buying up dark fibre, lots and lots of unused bandwidth all over the US.

I don't know if you would get your broadband provision from GoogleNet, but I reckon a lot of people would. So in the first instance at least, they are not really as subject to blackmail by telcos as a lot of people speaking out in favour of neutrality are suggesting. Everyone else is though, so the question is what do Google see as the future of the Internet? Indexing the chaos of the current system, where anyone can connect and contribute, has made them a lot of money. But perhaps the Hollywood backed alternative of the TVnet, as system whereby you can buy all forms of sanitised and commercial music, film and games in the comfort of your own home will start to appeal to them more once they do an Apple and reinvent themselves as 'content providers'.