Editor’s Note: After reading the Google/Verizon Net Neutrality Proposal, we wondered just what would happen if it was actually adopted by the FCC. Below is our best guess. A correspondence from the future. Are you old enough to remember the Internet as it was first imagined? A place of free expression, shared information, and equality of access? If you answered no, then you don’t know what you missed. Up until a little over ten-years ago, paying for internet access meant that you’d get access to, well, the internet. Sure, there were different speeds and data caps to consider, but the information flowed. Americans had such unabated access to information, online gaming, and other media through wired and wireless sources that newspaper empires, television networks and other giants of the media industry shuddered in the presence of the World Wide Web. If you’re old enough to remember that freewheeling time of torrents , WikiLeaks , Hulu and The Pirate Bay , you’ll likely recall hearing something about a deal that caused a media murmur in the spring of 2010: Google and Verizon’s announcement of a suggested course of action to ensure net neutrality. For those too young, or now too senile to recall, Google and Verizon announced that in light of the U.S. government’s failures to legislate regulations to ensure net neutrality across the nation, they’d come up with a few points that they were sure would do the job nicely. Google’s Eric Schmidt and Ivan Seidenberg of Verizon told Americans that they believed–and these are the broad strokes–that everyone in the country should have access to broadband Internet. Schmidt and Seidenberg also stipulated that they felt broadband network technology should be leveraged in order to improve the country’s power management systems and innovate the way that the nation’s healthcare and educational infrastructures are operated. Like true corporate citizens, their suggestions were framed with protectionism
More here:
The Google / Verizon Net Neutrality Pact – 10 Years in the Future
