A Verizon executive took off the gloves yesterday and came out and warned Google that there will be no more free lunch. This article from the Washington Post’s Arshad Mohammed quotes Verizon’s Senior VP and Deputy General Counsel John Thorne as saying
“The network builders are spending a fortune constructing and maintaining the networks that Google intends to ride on with nothing but cheap servers,” Thorne told a conference marking the 10th anniversary of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. “It is enjoying a free lunch that should, by any rational account, be the lunch of the facilities providers.”
Later in the piece Thorne says that the free-riders such as Google, along with franchise impediments, threaten continued investment in the network. He even coins a phrase “Google utopianism” and accuses net neutrality advocates of “drinking the kool aid.” (As an aside, can we all stop use that overworked phrase.)
Thorne described two obstacles to building such networks: the task of getting thousands of local franchise agreements to offer cable television; and what he called “Google utopianism,” a concept he likened to “spiked Kool-Aid.”
As much as I rapped the net neutrality advocates for their extremism (see here and here), can the telcos also please dial down the rhetoric. You look like idiots, which certainly plays right into the hands of your most ardent net neutrality foes. Why should Google’s “lunch” be yours when they created something that in your wildest dreams Verizon could never have developed? It took a whole lot more than “cheap servers” to do what Google has done. And they did so at a time when the idea of a free, open and unhindered Internet seemed like an unalterable reality, even to the telcos.
Given the heat between the telcos and the net neutrality advocates, today’s Senate Commerce Committee hearing (webcast here) on the very topic of net neutrality should generate fireworks.
Cynthia Brumfield at 8:53 AM|Comments(1)
Verizon is the last company that should be talking about a free lunch. Verizon sales people tell clients daily why they should buy Internet services from Verizon. Do more, be more, create says the Verison Internet Sale staff. Google created something great. Verizon says it supports creation and innovation on the Internet daily via its sales force. We can all see how that creation will be rewarded. Pay us for Internet service but create something with it and you had better be ready to pay extra for doing so or...we will the greedy Telco will try to find a way to obtain extra income from your creation by blaming you for the Telco�s lot in life. Verizon fails to understand that they can own a river but not the boats that travel it. Customers already pay for the pipe. Verizon sales people tell me how great Google is and to use it as much as possible. Verizon Customers already pay for the traffic and access to the pipe. Verizon = Greed. Verizon is just another lost Telco in the land of the Bell heads.
Posted by: Pamela Patterson at February 7, 2006 1:27 PM
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