Google - keep it open until we can enclose it

Wails of woe today as the Net Neutrality Fraternity wake up to find that Google is preparing to jump the fence and leave them to the sharks - its in the WSJ here. And, as SAI notes:

One of the most kneejerk Internet causes in recent years has been "net neutrality"--the absurd conviction that phone and cable companies who paid hundreds of billions of dollars to lay the cable that Internet data travels over shouldn't be able to charge different rates for different tiers of data service.

From the beginning, big Internet content companies like Google have fiercely championed this.

Until they could get into the position (traffic from YouTube, pipes from purveyors everywhere) to negotiate their own preferential deal, that is:

Now, however, Google appears to be realizing that net non-neutrality would actually be a boon to business--because it can afford to pay preferential fees that other companies can't. Microsoft, Yahoo, and others appear to be realizing the same thing.

Score a very rare win for the telecoms:

Rare perhaps, but predictable certainly, on 2 counts:

(i) The Telcos have been signalling for 3 years now that they will do this, as they want to make sure that those that clutter up their pipes help pay for building bigger ones.

(ii) Google strategy across most key areas in their value chain is to play a double game - support Open (You Name It - Org, Source, Access, ID, etc etc) until they can get their own beautifully Chromed assets in place.

There are 2 bits to Net Neutrality - the initial idea was to assme that you got Feedom of Access no mater who you were. This waslater conflated by some more Web 2.0 hippie types into Freedom of Assets - ie the right to pay no more for dumping shedloads of traffic into the pipes than a few bits. It suited the NN lobbies' interests to conflate the two.

And the GYM club were all at it it, they only supported Net Neutrality to give them time to get their assets into line, as is probably also the case with their strategies for Open (Most Other Stuff). Especially now that FreeConomic speculative funding is pretty much drying up and the hunt for real revenue is on.

If you look at the value chain, its clear that distributors will always (i) make money and (ii) control their pipes. Google knows this - it played Net neutrality until it could effectively peer at Tier 1 level, and it will now do that until it has built its own backbone network.

Some people continue to think of Google as the cute startup that can Do No Evil, not the huge public limited Ad company and Microsoft - in - waiting it now is, and the tend to be bamboozled by the doublespeak, but the above strategy is very clear once one takes off the Googleglasses.

Update - a bit more clarification on this after reading Graeme Pieterz's comment below - my point is not that Google has jumped the fence yet (as Graham notes, this is Tier 1 peering CDN's) - but its not hard to imagine what comess next as Google backfills. Thus (in my view anyway) it is preparing to become its own distributor down the road and in the meantime ensure its content looks and feels like its coming from a Tier 1 player. Thusly, I think a lot of myopic Open folk are only now waking up to what Techdirt puts very well:

....people and companies, who used to rely on Google's legal team to fight their battles, now need to realize that Google is no longer the defender of Silicon Valley. While the company used to take the stance that what was good for the internet user overall would be good for Google in the long term, in the last year or so, the company has increasingly made decisions that go against that principle. Instead, it's done a number of deals that allow it to leverage its cash reserves to make life more difficult for others, but allow Google to protect itself.

They have followed a clever strategy - in areas where they have no hegemony, promote (and seek to influence) Open Whatever, as that way you get a lot of free resource - especially in the early days - and less resistance, in fact even some lurve. But when your chips are in place, start to replace Open with Google.

Update - El Reg has written a fairly scathing article a week alter after a lot of pixels were spilt...