Google, Net Neutrality and Dozy Tech Bloggers

I am somewhat bemused about the gerfuffle with Google's climbing down from being a champion of Net Neutrality. They signalled they would do this clearly in 2008 - we wrote about it here- I quote:

There are 2 bits to Net Neutrality - the initial idea was to assme that you got Feedom of Access no matter who you were. This was later conflated by some more Web 2.0 hippie types into Freedom of Assets - ie the right to pay no more for dumping shedloads of video traffic into the pipes than a few email text 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 own 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.

That was what we wrote in 2008....

We also wrote last year about the inevitability of end to end players making a settlement as the cost of creating alternative distribution systems is too high:

To explain, if I may - at the top of this post is a good old 4-market model. In the 1990's the Internet came out tops over a bunch of walled Online Service Providers (OSPs) who were trying to be monopolists (or at least warring oligopolists) at the Aggregation Layer. But it won only because of some strong forces helping it.

Firstly the distributors - Telcos (those people everyone accuses of Net Un-neutrality now) were totally neutral in allowing anyone with a modem to connect to anyone. Secondly, at the time the main consumer device players (Apple, Microsoft) were provider-neutral in that they allowed you to connect to AOL or Prodigy or the 'Net. Thirdly, content was neutral in that AOL et al - despite trying - could not lock up the content online.

The issue now is that the monopolist forces are operating at the aggregation layer again, but also trying to build end to end walled gardens, from content to device. (Think Apple i-Series, Google's various forays from content to mobile phone)

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But I suspect that strong legislation - and a lot of [end] user campaigning the like of which would make the Net Neutrality debate look like a coffee morning - is also required [to ensure an equitable settlement]. But forewarned, as they say, is forearmed.

In other words if you (i) knew how the industry value chain worked, (ii) understood what Google was signalling, (iii) assumed they could execute, and (iv) were paying the teeniest bit of attention, then all this should come as absolutely no surprise by Q3 2010.

So all the gnashing of teeth and wailing, calling Google a "Surrender Monkey" is to me a sign of Tech bloggers being either largely incompetent or asleep at their terminals for the last 2 years (or - could it possibly be - wishing to get as much linkbait now as they can ).

Of course, the Net Neutrality Hippy community will wail and gnash their teeth, but that will ever be thus - and as we wrote in 2007:

What is more germane is that the battle about who will pay for switching on the bandwidth will become up close and personal in 2008, as the Telcos do feel that Service Co's make billions from "Free Ride" economics over their pipes with the emergent rich media services.

We can confidently predict that all the resultant issues - throttling, net neutrality etc etc - will not go away in 2008 either.

This is an attempt to influence the inevitable reglation to serve the interests of major players, who have thrown their lots together as the scary alternative is that the customer wins..

As you can see, we thought it would all come to a head in 2008, so if anything this has all taken longer than we thought.

So, as overnight shocks go, this has been around for some time.....