M+E Daily
Google-Verizon: Proposal Critics Say Companies Want Loophole For ‘New Entertainment Options’
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“We want the broadband infrastructure to be a platform for innovation,” the chief executives of Google and Verizon state in a joint proposal, announced yesterday, for how the U.S. government should regulate Internet services. To this end, the two companies press for broadband providers’ right to develop “new entertainment and gaming options,” among other new products, that are separate from traditional Internet access and hence not subject to the same government regulations.
Google and Verizon stress that under their proposal, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) would monitor the development of these new online services, to ensure that “they don’t interfere with the continued development of Internet access.”
But the proposal has been met with outcry from media watchdog groups, along with a terse response from the FCC.
Andrew Jay Schwartzman, SVP and policy director at advocacy group Media Access Project, sees in the new-services proposal potential for a loophole that “may make some services unaffordable for consumers and access to those services unavailable to new start-ups” (in an interview with the New York Times).
The FCC, for its part, bridles at the corporations’ attempt to redefine the government’s role in net neutrality.
“Some will claim this announcement moves the discussion forward. That’s one of its many problems,” FCC Commissioner Michael Copps says in a statement (.pdf). “It is time to move a decision forward — a decision to reassert FCC authority over broadband telecommunications, to guarantee an open Internet now and forever.”
