The Wall Street Journal has a story this morning suggesting that Google has stepped back from its support for network neutrality by suggesting to internet service providers that it puts technology at their facilities to cache its content locally.
Google has struck back by denying that this idea – which would help to speed up the rate at which internet users can access web pages and video from Google and YouTube – is either a change of its stance, or a breach of net neutrality principles.
It says this is by no means the same as a cable or telecoms broadband provider in the US charging some content companies to access a “fast lane” that would deliver their stuff to the consumer faster than other companies using the pipe.
Google may be right that it has not changed its position. But it does show why the notion of legislating net neutrality is so thorny. When I wrote a column about this two years ago, I did not support legislation, despite my sympathy for the basic principle.
Big companies do in practice deliver their services more rapidly than small ones because they have the technology and the resources to provide local caching and other speed-up tricks. As a result, the consumer’s experience is not neutral.
It still seems to me that the big problem for the US is a lack of adequate competition to provide broadband access to homes and offices. This, I believe, is due to insufficiently robust regulation of telecoms companies compared with Europe.
In countries such as France and the UK, the unbundling of telecoms networks to allow new competitors to offer broadband services led to robust price competition and has made it less likely that any one provider can distort the network.
By the way, here is the view of Richard Waters, my colleague in San Francisco, who is more of an expert on these matters than I.
