Google-Verizon Pact: It Gets Worse
So Google and Verizon went public today with their “policy framework” — better known as the pact to end the Internet as we know it. News of this deal broke this week, sparking a public outcry that's seen hundreds of thousands of Internet users calling …
Context & Ripple Effects
The relationship has fully inverted. In June 2007 Verizon fought Google's proposal for open-access conditions on the upcoming airwave auction, and a Business Week piece had asked as early as 2006 whether Verizon was a network hog throttling peer traffic. By December 2007 the carrier had embraced Google's Android, and on August 4 of this year Bloomberg reported the two were close to a deal on web traffic rules. Today they made it official: a jointly authored "policy framework" for how the Internet should be regulated.
The publication converts a leak into a lobbying document — two of the most powerful players in both wired and wireless broadband now proposing the rulebook themselves rather than waiting for the FCC to write one. The reaction has been unusually broad for a policy paper: syndication across the New York Times (which framed it flatly as a threat to startups), the Washington Post, and Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine declaring himself baffled by it, alongside the reported hundreds of thousands of users protesting.
First-order effects
- Startups and independent web publishers are the named losers under the framework's critics: if paid-priority tiers become lawful on wireless networks, new entrants compete against incumbents who can buy faster lanes — the New York Times' editorial page makes exactly this argument.
- The FCC loses agenda control: with Google and Verizon proposing their own regulatory scheme, the agency must either accept an industry-drafted compromise or fight the two largest names in Android and broadband simultaneously.
Second-order effects
- AT&T, Comcast and other carriers gain a template: once Google — historically net neutrality's loudest corporate ally — signs onto carve-outs, rival operators can adopt the same wireless exemption without bearing the reputational cost alone.
- Net neutrality advocacy groups get their clearest mobilizing villain, and the optics of the alliance (the open-Internet champion plus a carrier previously tagged a network hog) make the coalition politics of the FCC fight more polarized, not less.
Third-order effects
- The episode establishes a precedent for national communications policy being set by bilateral corporate agreements first and regulators second — a structural shift in where Internet governance happens.
- It hard-codes a split regime: one rulebook for wired networks and a weaker one for wireless, which given mobile's growth trajectory means the exception gradually becomes the main market.
The trend: Broadband policy is migrating from FCC rulemaking toward privately negotiated compacts between carriers and platform giants, with wireless carved out as the less-regulated frontier.