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March 28, 2024

Let's Not Let That New-Fangled "Wireless" Thing Confuse Us

Come again? Verizon and Google have come up with some “thinking” for the FCC as it comes to grip both with America’s broadband future and its own legal box limiting what it can regulate.

The solution: One Internet for all of us, under God, with justice and liberty….wait a minute, I got distracted there.

One Internet, level playing field, but with a few exceptions.

“Internet service providers would not be able to block producers of online content or offer them a paid “fast lane,” explained the New York Times. “The proposal, however, carves out exceptions for Internet access over cellphone networks, and for potential new services that broadband providers could offer”.

The new services exception could probably be wide enough to drive an Internet through. But “cellphone networks”?

I sometimes do get my NYT reading confused with The Onion, given the flow of news, but this seems unbelievable.

Google and Verizon, of all companies, know that it is the mobile web that’s the big prize going forward. Choose your favorite metaphor. The Internet will be like water, like electricity, like air. For the next generation, it will just be there, accessible from anywhere at the touch of some device, or maybe just the turn of the head or blink of the eye. The tethered, desktop web is already becoming your father’s Internet.

We sense that to be true and now we’re seeing analyst reports trying to quantify it, like Gartner’s saying that by 2013 — barely three years away — mobile phones will overtake PCs as the dominant web access device worldwide.

The issues of broadband access and the costs of creating the next-generation digital infrastructures are serious and knotty ones, and the Google/Verizon pact may create more of a backlash than they anticipated. (See “Verizon-Google Pact: 5 Red Flags,” by Ian Paul in PC World, for some of those issues.) Separating out, though, the future from the past should be a non-starter as the FCC wades deeper into net neutrality.

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