To see "smoking gun" proof that "net neutrality" is a made-up issue and argument, read the short but telling excerpt below from George Lakoff's Book: "Thinking Points" published October 3, 2006, when the only net neutrality incident at that time was the FCC's Consent Decree with rural telco, Madison River Communications in February 2005.  

From Thinking Points, Chapter 8, The Art of Arguments:

"Thus, the argument for Net neutrality becomes an argument for government regulation in this form by the FCC.

In discussing Google's new "Privacy Dashboard," Fox Business' Neil Cavuto asked Google CEO Eric Schmidt about the ability to delete private information.

• Mr. Cavuto: "How do I know you are deleting it?
• Mr. Schmidt: "Because we say so."

Not being one to accept Google's legendary PR spin without a grain of skepticism, lets review the real significance of Google's new "Privacy Dashboard."

First, to be fair to Google, the privacy dashboard is indeed an incremental improvement over what Google users had before, because it aggregates what was in 21 different places before, into a single more convenient "dashboard." 

• However, Google overhyped the enhanced convenience and control of this single dashboard, because users still have to use the same 21 different steering wheels and brakes they had available before, in order to control Google's multi-directional invasion of their privacy.

Second, this "dashboard" was exceptionally easy for Google to produce. All it basically does is insert a new front-end web navigation page -- to more easily find other existing Google webpages -- much like any website home page offers navigation to pages behind it.

1.   Why has Google been so hostile to protecting brand trademarks that companies have had to resort to suing Google to get any satisfactory brand respect?  

2.   Why is Google's Chrome browser so hostile to brand-marketing? 

• If a user types in a company brand name as a www. ... .com URL into Chrome's "Omnibox," Google's browser always takes the user to Google's copy of the website first and not to the requested company's branded website where the brand-company can benefit from the visit or click-thru information that their brand advertising has earned.
  • In other words, is Google leveraging its fast-growing, Chrome browser technology, used by 30 million people, to become a gatekeeper for harvesting branding online? 

3.   Why is Google's  AdWords "Quality Score" policy so hostile to online brand marketing? 

After discussing whether Google should buy the New York Times, Google decided against it because it "would damage its 'neutral' identity", per Ken Auletta's just-published book "Googled: The End of The World as We know It." 

• Google has long claimed to be neutral. Their corporate philosophy statement claims: "We never manipulate rankings to put our partners higher in our search results and no one can buy better PageRank. Our users trust our objectivity and no short-term gain could ever justify breaching that trust."  
• As the world-leading corporate proponent of an industrial policy to mandate net neutrality for all its potential broadband competitors in cloud computing, and as the beneficiary of "The Google Loophole" in the FCC's proposed open Internet regulations (para 104), it is fair to stress test whether Google's claim of a "neutral' identity is true or just cleverly-executed PR.

Is Google Neutral?

First, by the standards of Google's own co-founders, Google's search advertising model is not neutral.

eBay is licking their chops at the prospect of the FCC's open Internet regulations locking in their dominance of:

• Online auctions (95% share); 
• P-2-P voiceware (via #1 Skype's ~500m users); 
• Classified ads ( #1 in revenues); and
• Online payments (via eBay's #1 PayPal).

Like Google, eBay knows that "openness" is industrial-policy-speak for:

• Rewarding favored "national champions" and
• Locking in first-mover and netopoly scale-and-scope-advantages.

The netopolists must be giddy at how they now have the full power of the FCC focused on permanently locking in their market dominance going forward. 

As the lead bankroller of the "open Internet" slogan that the FCC now proposes to adopt as new U.S. policy without Congressional authorization, Google knows what an "open Internet" is supposed to mean: Google gets the benefits of the Internet without its costs. 

Kudos to Gordon Crovitz' WSJ column that highlighted the wisdom of Larry Downes, author of "The Laws of Disruption" who cut to the crux of the net neutrality debate in asking the simple pointed question: which is the bigger threat to the Internet -- the FCC or companies?  His answer: the FCC.

• Larry Downes: "U.S. consumers have plenty of reasons to be suspicious of both the FCC and the communications industry." His advice: "Consumers should ask themselves which of these powerful interests is more likely in the end to abuse its power. Who, in other words, has the greater potential to make things worse for everyone?"
• His answer seems sensible: "Absent any evidence of serious market failure yet, I'd much rather deal with the devil I know than a resurgent FCC."

The FCC's claims that their proposed net neutrality regulations would just "preserve" the open Internet are simply not true. The facts are clear that the FCC's  proposed regulations would:

• Be a big change in FCC Internet policy; 
• Implement big Internet policy changes without Congressional authorization; and
• Change the Internet in big ways.
  • (The one-page PDF version of this post is here.)

The FCC’s proposed net neutrality regs are a big change in FCC Internet policy; they would:

The WSJ op-ed, "Net Neutrality: Spur to Entrepreneurship, an open network will unleash investment" is a dystopian and nonsensical assertion that it is Government that "unleashes" investment, when everyone's common sense knows that Government regulation is all about putting leashes on businesses and investment!

Competition and market forces have already unleashed $300 billion in cumulative U.S. wireless investment per CTIA!

Google responded to the FCC's questions that effectively address whether or not Google Voice should be subject to the FCC's proposed net neutrality regulations.

In a nutshell, Google basically asserted that it is acceptable for a benevolent provider of free services like Google Claus to discriminate and block calls as an information service voice provider, but it is unaccceptable for profit-seeking broadband voice and information service providers to discriminate or block calls.