Google and Verizon: favorite content ?

A recent article published in the New York Times has caused quite a bit of fuss in the last few days. The article referred to an alleged agreement between Google and Verizon. Based on the agreement, Verizon might get a faster broadband service for a specific type of Internet content.

Companies like YouTube ( which is owned by Google ) would pay for a faster content delivery to users. Eventually this will end up in probably increasing the access costs of users.

The article also talks about the ancient problem of the FCC ( Federal Trade Commission ) an organism that doesn’t manage to apply their rules in the world of Internet service providers. In April, FCC received a major image hit. Then, three judges established that FCC Doesn’t have the authority to intervene in the actions of Comcast, which limited the peer-to-peer traffic. The decision has lead to the decrease of efforts of the agency to ensure the neutrality of the networks, the so called “net neutrality”.

Lately, FCC consulted companies in the telecommunications, cable and Internet areas to reach a concept of  “net neutrality” to be accepted by all parties. Basically, FCC wants to make communications companies to give an equal treatment to the broadband traffic that passes through their networks, regardless of it’s content.

The civilian society now teams up with companies like Google and Skype and asks for the intervention of an organism to stop broadband providers from becoming the online content watchmen. The fear comes by the fact that they can slow down or can they favor some types of content instead of others. In this context, the alleged discussions between Google and Verizon are causing some hot talks to appear. Verizon officials denied this rumors, saying that “our interest is to establish a frame for Internet policy to ensure transparency and responsibility and to incorporate the FCC authority, but also to maintain the investments and innovation”.

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