Google questions about net neutrality

[The Hollow]

According to the Wall Street Journal, Google had entered into discussion with major cable operators and mobile operators to obtain U.S. preferential treatment for its own web services. Meanwhile, the Mountain View giant said that could interfere with its manually search algorithm.

Neutrality: access to the network

Do not be evil, this is the leitmotif of Google, yet the Californian firm appears to be poised to waive that rule in several ways. Not satisfied to dominate the market for Internet search, Google is trying now to obtain partnerships with American ISPs to offer an optimized access to its Internet services. This raises the question of network neutrality.

For their part, operators explained that content providers should share the costs of their infrastructure, particularly because of a traffic increase of more than 50% annually. Also, they believe that to address this high bandwidth (especially because of the video streaming) they must find new revenue to update their network. Among these solutions, operators do not monetize quick access to content providers such as Google.

One of the big U.S. cable operators refused to sign such a partnership with Google because it would violate the principles of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) the neutrality of Internet networks. Interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, a leader of the ISP in question says that such a decision could cause serious legal repercussions "if we had signed, would ravage Washington"

In this case, Google is not alone in questioning the principles of network neutrality and Yahoo! and Microsoft had both withdrawn from a coalition to ensure the neutrality of the Web. Thus, each trying to impose its default search engine on mobile phones operators and Google appears to have precipitated its browser in Google Chrome final version to be distributed by computer manufacturers under OEM version.

Neutrality: Internet search

The introduction of Wiki Search in Google's search results also suggest some specialists rather skeptical about this technology. Wiki Search allows the user to change a search result on the fly to customize the results of a query for the user account.

However, LeWeb'08 summit, held in Paris last week, Marissa Meyer, vice president of Google, said the company was currently in the process of observing how people use and Wiki Search , Ultimately, could be used to refine search results by the global automated algorithm search engine. Ms. Meyer explained that if thousands of people held an obvious change, then the default will be conducted within the engine.

The debate intensifies in experts in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and some consider this abusive practice. After all, what is an obvious change? Others argue that the voting system introduced by Search Wiki, is complementary to the PageRank technology that analyzes the popularity of a site through inbound links.

The tumult of those discussions around the net neutrality side of the dominance of Google emphasizes the inevitable commercial and disaffection that exist between the FCC and U.S. ISPs. To date, the Internet is not really a comprehensive international authority capable of intervening in these discussions.