Net Neutrality is at the core of the Internet Battle and will be one of the main aspects of the trade war which we will follow through this blog. To sum up, Net Neutrality refers to the current principle that Internet should be neutral which means Internet users should have the choice in what content they view and what applications they use on the internet.

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As the SavetheInternet.com Coalition explains it in the video on the left, American’s main cable and telephone companies such as AT&T, Verizon or Comcast want to charge Internet companies for quality-of-service (QoS); in other words they want to tax content providers to guarantee faster delivery of their data. For example, last year, Verizon’s CEO argued that Google should have to pay for bandwidth. However, even if they pretend to do it in a non-discriminatory way, their main strategy is to discriminate in favor of their own search engines, Internet phone services, etc by blocking or slowing down their competitors. Paul Kaputska notes in his blog that the message of telecommunication companies is “Google is bad, and wants to control the Internet to keep its cash pile growing. Telcos, meanwhile, just want to innovate, so please don’t write laws keeping them from doing so.”. However, beyond this trade war is the issue of the Public Interest.

Google and Microsoft common position

Even if Google was recently at the center of a buzz which alleges that Google was backing off its full commitment to Net Neutrality legislation, rumor that has been refuted 4 days ago, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, InterActive Corp., Microsoft and Yahoo! are the principle supporters of Net Neutrality among the leading high-tech companies and they try to influence the FCC to adopt a Net Neutrality Law. Via this blog, we will follow this issue and its economical and technical consequences.