Google’s Evangelist Evangelizes to Telcos: Tough Audience for the GOOG
July 25, 2008
Telecommunications companies like Verizon, AT&T, and SBC have got the Internet and the users all by the nose– without a T1 fiber, a DSL line, a cable connection, or heaven forbid, dial-up, a user has to resort to hitting a Starbucks or a McDonald’s to get online.
The major players not only offer the service on current infrastructure, they can offer bundles of products (Who has the cable/telephone/Internet combo at home? Go ahead, raise your hand.) to make consumers’ lives easier. Why go anywhere else? It keeps control firmly in their hands, and any other companies wanting to get into the game are on the outside looking in.
In the Internet’s infancy, we were willing to give the telcos if not carte blanche, certainly an easy road with little regulation to expand networks. It took the telcos lots of time and lots of money – and now this monopoly is their reward.
Vint Cerf, affectionately called “Father of the Internet” and Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist, is preaching that there needs to be more regulation of the telcos as well as more competition (Read: Google wants to sell Internet access, too). You can hear an audio interview here.
From Google’s point of view, incentives are needed to bring more competitors into the market to break the telco monopoly. And who would those competitors be? How about Google, Microsoft, IBM, etc…. Cerf summarized his (and Google’s, presumably) opinion by saying that the telco companies are acting like spoiled children – they want the incentives and they want to keep the network, too.
It’s bad for the country, Cerf says. It’s bad for Google, too.
So Google is planning its own Internet revolution. In the past ten years or so the concept of broadband power lines (BPL) has come up several times. This would let electric companies in on the Internet access game, but the technology was iffy and caused other problems with service. In March of this year Google sent the FCC a proposal to provide wireless high-speed access over power lines without the problems of the past. Info is here. Time will tell.
So the current Internet service monopoly, grounded in business models based on 19th century principles (outlive the opponent to win), is colliding with a monolith built on 21st century principles (if you can’t beat them, buy them).
The truism remains: Nuclear war is won by the outfit that strikes first. And Google has shown in the past that it has power – and it’s not afraid to use it.
Jessica Bratcher, July 25, 2008
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