Welcome to Verizon Bureaucracy
May 8th, 2006 by MattOne of the reasons I started paying attention to this fight is because the telecoms started saying that they were going to violate the principles of internet freedom. For instance, John Thorne, SVP of Verizon, said the following in February in a major speech reported in the Washington Post.
A Verizon Communications Inc. executive yesterday accused Google Inc. of freeloading for gaining access to people’s homes using a network of lines and cables the phone company spent billions of dollars to build.
The comments by John Thorne, a Verizon senior vice president and deputy general counsel, came as lawmakers prepared to debate legislation that could let phone and cable companies charge Internet firms additional fees for using their high-speed lines.
“The network builders are spending a fortune constructing and maintaining the networks that Google intends to ride on with nothing but cheap servers,” Thorne told a conference marking the 10th anniversary of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. “It is enjoying a free lunch that should, by any rational account, be the lunch of the facilities providers.”
On the call today, Link Hoewing, Verizon’s VP for Internet Technology Policy and Business Support Planning, implied that there will be no content discrimination, that Verizon can’t even tell if a packet is from Google. So I asked him about the statement from his colleague at Verizon. Here was his response.
You’ll have to ask John about that.
He then gave me a bureaucratic run-around about how corporate officer Tom and not corporate officer John is in charge of Verizon’s policy and so I shouldn’t listen to corporate officer John. Look, that’s insane. John Thorne said publicly at a major speech that his company believes that Google’s profits should belong to the telecom industry.
If Verizon can’t get their facts straight internally, how can we trust them to manage the internet without any oversight whatsover? I can already imagine the customer service nightmare I’m going to have when my blog isn’t viewable by Verizon customers.
May 9th, 2006 at 6:13 am
Verizon also warned the financial services firms — who are threatening to weigh in on the side of net neutrality — that their stance could compromise “security”.
A recent blog entry describes what the carriers really appear ready to do: stifle innovative applications like Skype, Vonage and YouTube.