Siva Vaidhyanathan has a book in progress, The Googlization of Everything. There he posted today an August interview he did with Vint Cerf, Google’s Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist. Siva calls it a brief but rich exchange. When Cerf says Google is committed to keeping the Internet open, Siva follows up:
SV: Let’s talk about that. There is all this dueling lobbying and arguing going on at the FCC and in Congress between firms like Google and the telecoms. What can Google do to change the narrative to make this issue seem clearer or understood in different terms?
VC: That’s a good question. We have to get beyond the bumper sticker slogans about all this. Look at it historically. When we all used dial-up, we had thousands of Internet service providers. Now that we use broadband there are at most two players available to subscribers – often just one. Competition is not disciplining that market. Unless you have enough competitors you have the potential for very uncompetitive practices. I am afraid that the system in the United States is just not set up to deliver the best broadband service.
Now in some places in the world – the United Kingdom, Japan, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand – carriers are compelled by the state to make service competitive. But we seem to be stuck in this odd loop that says deregulation always creates competition. It’s just not true.