Verizon, Google meet on Shakedown Street

Since when is a partnership a one-way street? Since the coining of the term “government-business partnership,” that’s when.

The government can innovate (nuclear power, the Internet) and hand it over to the private sector to make all the dimes off our public investment. OK, so companies improve on it. Shouldn’t some of the benefits of those improvements flow back to the public like royalties?

A fine example is the emerging discussion about an open Internet brought to light by this week’s agreement between Verizon and Google. It allows for preferential flow of data through mobile networks, so that those big enough to afford it can buy priority. In this case Google services would bump aside competitors when delivered via the Internet to mobile phones.

Somehow they have spun it to emphasize that the “public Internet” would remain neutral. Well how about untwisting the definitions and saying the Internet is public. Then everyone would have the right to equal access and speed. And it’s the same internet whether someone is sitting in their home or standing on a streetcorner.

Mobile telephones and their benefits should be doubly public in nature, not less public. Telephone services are, or have generally been, “public utilities,” with the government at least regulating them to a degree, supposedly in public interest. And the towers Verizon uses to transmit its mobile signals exist by the good graces of the public, through local approval processes. We let them puncture our neighborhoods and horizons with their towers just like they require our permission to stick their poles along our highways and drape their wires. We don’t need to take the clout — we’ve got it.

Yet Verizon, with the framework announced this week in the absence of government regs, would not limit itself to Google. This is its template for the future — they even have the audacity to call it a pattern for how the government should (not) regulate such deals. The mobile giant would love to sign more, similar deals with anyone who could pay them to get onto mobile phones faster. The more, the merrier.

Soon it becomes a shakedown, a good, old-fashioned Mafia protection racket. Pay the man to walk safely down the street.

It’s like running a commuter railroad and instead of saying people pay more to ride first class, people who don’t pay more go to the same destination pulled by an 1890s steam locomotive. We’re talking separate trains, here.

Sorry, but I ain’t riding in the cattle car, so to speak, and neither should you. I want my media business to come up just as fast as AOL either in your home or standing on a streetcorner. And the same goes for my lawnmower repair guy vs. Sears. Or my favorite news sources vs. Big Media.

There are plenty of rewards being paid from the innovations of Google, Verizon and the like. But the Internet is infrastructure, a common carrier, and should remain so. Infrastructure is public. It is now up to the Federal Communications Commission to show us who it works for on this issue and use its authority to keep the Internet at an even flow.

When the cookies munch you

It started out innocently enough. Or did it?

“Cookies” that initially tracked how you navigate a website were merely research tools, right? Ways web developers could find out how their clients sites were attracting customers or visitors to various pages. Ways most popular offerings could be tracked. That’s what the website privacy policies told us.

But it took only the thinnest reed of cynicism to know that more was in store. And now that we are being shadowed at virtually every keystroke on the Internet for the purposes of targeting advertising, or by those with even worse intentions for us or the health of our computers, once-imaginary creatures from the nightmare lagoons of privacy invasion are beginning to breathe a lot closer to our necks.

Soon after I recently popped up a page for the Lowell Folk Festival, I found a Google ad on my G-mail for a folk act’s concert tour, someone I hadn’t thought about in a long while but whose appearance tempted me for a moment. Some internet marketer was doing their job well, and it was for music, whose cause is just. But the trust we place in Google by utilizing their free services is immense.

The phrase “falling into the wrong hands” comes to mind. And there are plenty of wrong hands out there. Google may be run by Boy Scouts right now but the jingling of doubloons is an inevitably corrupting influence. When nukes fall into the “wrong hands” (as if there are right ones) we worry a lot. When privacy falls into the wrong hands — well, we’re way past 1984 already.

But worthy organizations and businesses have the potential to utilize internet advertising and all its potentially invasive technologies. We don’t ask Google how its high priests work their magic, and Google would not tell us if we did. Advertisers just want to know whether it works, which Google does purport to tell us when we use AdWords.

But now that the cookies are munching us, we are on some level contributing the ruination of the Internet when we purchase such an ad. How much time do people spend either cleaning up their computers from invasive technology or blocking it? I surely don’t spend the time reading every privacy policy I must click to approve, do you?

To varying degrees, advertising has always been an invasion of consciousness. “Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco” on the side of a barn took the bliss out of the countryside 80 years ago, but today we’ll tolerate quite a bit more noise than that. The problem is that the technology is starting to stalk us into every corner.

That leaves the possibility that the voice behind it — yours, perhaps — becomes the enemy, and your innocent enough approaches will become unwelcome. It happened with TV, and the clicker became the antidote.

Congress is considering some curbs that, however enforceable, would seek to protect the innocence that remains. For those of us who are not advertising jackals, let’s enjoy that innocence while it lasts.