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.