After the Commerce Committee of the US Senate rejected
enshrining the equality of internet data in law last week, Vint
Cerf has told an audience in Bulgaria that the firm will seek to
protect its rights to reach every home with antitrust legislation,
according to Reuters.
"If we are not successful in our arguments then we will simply
have to wait until something bad happens and then we will make
known our case to the Department of Justice's antitrust division,"
he told an audience in Sofia.
Last week the Senate's Commerce Committee approved significant
changes to US telecommunications law, allowing telcos to offer
TV-like digital video services. The telcos wanted to ensure that
they could prioritise their bandwidth-heavy video services on their
own networks, but this raised the ire of digital rights
activists.
Foreseeing a future where services such as Google or MySpace
could be charged to be sent to homes and services which did pay a
fast-track fee were promoted by telcos, activists and politicians
opposed the change and attempted to have 'internet neutrality'
enshrined in the new law.
That attempt failed by the narrowest of margins. An amendment
needed a majority of the 22 person Committee but the vote was tied
at 11–11. An amendment may still be introduced once the bill
reaches the floor of the Senate.
Cerf is a vice president of Google and is credited with playing
a key role in the invention of the internet. He helped to develop
the universal TCP/IP
protocol in the 1970s and founded the Internet Society in 1992. He
is now 'chief internet evangelist' for Google.
Speaking in Bulgaria at the invitation of that country's
president, Cerf said that Google would have to adapt if the US law
is passed without any automatic protection for net neutrality, but
that the company would have to "wait and see whether or not there
actually is any abuse," according to Reuters.
Telecoms companies lobbied hard against net neutrality and have
argued that since they pay for the networks they should be allowed
to decide what information receives priority on it. AT&T CEO
Edward Whitacre said last November in an interview with Business
Week that internet companies such as Google and Vonage ought to pay
to reach customers' homes.
"How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a
broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what
they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to
let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to
have a return on it," he told the magazine.
Proponents of net neutrality argue that by paying a monthly fee
for internet access, customers have already paid to access sites
like Google or Vonage, and blocking the sites and asking for
further payment acts counter to the service they have already
bought.
