The “History of the Internet” on Wikipedia gets down the basic time frames of the net’s basic permutations and technological benchmarks, and while it can be woefully inaccessible it is adequate to draw some interesting conclusions from. Yet most noticeably divorced from the “History” is the rise of Google, whose innovations and dominance in data-mining and infrastructure paved the way for the massive commercialization of the Internet that we know today.
    
But what’s something that happened in recent memory that might explain why our Internets are suddenly under attack? It’s only been about two years since Google and Verizon made an unprecedented deal that would allow them to take full advantage of each other’s infrastructure: Google’s search monopoly/data mining infrastructure and array of promoted information services, and Verizon’s global wireless broadband.
    
A year or so before that Verizon criticized Google and Skype for freeloading on infrastructure telecoms who were responsible for the researching and developing the networks they were apparently benefiting too much from. (Isn’t it just like business to measure the value of something influential on financial entitlement and not how it’s changing culture or benefiting our lives?) But we all comprehend the omnipresence of Google; in a very short time Google has turned what’s going on behind the search box into a multinational corporation with a largely ad-based business model that is eclipsing television. With its arbitration over search rankings and massive data gathering techniques that facilitate activities like the targeted ads we enjoy, Google has become more of a de facto Internet gatekeeper than the service providers themselves. This was probably one of the most important steps to getting us where we are now.
    
Google also thought that exploding demand for increasingly mobile wireless broadband might be possible by monetizing it in a way other than targeted ads, which is where the fear that this could start affecting Google’s stance on “net neutrality,” the principal behind how we’ve known the Internet since AOL, started manifesting. Net neutrality, of course, is the attitude about overall Internet management asserting that Internet carriers and providers, like Comcast or AT&T, cannot discriminate or otherwise alter their services towards any specific content or types of traffic for any reason. It’s a rule that’s been backed by the Federal Communications Commission, Washington and Google, effectively keeping the telecom’s mitts off the Internet, leaving them solely as providers, and content creators solely responsible for their content.
    
When Google started playing provider with Verizon it advocated “limited neutrality,” a laughably transparent effort to stay consistent with the rhetoric people are comfortable with while conveniently claiming that wireless Internet providers should be able to do things like charge content creators, which could be any site on the web not directly affiliated with Google, for extra speed. Or establish a two-lane road of sorts, the faster one costing extra. To hear Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, talk about it: “The issues of wireless versus wireline gets very messy ... and that’s really an FCC issue, not a Google issue.” Oh, the two kinds of Internet are just so confusing.
    
Thankfully this all amounted to companies with share-holders acting in their own self-interest merely brainstorming about possibilities — so far Google and the service providers have wisely left well enough alone.
   
 And Google isn’t the bad guy anymore. The ideals of net neutrality that we’ve enjoyed for over 15 years were never really threatened by oligopoly, because those companies had the wisdom to not alter the climate that was responsible for their prosperity. Now those ideas have been swiftly blitzkrieged into fantasy by the reckless and irresponsible interpretation of laws paid for by a foreign industry that need serious reassessment. Hollywood and television should embrace the Internet with open arms if they want to survive. Take a Steam-like client for TV and movies comes to mind: Keep post-theater and TV releases assessable and cheap on an easy-to-use platform with fun and desirable services and the most justified pirates among us will stop. I’ve seen this happen over and over again with Valve’s Steam service: They are doing it right. But these old entertainment industries are cohesively, uncreatively and inefficiently putting their own interests over the rest of ours in a last ditch attempt to reclaim a market they feel entitled to, and they should be punished for it. Like the Internet? Go to opensecrets.org and vote for politicians getting funded by the Internet, not television.


— Wiley Robinson is a junior in ecology and evolutionary biology. He can be reached at rrobin23@utk.edu.