Does Google’s right hand know what its left hand is doing? That’s the obvious question given this article from Reuters:

New Internet TV services such as Joost and YouTube may bring the global network to its knees, Internet companies said on Wednesday, adding they are already investing heavily just to keep data flowing.

Google, which acquired online video sharing site YouTube last year, said the Internet was not designed for TV.

It even issued a warning to companies that think they can start distributing mainstream TV shows and movies on a global scale at broadcast quality over the public Internet.

“The Web infrastructure, and even Google’s (infrastructure) doesn’t scale. It’s not going to offer the quality of service that consumers expect,” Vincent Dureau, Google’s head of TV technology, said at the Cable Europe Congress.

The phoniness is so obvious, it’s eye-rolling! Google paid the princely sum of $1.65 billion to acquire YouTube precisely to increase video traffic online. Now the company is objecting to Internet-based television because it… well, increases video traffic online.

Everyone knows that consumers’ TV habits are changing. In January 2006, not a single major network streamed its programming. Today, they all do. Add in YouTube and iPod downloads and you see why commentators have been using the phrases “TV viewers” and “paradigm shift” in the same sentence a lot.

Google’s obviously staking its claim to consumers’ eyeballs by planting scary stories designed more for public consumption than serious analysis. Honestly, you can’t get more transparently self-serving than this.

Google’s acquisition of YouTube is huge news in both the financial and technological worlds — it’s been several years since anybody paid ten figures for a website that didn’t make any money — and it will have an effect in the net neutrality fight as well. Writing for the Financial Times this week, economics professor Thomas Hazlett points out that Google has become

…the leading champion of the hottest topic in technology policy over the past year, asserting that if web innovation such as theirs was to be retained, new laws were warranted. … “Network neutrality” rules were needed, Google argued, because the architecture of the internet demanded it. That structure relies on traffic flowing freely over a network that is “open, end to end”.

Yet the capitalist engine that powers the internet demands something completely different, as Google’s acquisition of YouTube makes clear. That strategy is to integrate Google’s search and advertising sales with YouTube’s users, which could potentially impede access to one of the hottest technologies by other service providers. Jeremy Schoemaker, a net economy expert, sees the deal as superb for Google, “merging to form the biggest video network” and winning a “land-grab for publisher space”. Perhaps even better, it boxes out a rival: “This move is a total ‘in your face’ to Microsoft,” which had made YouTube an offer for an advertising agreement.

So does Google fancy itself an aloof public benefactor or a hard-charging business? It seems to fancy itself as both, but only Google executives and their mothers are likely to believe the two priorities can coexist. It won’t be long before Google’s obligation to their shareholders interferes with their lofty public statements, especially once they start integrating YouTube with their search and advertising features. Precursor Group founder Scott Cleland gets down to details:

Will the Google “searchopolist” with 50% share of the search market pledge to not “block, degrade, or impair video or other content of consumers or competitors? Will they agree to not discriminate against any of “the people’s” youtube videos by giving them a higher/lower search ranking than others based on how much they pay for the search keyword or advertising? Will they keep youtube “democratic” where everyone’s video is treated exactly equally with everyone else’s video?

We’ve been trying to think of a good example of public hypocrisy to illustrate this. It’s not quite fair to compare the company to a single person caught with their hand in the cookie jar, and we wouldn’t go so far as to compare it to Enron. So, dear readers, think of it a little like the fight between Isaiah Washington and Patrick Dempsey from Grey’s Anatomy. Most of the time they’re Burke and McDreamy, saving lives, and entertaining key demographics every Thursday night (and Friday repeats).

In the same way, Google makes a good show of being more than a normal company — just about everyone with a modem has heard their motto “don’t be evil” at least once. But just as Burke and McDreamy are actually real people who get into fights and cause trouble on the set, Google is a self-interested company like any other and therefore will keep it’s eye on the bottom line.

And hey, there’s nothing wrong with that — they’re incorporated as a for-profit enterprise, not a non-profit. But if you try to pretend you’re one thing while you’re actually something else, well, don’t be surprised when everybody notices — and you end up in all the wrong gossip columns.

Note to readers: The Hands Off team has one member who is completely obsessed with Grey’s Anatomy. You may notice more references to the show in our posts, with this being its second mention. Stay tuned!

After the season premiere of Grey’s Anatomy, it seems that Meredith and McDreamy might be getting back together. But, as blogged by Shonda Rhimes (the show’s writer and creator), nothing is as easy on that show as it seems: “Just remember that nothing is ever wrapped up easily on this show.”

So, what if Addison were to return to New York, but responds to an urgent call from Seattle Grace to consult on a complicated surgery that just happens to be her specialty? But there’s a terrible blizzard in New York and she can’t fly to Seattle, so she assists via Internet? Great - thanks for pitching in, Addison! Or not. Consider, in a world with government-regulated Internet traffic, when the patient on the table is crashing and Addison needs to tell Bailey what to clamp or suture, the (Internet) tubes get clogged — with email. Flatline. Intubate. (Hands Off doesn’t actually know many medical terms.this is just for color.)

This scenario occurs to us not just because we’re excited about the return of Grey’s Anatomy to ABC’s primetime schedule, but because of a recent op-ed in the Martinsburg Journal that brought up one of the more serious, albeit underexplored, reasons to oppose new net neutrality laws: The needs of telemedicine. In the op-ed, health care writer Vanessa McLaughlin explains:

“Net neutrality advocates say every bit of Internet traffic should be treated alike. But that makes as much sense as an emergency room that eliminates triage and treats a broken nose with the same urgency as a heart attack. In an ER, some cases are more critical. On the Internet, some bits of data are more important. Medical data needs to get where it’s going fast and safe. If an e-mail or music video is delayed by a traffic jam on the network, the damage is minimal. If a medical transmission is disrupted, someone could die.”

That would surely make for an interesting episode of Grey’s Anatomy, but it’s not something we would ever want anyone to deal with. And it’s just one more reason to oppose far-reaching new Internet regulations.