• “We believe that the new [Clearwire] network will provide wireless consumers with real choices for the software applications, content and handsets that they desire. Such freedom will mirror the openness principles underlying the Internet….” - Google public policy blog on its $500 million Clearwire WiMax investment, May 7, 2008
• “Exclusive web and local search provider” - Google’s investor relations statement [pdf] on what it’s getting for its $500 million (Slide #9)

There’s a pretty big temptation to crow about Google’s hypocrisy. But as Don Corleone said in The Godfather, “That would be wrong.”

Is Google backtracking on its support for net neutrality? Sure. But that was inevitable and few took the company’s Messianic pronouncements in favor of Net neutrality seriously anyway.

The real issue is that the Sprint-Google-Intel Clearwire announcement shows once again that broadband deployment is frighteningly expensive, whether wired or wireless. Even with all the benefits of modern technology, there is simply no easy way to bring high-speed service nationwide – especially to rural and underserved Americans.

Will WiMax be a nationwide silver bullet? Probably not. Will it be a plausible option for some consumers? More likely.

But that’s why the federal government is right to retain the traditional evenhanded approach to the Internet that it’s had since the 1990s and not try to regulate new technologies, especially if the financing for these systems holds the promise of lower-cost options for consumers.

As the Chinese adage goes, Let a hundred flowers bloom. Consumers will then choose the winners and this whole neutrality issue will crumble from its own irrelevance.

Now this is a breath of fresh air from America’s heartland:

“Though attempts are being made to position net neutrality as pro-consumer, in reality it is very anti-consumer. With net neutrality, Web-based companies would avoid compensating network owners for use of their facilities, leaving consumers and network owners to pay those costs. This would force the majority of consumers to pay for the high costs driven by a minority of Internet users….”

The author is Dan Hesse, CEO of Kansas-based Embarq, who penned this great column on the absurdity of net neutrality for the current issue of Chief Executive. As Hesse notes, in 2007 alone, communications companies are investing $70 billion to upgrade the country’s network infrastructure. With America already behind more than a dozen other nations in broadband access, such investment is indispensable and, as Hesse rightly observes, this investment would not continue if Congress enacts net neutrality pricing regulations.

Less than 10 years ago, wired broadband costs ran as high as $60 a month and wireless broadband was a myth. Today, inflation-adjusted prices have plunged 50 percent or more depending on location, while choices have expanded and wireless has become an instant mass-market phenom. Given this, Hesse’s warnings about the cost to consumers of net neutrality’s ultimate cost seem not only correct but downright commonsensical.

Incidentally, on this lovely fall afternoon, we’ll throw another bouquet to the company: that green “origami jet” logo is really cool.

“This [60-day] deadline is appropriate in light of the Commission’s failure, after eight years, to develop lawful unbundling rules, and its apparent unwillingness to adhere to prior judicial rulings.” – Final sentence in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia’s 2004 opinion overturning FCC rules on telephone competition

The DC Court of Appeals’ verbal guillotine on federal efforts to create “wholesale” vs. “retail” phone service competition should be a timely reminder to anyone entranced by Google’s siren song urging same kind of federal rules for wireless broadband.

Like a bad Hollywood sequel, Google seems hellbent on pushing Congress and the FCC into making the same mistakes that delayed investment and caused thousands of lost jobs in the phone industry over the past decade.

Let’s go back to those thrilling days of yesteryear: Entire forests were sacrificed to produce the paper necessary for all the NPRMs, court and regulatory filings, amicus briefs, FCC orders, lawsuits, stays, more FCC orders, more lawsuits, and more stays – all in an eight-year adventure in the pointlessness of federally managed “retail” competition. As Adam Thierer at PFF notes, the three FCC attempts at creating regulated wholesale vs. retail “competition” alone totaled 1,575 pages and included 6,770 footnotes. Incidentally, let’s remember that in 2004, the ink was barely dry on a 576-page FCC “competition” plan – its third try! – when the DC Appeals Court struck it down.

As usual, Holman Jenkins has pegged this issue perfectly, though candidly we’re not sure if he’s trying to invoke an image from the old “Kung Fu” TV series or from the climax of “Return of the Jedi”. One thing is certain: With our economy dependent on broadband investment, Google’s plan for new wireless regulation is a loser for everyone except, not surprisingly, Google.

How bad is that Skype/eBay “wireless net neutrality” petition to the FCC we’ve been talking about the last few days? Tech Liberation Front (a great blog you should be reading, if you aren’t already) gives good gist:

The Skype-Wu proposal would foreclose such marketplace experimentation by essentially converting cellular networks into a sort of quasi-commons and forcing private network operators to provide network access or services on someone else’s terms.

What does that mean in the big picture? TLF has one idea:

In my opinion, when you get right down to it, this proposal is a declaration of surrender. That is, Skype and Prof. Wu almost seem to be saying that while it’s nice we’ve seen innovation at the core of the wireless sector over the past two decades, we now need to get on with the important business of establishing rules to ensure the maximum amount of output or innovation at the edge of networks while largely ignoring what happens at the core, or even prohibiting certain things from happening at the core. In other words, to maximize the freedom to innovate at the edge of networks, we must now restrict the freedom to innovate at the core in some ways.

And of course, the same is true with “wired net neutrality.” The regulationist side likes to claim they are protecting innovation, but what the companies pushing hardest — Google, eBay and Amazon — really want to do is freeze the market where it is now, with each at the top of their own game.

Regulation rarely is good for any kind of competition, let alone prohibitionist regulation like the Dorgan-Snowe bill under consideration in the Senate now. Online and on the airwaves, it still makes the most sense to hold off and deal with problems if they ever actually materialize.

Have proponents of “net neutrality” gone too far? We’ve said so for awhile now, but even some websites sympathetic to Internet regulation are blanching at the latest bad idea, called “wireless net neutrality,” the latest idea from the theorist behind the original movement, Tim Wu. For instance, the reliably pro-NN, anti-telecom industry blog TechDirt has reluctantly published an article titled “Call For ‘Wireless Net Neutrality’ Just A Little Off-Base.” Here’s the short version:

Net neutrality is a loaded term that’s almost guaranteed to instantly raise people’s blood pressure. But it’s really a pretty poor term to use here. Wu raises some good points, but much of his paper is undermined by some misunderstandings of the market, and a failure to realize that the highly competitive mobile market is already moving toward openness, so any neutrality regulations would be premature and unnecessary.

The contributor doesn’t say what he thinks about plain old, wired net neutrality, but his arguments against the wireless form sound strikingly like, well, like that of a net neutrality skeptic:

Wu’s calls for neutrality regulations are premature and unnecessary. … The market is competitive, and any net neutrality or device attachment regulations simply aren’t necessary at this point.

We’ll certainly give them a hand for that.

As Jay Leno would say, “You can’t write ‘em any better than this!”

According to Monday’s San Francisco Chronicle, Google is upset with the city government there for not moving fast enough in deploying wireless Net access. The deployment date has slid to 2007 and the city, at least according to Google, is making new and unreasonable demands.

“Every meeting is like the first,” according to the Google official in charge.

This is so ironic it’s almost beyond belief!

Could this be the same Google that’s lobbying for the Feds to start a massive new regulation of VPNs and the Internet? If that ever happens, our online experience will be answerable to a multi-headed Hydra of unelected regulators and judges that makes the San Francisco team look like a vaudeville act.

Google’s actions have the unmistakable markings of a company so entranced with its own virtue that it just assumes government regulators will bow down before it. (Remind anyone of…Martha Stewart maybe? …Although she did make blintzes on the Today Show this morning that looked delicious).

The problem is that making the Internet subject to the vagaries of lawmakers looking to protect a favored company means parochial concerns can quickly trump the greater good. As a former President might have put it, if Google thinks that San Francisco regulators are troublesome, “You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet!”

On the subject of “net neutrality,” we agree wholeheartedly with the anonymous purc2523, a “Smack-Fu Master in training” at the message board Ars Technica. Many contributors to that site have regrettably closed their mind on the issue and are conflating support for a “free” Internet with suffocating new laws that will actually shackle some Internet companies. And midway into one debate, purc2523 offers just the kind of scenario the Senate should be thinking about when they reconvene:

A small WISP [wireless Internet service provider] in a rural community wants to begin to offer VOIP to his/her customers, but occassionally his access points are full. The WISP elects to use QoS to ensure a quality connection for his customers using third party voip providers like Vonage, At&t, etc. Everything sent on the SIP ports gets a higher priority. This doesn’t seem like a bad thing for any customer, at least to me.

Net neutrality legislation would make this impossible, and customers just suffered. The only option for the Wisp is to order more access points and possibly increase his prices to all customers to offer better Voip. I’m not so sure that the customer wins out on this, and the small Wisp definitely just lost.

It’s unintended consequences like these that the net regulation crowd has completely ignored. We’ve heard them argue that net neutrality is important to small business, but as purc2532 makes clear, the reverse is actually true: The kind of strict regulations they would have would make it illegal for small ISPs to use technologies that allow them to compete. But Google won’t talk about that.