John Thorne, a senior VP for Verizon attempted to muddy the waters with rhetoric right before the Senate Commerce Committee discusses net neutrality today. He started off using Google, a well-known big name on the Internet, as an example of someone who would get a free ride at the expense of the phone companies. The idea being that the phone companies put up these high speed networks for Internet access and then Internet companies can actually use them.

This seems to be yet another way that the big telecoms are trying to squeeze people for money, essentially charging money to content providers any time someone passes content along their network.  While on the outside, it may seem cut and dry to some — they own the network, they should be allowed to charge for what goes across it — it’s far from that simple.

The Internet’s major design was to allow an end user to reach content regardless of how it got there, with no control from either the end user or the content provider on how that data travels. Google pays a hefty amount of money to its Internet service provider to allow it to serve data, and the users pay money to their Internet service providers to be allowed to get to the Internet, whether they download something from Google or not. As neither of them have control over which networks they travel along in order to talk to one another, it’s bordering on monopolistic to allow a network in between to charge money for data that goes across. There’s no choice to the consumer and no choice to the content provider.

What would end up happening is that content providers would no longer be able to afford serving content to some people, and those people would be blocked — a scenario that the big telecoms are hoping for, as it would allow them to create their own Google-like services that more people would use. Instead of having to create a better service in order to attract customers, they could just rely on pricing their competition out of business — a situation that is no good for either consumers or content-providers. It only ends up in favour of the big telecoms.

The Senate Commerce Committee is mulling over the idea of writing laws that ensure that such a situation could not occur. If they don’t, it will give carte blanche to the big network providers to double-charge anyone they’d like.  Imagine paying for Internet access from Verizon and then discovering that you can’t access your favourite site because that site has to pay extra if you do, so they’ve cut you off.  That site is paying extra money to their own Internet provider already each time you access their content, but they’ll have to pay even more as their data flows from one network to another, with each network provider trying to add a little toll onto each one.

It’s akin to living in a world with nothing but toll roads, but instead of the roads’ owners charging you to drive, they charge whomever you’re going to see. It doesn’t matter who you are, no one is going to want you to visit. Not unless you pay them more than they’re having to pay the owners of all the little toll roads.

It’s a complete breakdown of  the way the Internet works, and the visions Thorne is trying to put into the Senators’ heads, saying that Google will be able to freely ride into people’s homes, is just another way of trying to confuse the issue. Google doesn’t ride free. It has to pay just like everyone else does, but it has to pay business rates for allowing billions of people to hit its servers. I assure you that’s more money per week than most of us make in a year.  To imply that they are getting to do anything they want for free is duplicitous at best, and close to fraudulent.

Let’s hope the Senators on the Commerce Committee aren’t as easily swayed by rhetoric as the appointees they confirmed to the FCC.