Ars Technica has a good editorial up on Network Neutrality. It brings up the position of Holman Jenkins at the Wall Street Journal, which argues that online companies are free riding off telecom companies, while making the Internet appear ‘free’. The Huffington Post has criticized this and other WSJ articles on Net Neutrality, raising questions about the paper’s bias/position on the issue. However, I’d like to go further than the WSJ‘s connection to Cable One. Given that the WSJ is owned by News Corp., plus the GOP’s stance against Obama appointee FCC Julius Genachowski’s position on net neutrality, should it be any surprise of the bias?

Rightfully so, Ars Technica argues that that it’s more complicated than that, given how much Google, et. al. spends on servers and how much money ISPs are making. In the end, a lot of money is being made regardless of where the company is in the ‘network’. So in many ways, its really about the cash-flow not the data.

Here, I’d like to toss in my perspective. I am by no means someone who believes in the purity of the web. I am under no delusion that it is completely democratic given issues of access and the massive corporations that control the flow of information. Why?

1. Most of us pay a monopolistic telecom company to access the internet.
2. Google controls 80% of the market share in online searches. Despite the initial success of Microsoft’s Bing, it has yet to put up real resistance against Google.

In other words, the ‘Web’ is not free either in price or in terms of the flow of information. However, that doesn’t mean that when you do have access, you don’t have the opportunity to find sites from a wide array of sources. This has to do with the understanding, by companies like Google, that consumer behavior (or the data gathered from it) is far more valuable than corporate manufactured/manipulated behaviors (this is the crisis that Microsoft is facing).

So the debate over net neutrality isn’t about freedom, as much as its about the type of exploitation consumers want from corporations.

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