Completely changing your stated principles on the importance of net neutrality and openness in the wireless sphere, because it suites your financial situation, is not "compromise" it's hypocrisy.
In the U.S. companies can't have principles that don't suit their financial situation. If they try to, the board is exposed to shareholder class-action lawsuits.
That's not entirely true. Red Hat has stuck to the Open Source and Free Software movement since its founding, and I don't think it has strayed from that or compromised, even when Microsoft offered a "patent deal" then waged a proxy IP war via the SCO lawsuit.
They've been granted some defensive patents, but publicly pledged not to use them except to defend themselves and Open Source software.
They're on track to make their fist billion in revenue at the same point as Microsoft did in its existence.
They could've gone into a similar (or probably more lucrative) deal as Novell did when Microsoft gave them $350 Million dollar "patent cooperation" and Suse license over a few years.
Red Hat turned it down outright. Think of how much that would've benefitted Red Hat. That was well more than half of their revenue at the time. They stuck to their principles at the expense of that type of massive profit. It paid off.
Exactly, the glaring problem here isn't that Google or Verizon make a deal that is beneficial to their shareholders. The problem is the complete ineptitude of the government to design regulatory law.
In time perhaps we will view the failings of the FCC as the failure of MMS, I hope not.
I was under the impression that Google put a special clause in their charter(?) that gave them special permission to make decisions that appear to go against their bottom line.
I'm not aware of any such clause, are you thinking of "don't be evil"? What you may be thinking of is some of the weird voting rights arrangements:
"In an unusual provision for a technology company, Google will create two classes of shares with different voting rights, a move that aims to guarantee that founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page will maintain decision-making authority"
A clause like that doesn't affect the type of lawsuits I am talking about.
I think you're right; I can't seem to find anything that gives them special non-profit-seeking privilege. The only thing related is the "Don't be Evil" statement in their Owners Manual for Shareholders that states:
"Don't be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served-as shareholders and in all other ways-by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company."
I guess the exceptionally weak phrase "even if we forgo some short term gains" included in a non-legal document isn't really much protection.
The attitude in the agreement towards wireless is that it's too competitive to regulate right now, basically anything could still happen that isn't a "complete change" it's just a wait and see compromise.