[grandalf]

This is the key point. Users don't care.

Back in the days of Alta Vista, Google offered better search. Today, search is a solved problem and easy for many companies to clone. I'd estimate that 80% of internet users would fail to distinguish between the search quality of Google search and a pagerank-based index of the top 20 websites (which could be hosted on a laptop).

This is why Google attempted to innovate via legislation by trying to get net neutrality passed to prevent its competitors from taking market share via deals that shared profits with ISPs.

Google has failed to stop it, so it must now engage in its own dealmaking to block its competitors from "taking" search traffic (and ad revenue) via non-neutrality ISP deals.

The biggest threat to Google would be a deal between Apple or Microsoft and Comcast or Verizon.

Google's deal with Verizon is an attempt to scuttle any such deal. I'm surprised Verizon found a win in it, but who knows. We will soon see what sort of QoS Verizon gives FaceTime on iPhone 4.

[aristus]

That's a very interesting take. I hadn't considered Google being worried about getting commoditized out of the market. That's a very strong motivation. Another is that if speed is a do-or-die feature, then they want to be able to control all of the factors which will make Google faster or slower. They can compete on tech, and so of course they want to compete on that footing.

Whether you think of them as evil or not, corporations rarely act out of one motivation. There are usually many many desires that get advanced or thwarted in the course of a particular act.

A company may buy a startup out of a desire for the tech or team, to work out the bugs its M&A pipeline on a relatively unimportant acquisition, to encourage other startups to focus on the acquirer's platform, to deny a competitor use of the tech or team, and to give a department within the parent a unsubtle hint that they are not doing their jobs. All at once.

[chopsueyar]

It isn't about search, it is about pay-per-click ads.

Could Apple, Microsoft, Comcast, or Verizon create an advertising platform as functional as Google Adwords?

That is where the money comes from. It is in Verizon's best interest to replace all Adwords advertisements with content from it's own ad network, and same with Comcast.

Cable television replaces nationally broadcasted commercials with local versions. Why couldn't last-mile ISPs do this as well?

Also, this is so US-centric. Any other country that adopts a net neutrality policy will have an advantage over the United States, not a disadvantage.

[grandalf]

Well, search is most of Google's pay per click ad revenue (and probably the ideal use case for pay per click advertising).

I agree with your take on the strategy for last mile ISPs.

But I don't see how it amounts to much of an advantage or disadvantage.

[rue]

> This is the key point. Users don't care.

That is no point at all. Users are not familiar enough with the problem space to be able to care (or not).

[grandalf]

Hence it's not a problem for them. Problems are what create business opportunities. In the Alta Vista days, I had a search problem (search sucked) but today I do not. If Google went away I would still not have a search problem.

Obviously, if something arcane like QoS became a problem for users, then an ISP would have a more difficult cost/benefit decision to make about how neutral it wished to be.