EconTech

And I’m pretty sure he gets it all wrong:

Google: As Open and Neutral as It Wants to Be

I hope to return to blogging more regularly now that the college-hunting process is over for my high-school senior son—our family’s first time through what is an amazingly-daunting (and time-consuming) process—and I still have a backlog of other work to clear out, but I can’t resist jumping in to discuss one aspect of the new WiMAX deal announced yesterday between Sprint and Clearwire. As you may know, for awhile, WiMAX has been the next great wireless broadband technology. I say for awhile as it isn’t clear that it is going to ever succeed, but yesterday’s deal is another attempt to take a serious run at it.

That technology isn’t my focus. As part of the deal, Google is reported to be investing $500 million. Google has emerged as serious player in broadband, playing an important role in the last spectrum auction. Google clearly wants to see more broadband capacity and in a post yesterday on the deal, Google emphasized its desire to see an open Internet.

But only so open it seems. As reported in the WSJ yesterday and as is clear from the 9-page press release on the deal, Google’s investment buys it a preferred status on the network. To quote the press release: “Google will partner with the new Clearwire in the development of Internet services, advertising services and applications for mobile WiMAX devices. In addition, Google will be the search provider and a preferred provider of other applications for the new Clearwire’s retail product.” Four bullet points later, we are told that: “Sprint and Google have also entered into an agreement related to Sprint’s mobile services, whereby Google will become the default provider of web and local search services, both of which will be enabled with location information, for Sprint. Sprint will also preload several Google services - including Google Maps for mobile, Gmail and YouTube - on select mobile phones and provide easier access to other Google services.”

I am not sure what all of that means exactly. “The” search provider sounds like their will only be one search provider and a “preferred” provider makes it sounds as if other providers will be relegated to inferior positions. We also know, see Thaler & Sunstein in Nudge, that default settings are very powerful in determining behavior even if the setting can be changed at low cost.

Google has a public position on net neutrality that contemplates prioritizing based on the general type of application but not based on the ownership of the application. I shouldn’t over-read two paragraphs in a press release, but it isn’t clear to me that the positions that Google have bought with Clearwire and Sprint are consistent with its prior position on openness and net neutrality.

I see little reason to believe that Google is going against net neutrality here. The most damaging sentence is:

Google will be the search provider and a preferred provider of other applications for the new Clearwire’s retail product.

This merely says that the applications Clearwhile will be putting on their phones are Google by default in the install. As long as there is not application and option lock-in, there is nothing unopen about this. The “the search provider” indicates there MAY be some option lock-in, but it is very loose evidence.

Everything else refers to defaults, and you will find defaults all over the place in computer software. They do not make things less open. The problem is when attempting to choose another default becomes extremely difficult to impossible. However, the simple use of the word default along with preferred provider, etc. indicate that that will not be the situation. It seems like a $500 million investment ought to buy you something these days, and some default preferences in several applications is just as good of a way as any. Indeed, I suspect Sprint and Clearwire get the better end of the deal as they probably would’ve used quite a bit of Google for any internet facing applications due to its sheer popularity.

Of course, I haven’t mentioned that none of this really falls into the realm of network neutrality. If you can buy a phone and use it on their network, and that phone makes use of non-Google services that get treated the same as the Google’s services in terms of bandwidth provided, latency, and such, you still have a neutral, open network. That a deal has been struck that makes Google the default on phones provided by the network has little to do with the network’s openness itself. The question remains whether unlocked phones can be used on the network, and that openness, and how those phones would be treated by the network, are where issues of neutrality and open access come in. The use of 3rd party applications on the supplied phone, and their treatment on the network, would also fall under this rubric. But, since these are all contested issues with the current network, with 3rd party applications mostly getting the shaft, if such conditions held into the future, it would be hard to blame Google for not changing them.

default settings are very powerful in determining behavior even if the setting can be changed at low cost.

Indeed, but then, can you name a more sane default than Google for search?