The Washington Post interviewed Google CEO Eric Schmidt:
Google chief executive Eric Schmidt favors net neutrality, but only to a point: While the tech player wants to make sure that telecommunications giants don’t steer Internet traffic in a way that would favor some devices or services over others, he also believes that it would be a terrible idea for the government to involve itself as a regulator of the broader Internet.
“It is possible for the government to screw the Internet up, big-time,” he said. Google is strong enough as a company to weather any possible outcome on the issue, he said. But what he worries about “is the next start-up.”
It is rather obvious that anyone wants competition or regulation that prevents complementors from extracting monopoly profits, or just limit their complementors’ strategic levers. Or, from another perspective, the openness of the Internet is good both for business and public welfare.
The openness of the Internet is about more than traffic management in the access network, and Google’s Data Liberation Front seems to be a good thing. Let’s hope that the recent TechCrunch story on Orkut is an one time incident.
