The group that had gathered in front of Google headquarters in Mountain View, California was relatively small. Only around 100 protesters had turned out to lend offline expression to their anger at the corporation’s latest plan.

The online community, however, reacted with far more alarm. Bloggers in the United States, Europe and Asia warned of a threat to Internet freedom, while consumer protection agencies said they feared interference with data traffic that could have unforeseeable consequences for media diversity. Germany’s consumer protection minister, Ilse Aigner, declared that she had “no sympathy” for companies “distorting competition at the expense of the consumer.”

The cause of all this commotion was seemingly minor, a joint statement issued by Google and telecommunications giant Verizon that outlined in seven brief bullet points the two companies’ proposal for a future regulatory framework for the Internet.

Most of the suggestions were hardly spectacular, but one in particular packed a significant punch: The two corporations called for governments to leave it up to the market to determine whether telecommunications companies should be allowed to charge an additional fee for certain data-intensive services — especially if customers want speedy access. Examples could include medical services, online games or power grid management.

No Discrimination

Until now, the Internet has remained largely neutral, with no one discriminated against and no one given preferential treatment. Blog posts are transmitted just as quickly as Google’s data. But the flood of information continues to swell. American technology corporation Cisco predicts that annual data volumes will quadruple by 2014 to around 767 exabytes (one exabyte is equivalent to 1 billion gigabytes) — a capacity equivalent to 12 billion DVDs per month.

In other words, many billions of euros will need to go into upgrading the Internet over the next months and years. Telecommunications companies fear this will hardly be possible if they continue to play by the conventional rules. They have been flirting for some time with the idea of a two-tier Internet, in which users could pay to have their data transmitted more quickly. Google’s latest advance suits these companies quite well.

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