14 DAY TRIAL // Google was present at the World Mobile Congress, the wireless industry's biggest get-together, and CEO Eric Schmidt addressed the reticent crowd of mobile specialists for the first time. The CEO was there to calm some of the worries of the mobile industry and extend an olive branch to a sector feeling increasingly threatened by Google. His main point was that Google has no intentions of competing with operators and it would much rather prefer to partner with them to offer the consumers what they want.
He was met with skepticism though and the crowd had quite a few concerns, despite the CEO’s reassurances. One of the main issues was the whole 'net neutrality' debate, which is hotly disputed in the US at the moment. While the debate is not currently an issue in Europe, the implications of the US decision are sure to have global repercussions. The main fear among wireless and network operators is that Google is trying to turn them into 'dumb pipes,' simple bandwidth providers to the benefit of content creators and web service providers like Google.
"I feel very, very strongly that we depend on successful businesses for the operators globally and I disagree that we are trying to turn the operators into dumb pipes," Eric Schmidt responded to one particularly disgruntled attendee, according to the Guardian. "We need advanced sophisticated networks, we are not going to be investing in broad scale infrastructure, we are going to have the operators do it."
He went on to say that Google sympathizes with the operators' problems and understands that wireless bandwidth is limited. He also agrees that these companies need to recover their investment in infrastructure and that this can very well mean special deals with content providers. Google doesn't have a problem with that, but what it disagrees with is one content provider being favored over another by the operators, effectively dictating a market they have no direct involvement with.
"Google defines net neutrality in the following way: if you have a content category like video we want to make sure that the operator does not favour one video [provider] over another because that would then allow the operator to pick winners in the category," Schmidt said.
However, it's unlikely that people in the industry were put too much at ease by Google's speech. While the company reassured the audience that it has no plans to start competing directly with operators either by providing their own internet services or even with Google Voice, the company is just too big to ignore. It's very likely that even one year ago, Google had no plans to enter the phone market yet it is now offering its own branded smarphone, the Nexus One. Its latest plan to start offering gigabit internet connections to up to 500,000 Americans is not a good sign either, even though, again, Google says this is only a test designed to help encourage higher-speed networks.