What boggles my mind is that you and everyone else here are getting your collective pants in a twist over an unconfirmed report from anonymous sources about something that frankly sounds rather unlikely considering Google's history of public statements and financial commitments on the subject. Surely there will be enough time for that after you actually know what Google and Verizon are trying to do, if anything.

Your hunch was right. Google's just tweeted ( http://twitter.com/googlepubpolicy ) that:

"@NYTimes is wrong. We've not had any convos with VZN about paying for carriage of our traffic. We remain committed to an open internet."

However they did meet with Verizon behind "closed doors" to agree on a common definition of what "net neutrality" is. Yes, it is not as infamatory as "let's implement something together and screw everyone else".

> We remain committed to an open internet.

Of course they do. No company we'll say - "we want to control the internet and everyone's access to it". They'll say somethig like "we want to expand more options for consumers", "we are helping deliver better content", and of course "we want an open internet". They are the ones being accusses of working out a deal behind consumers' back so their PR department will say something nice to soften the blow.

The only way to figure it out is to wait and see what happens. You'll have to forgive me if I don't take Google's PR department's word for it.

  >> They seem to be the first US company to happily surrender to the
  >> telecoms.
  > Google exists to make money. If surrendering to the telecoms makes
  > money then that's what they'll do.

That's a rather naive view of a complex question. Google has to balance short-, medium-, and long-term gains. If my only goal is to 'make money,' then I could make a ton of money if someone paid me $1-million to inject myself with the Ebola virus, but that's probably a fairly short-sighted decision...

> That's a rather naive view of a complex question.

Absolutely correct. I thought someone would call me out on that so let me explain in more details:

It is still about making money. It is about the expected ability to keep making money in the future. I was talking about maximizing the global future returns function (you can think of it as the stock value). This function is some composition of the 3 functions you broke it down to.

That still doesn't change the goal.

However,as you argue, there is a set of decisions that when taken, might lead to maximizing short term profit at the expense of long term profit.

Google traditionally tried to maximize the long-term, by positioning itself on the positive side of the moral spectrum -- it is their well-known "do no evil" mission statement. This of course could just be pure PR. Or, if not, it could have resulted in taking some short term losses (not getting involved with repressive governments around the world, for example) while increasing long term gains (attracting the right kind of geeks who actually care about morals, human rights, freedoms, etc.).

[As a quick side node on such moral mission statements, one can argue that the losses taken as a result of defending a moral stance, might be a good measure of how serious and sincere that moral stance really is. I am not passing any judgement on Google one way or the other here, just pointing out a general guideline].

The bigger the company got, the more likely that short-term gains will be emphasized. The company has stopped being identified with the personae of the original founders. Consequently it's moral properties have been slowly pushed aside and it became just another faceless multi-billion dollar behemoth.

Don't get me wrong, I like Google. It is making me money. I bought stock in it. But, I never bought into its "morality" message. I just assumed it was a PR trick to attract the right talent. It worked great, you have to give it to them. Eventually they'll have to rely on PR again, when that bubble bursts to minimize the damage to it "good" public image. Perhaps, now is such a time...

That's a bad analogy. Nobody would pay you to do that.

pharma corps without regulation? I might need to stop watching cyberpunk movies.

Why would they bother? No money in ebola - rare, highly fatal, and seen only in the poorest places on earth.

Bio-weapons division?

Hardly any money in that, assuming it's even legal, and don't governments (quite sensibly) keep all that in-house anyway?

How so? The point was to present an example of taking short-term gains that will have an effect on long-term gains. If Google blindly pursues only short-term gains, they risk weakening their medium- and/or long-term prospects.

Because your short long term loss doesn't benefit anybody. The long term gain in google's case would be Verizon, but in your example, it's some evil corporation who just wants you to die.

That's unrealistic.

whoooooooosh

"If surrendering to the telecoms makes money then that's what they'll do."

Surrendering to the telecoms leading to Google making more money seems very unlikely. Which is one reason to question the veracity of this report.

It is a good company because it solved a problem, related to us, and held itself to a high standard and we rightly attributed it good qualities because in its inception and even to today it has been a good force onto the world.

The moment Google starts to focus on the money at the expense of other more noble principles, such as Don't Be Evil, the company will die a slow at first and then immediate death.

Google was disruptive in its inception. It had and still has much support because it stood up to Microsoft. But now that it has paved the way and there is little difference between Google search and Yahoo or MSN, what keeps most searchers, especially in the tech community with google is its image.

The moment they start doing some evil, such image is dead, and people will be on a look out for some other search provider.

I hope that is the case and not just us under-estimating its PR department's ability to manipulate us.