Shameful Human(s) of the Week: Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page

This week’s Shameful Humans are Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, the founders of internet hyper-power Google. American telecom companies would love to decide what is, and is not, transmitted through the internet to their customers. Being allowed to do so would let them do everything from preventing bandwidth heavy P2P services from functioning, to blocking sites which carry anti-corporate sentiments. Until now, Google was the great holdout, trying to convince the FCC to keep the net neutral. Now, they’ve surrendered.

Google shattered their informal corporate slogan “don’t be evil,” announcing they have struck a compromise with Verizon which would see the wired internet kept neutral, while allowing the burgeoning wireless internet to be controlled by ISPs. The companies issued their compromise as a suggestion to government. If you’re wondering why two companies are coming up with legislation, it’s because the government of the United States is solidly owned by corporate interests, and they pretty much do whatever big business wants them to do.

Provided legislation along these lines is passed, as wireless internet becomes more and more dominant, and as smart phones continue the march toward ubiquity, it seems inevitable that the internet of the future will be free for corporations to control at their will. The scenarios are dystopic at best. Imagine ISPs bragging like cable companies which have worked out deals with big content providers: “we’ve got Google and YouTube!,” “yeah, well we’ve got Bing and Facebook!” And in that scenario, no one, no one, caries any great small and/or independant site you’ve ever loved. For Americans, it would be goodbye blogs, goodbye anti-corporate discourse, and goodbye Shufflingdead.com.

Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page have betrayed the people of the internet, and they are thoroughly shameful.

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