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Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Google neutrality: mobile/wireless and the future in India

Google last week wrote to the Indian regulator expressing its concerns about an end to net neutrality there. India is the poster-child for wireless-led communications with over 650m mobiles, but less than 40m landlines.
Ovum has just issued a prediction that in 5 years' time (never make predictions, but 5 years is close), there will be 785m accessing fixed broadband and 3.2billion accessing wireless globally (about 1.5billion of those in India and China, if smartphones deploy fast enough).
So the future of the Internet is wireless - yet it is given an exemption from neutrality regulations in the US by Google. This may just backfire on them, because content companies that do deals with ISPs signal, to quote Google's own submision in India: "ways in which broadband providers' practices can threaten the fundamental openness of the Internet".

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