Don't be evil... unless you think it will be good for everyone

This morning, I read this:

Google and Verizon 'near deal to end net neutrality'

Search giant said to be close to agreeing (on) a deal that would let the telecoms company prioritise categories of online content

So, what exactly happen to Google's supposed mantra?

The main thing that sold Google for me as a search engine back in the late Paleointranetic Era was that they would display content fairly. Many search engines back then would give you results based on how many times someone put the word you were searching for on the homepage. You'd get pages that would have pages of blank space at the bottom, and when you highlighted text, there would be every term anyone would ever search for.

Google's approach was different - they based search engine priority on a system of links between pages, to determine what content was actually relevant. You could count on Google's results to be the pages that were most visited, most linked, and most likely to be the results you were looking for.

I'm under the impression that favoring one content provider over another when they pay more to be listed would sort of fall into the grey area between light and dark. 

I mean, sure, this deal is for providing better connections to providers that pay more, which, in a way, kind of makes sense. They are using bandwidth, and that bandwidth does cost money. So if a content provider pays more, then they should get a larger share of the bandwidth, I suppose. Or should they?

What we need is for someone to fairly decide a way to allocate the I/O stream and...

Uh oh. I can see where this is going.

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