Media Wonk

Google chief seeks safe harbor at Aspen Summit - August 21, 2007

ASPEN, Colo.--According to Google chairman/CEO Eric Schmidt, settling the debate in Washington over network neutrality is simply a matter of ironing out a few details in the regulatory language.

Facing an after-dinner audience over-populated with telco lobbyists here Tuesday, Schmidt sought to downplay his company’s policy differences with broadband network providers over whether net neutrality is a principle worth committing to government regulation.

“We actually agree with our worthy opponents on a lot of these issues,” he ventured. “We agree, for instance, that carriers should be able to offer value-added services such as enhanced video—so long as other services are not excluded.”

Schmidt was keynoting the closing night of the annual Aspen Summit put on by the Progress & Freedom Foundation, a Washington, DC, think tank with a decidedly libertarian, anti-regulatory bent. It’s the sort of outfit that provides a platform for thinkers like University of Texas professor of economics Stan Liebowitz, who earlier in the day described Google and TiVo as “parasitic technologies,” because they thrive by negating the property rights of content owners. So perhaps Schmidt was just being prudent.

He opened gamely enough, declaring, “The Internet was created on the principles of free and open innovation and collaboration, and we need to keep it free and open. If it goes the other way, we will have a very serious problem.”

He offered a series of “calls to action,” including the preservation of net neutrality.

“No entity that controls the last mile, whether it’s a cable company or a wireless carrier or even a local government, as some of them are beginning to do, should be able to control the content that goes over their network,” he said.

After the opening flourish, however, he tried to keep it low-key.

He spent most of the 40-minute Q&A session deflecting questions of varying hostility and dancing away from efforts to pin him down on the particulars of any net neutrality regulation.

“I think they’re pretty good,” he said in response to a question about the FCC’s four general principles meant to guide the agency’s policy toward net neutrality. “But we understand that the carriers are the ones who are regulated, so obviously they’re very interested in the actual working of the rules.”

Pressed further, Schmidt demurred, “I don’t want to get into parsing the principles, or the language of the regulation. I’m just trying to explain my goal, which is to make sure consumers have real choices.”

Given the stacked audience, it’s perhaps understandable that Schmidt would try to avoid being baited into an argument, since anything he said could, and probably would, be used against him.

But his retreat into platitudes is becoming something of an annoying pattern, such as his ritual invocation of the DMCA’s Section 512 safe harbor without further elaboration in response to complaints from content owners about the widespread availability of copyrighted content on YouTube.

“We’re all in agreement that copyright is important,” he said Tuesday in response to being pressed on the issue. “But it’s also important to come up with a way for consumers to be able to consume the content they want legally.”

Ah. And so it is.

One of these days, it would be nice to know what Schmidt and the other Google-ites actually think about the controversies they’re in the middle of.

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