After years of failing to reach a deal, Verizon is finally getting the iPhone 4G.
Verizon's network performance makes QoS an issue. Imagine facetime over the mobile network, etc. Chances are Apple is very concerned about the Facetime experience and wants non-neutral QoS to benefit it.
Further, Google is making tons of money on mobile ads, etc. All Apple needs to do is direct search traffic to Bing (or to Apple's own search engine) and that's a significant revenue boost.
Search is no longer a hard problem. Microsoft cloned Google search fairly quickly and is very likely to help Apple by offering a good deal on revenue sharing.
These factors combine to suggest that Google is VERY worried about an Apple/Verizon deal.
Imagine if tens of millions more iPads are sold, each with Verizon 4G and non-net-neutral search redirects.
Does anyone really think consumers would care? Bing and Google return almost identical results, and Apple is probably less than two years away from being able to engineer its own Google caliber search engine.
I think that what people forget about Google is that in spite of all the brilliant engineering (which is surely unrivaled) most of the actual revenue comes from simple search which is very much threatened by net non-neutrality.
Google was forced to backpedal on its previous stance out of the necessity to stop Apple from making a google-killing deal with Verizon.
All this is speculative and based on speculation about how successful Apple's devices will be on Verizon (and how little customers care which search engine handles their searches). But Billions of dollars are enough to make any company change course on a dime.
Verizon's network performance makes QoS an issue. Imagine facetime over the mobile network, etc. Chances are Apple is very concerned about the Facetime experience and wants non-neutral QoS to benefit it.
Further, Google is making tons of money on mobile ads, etc. All Apple needs to do is direct search traffic to Bing (or to Apple's own search engine) and that's a significant revenue boost.
Search is no longer a hard problem. Microsoft cloned Google search fairly quickly and is very likely to help Apple by offering a good deal on revenue sharing.
These factors combine to suggest that Google is VERY worried about an Apple/Verizon deal.
Imagine if tens of millions more iPads are sold, each with Verizon 4G and non-net-neutral search redirects.
Does anyone really think consumers would care? Bing and Google return almost identical results, and Apple is probably less than two years away from being able to engineer its own Google caliber search engine.
I think that what people forget about Google is that in spite of all the brilliant engineering (which is surely unrivaled) most of the actual revenue comes from simple search which is very much threatened by net non-neutrality.
Google was forced to backpedal on its previous stance out of the necessity to stop Apple from making a google-killing deal with Verizon.
All this is speculative and based on speculation about how successful Apple's devices will be on Verizon (and how little customers care which search engine handles their searches). But Billions of dollars are enough to make any company change course on a dime.