The best short comment I've read on the mating dance between Verizon and Google is the Great Grimmelmann's About That Open Internet Thing.
Recent Bluessky Posts- Should carve out the very southern bit of Florida, including Miami, which is more like northern South America. June 19, 2026 Michael Froomkin
- Jotwell: Corporate Robert Rosen, Protecting the Interests of Non-Parties in Corporate Governance, JOTWELL (June 18, 2026) (reviewing Gabriel Rauterberg & Sarath Sanga, Altering Rules: The New Frontier for Corporate Governance, 42 Yale J. on Reg. 291 (2025)), corp.jotwell.com/protecting-t.... June 19, 2026 Jotwell
- Jotewell Property: Rosa Newman, Is Gentrification Always the Enemy?, JOTWELL (June 17, 2026), (reviewing Carol N. Brown, A Civil Rights Defense of Gentrification, 97 Temp. L. Rev. 1 (2025)). property.jotwell.com/is-gentrific... June 17, 2026 Jotwell
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I’ve been very confused by this (and in theory I’m someone who should understand it pretty well) but I think things are starting to gel for me. I find the notion that all packets should be treated equally to be obviously ridiculous and I don’t think that’s what’s actually at issue in most cases. The problem here is that wireline networks are heavily overprovisioned – in the backbones, at least, there’s bandwidth to burn. That’s not the case in mobile cellular networks, however, and there’s more congestion and competition for a place in the queues. Traditional best-effort delivery will probably screw nearly everyone – clearly you don’t want “infrastructure” (routing, for example) packets being treated equally with web browser traffic and you probably don’t want real-time voice being treated equally with web browser traffic, either.
I don’t like slippery slope arguments but I suppose they’re unavoidable. So here, the question becomes “once you start making different guarantees about different kinds of traffic, how do you prevent the carriers turning this into a mechanism to squeeze more money out of customers?” Or at least that’s my understanding of the question. I don’t know what the answer is other than to point out that there’s already some traffic differentiating going on, but it’s invisible to users. I just really don’t know here, but the bottom line is that I find the suggestion that there should be no differentiation in traffic policy to be really odd. And I’ll note that it’s *especially* odd coming from AT&T customers .