Opinion: No party a saint in Google Voice circus: Rural consumers slighted

This latest AT&T/Google wrangling before the Federal Communications Commission is a heavy dose of circus entertainment with a serious issue buried underneath.
AT&T, by ratting on Google Voice’s restricting calls to rural communities, is creating a smoke screen with Congress, the media and the public because the FCC’s push for net neutrality scares the beejeebers out of them. What some people aren’t seeing is the underlying fact that both AT&T’s and Google’s treatment of rural communities is exactly why we need net-neutrality laws.
It was pointed out in The Hill (publication), that AT&T has a telecom business practice of discriminating against rural communities. “Northern Valley Communications and Sancom Inc. wrote to the FCC that they ‘agree with AT&T that call blocking is an impermissible form of self-help,’ but write separately to add that AT&T is engaging in very similar conduct to ‘reduce its access expenses’ by simply refusing to pay its bills” to small rural carriers.'”
The more involved AT&T is with wireless and other Internet services, the greater the chance these discriminatory practices will spill over into their Internet operations.
Google, while correct in claiming to not be in the carrier business, is nevertheless offering a Web-centered service that is discriminating against rural communities. If you offer a calling service, but you prevent people from calling to particular parts of the country, that’s discriminatory. This is why carriers are prevented from doing it. Google is trying to hide behind a technicality, but, from the perspective of who can benefit from Google’s service, segments of the country cannot receive Web-generated calls from Google Voice users.
What unifies both of these players in this latest “Daddy, Daddy, Mikey’s not playing fair!” charade is the fact that both companies are reacting to rural phone carriers’ fees for terminating voice calls in rural communities. Furthermore, as highlighted in Google’s recent blog post, porn companies (forever on the leading edge of all technology adoption drives) figured out a way to integrate dial-in porn services with rural termination points and subsequently collect termination fees.
No party in this cluster — telco’s, Google, rural carriers created to score big bucks on termination fees, porn capitalists — can claim to be saints on the issue of providing all customers with equal treatment. They collectively reinforce my argument as to why we need net-neutrality rules with teeth. Big business interests jumping onto the Internet will hurt consumer and small business interests every time there’s an opportunity unless you have sensible regulation that enforces fair play.
As Tim Marema, VP for Communications at the public advocacy group Center for Rural Strategies (http://www.ruralstrategies.org), sums up, “Getting into the details of the fight between Google and AT&T isn’t going to raise the issues that rural needs raised: it doesn’t matter what these guys do if they don’t pay attention to rural services and access. It doesn’t matter if Google has Google Voice when rural doesn’t have broadband. And if AT&T is going to get all protective of rural on this issue, why don’t they extend similar sympathy to their rural customers when it comes to expanding their broadband service area in rural?”
Craig Settles is an industry analyst and consultant specializing in effective broadband business strategies. You can follow his blog at http://roisforyou.wordpress.com.