Google/Verizon want "minimal regulation" (just sometimes)

The Google/Verizon “can’t we get along” roadshow on government oversight of the Internet went into high gear this week, with an editorial piece in the Wall Street Journal on areas where the Droid buddies agree about the FCCs National Broadband Plan. Frankly, the piece is a bit of a snoozer until the second to last paragraph.

“The Internet has thrived in an environment of minimal regulation,” write Google’s Eric Schmidt and Verizon’s Ivan Seidenberg. “While our two companies don’t agree on every issue, we do agree generally as a matter of policy that the framework of minimal government involvement should continue.”

We were just about to dive into the FCC’s database to retrieve various instances in which the companies have been asking for a tad bit more than that, but Josh Silver of Free Press beat us to it. Abhorring any wasteful duplication of effort, we’ll pinch from his list and add a few items of our own.

Google strongly supports net neutrality rules, Silver notes. Indeed, the search engine giant backs the agency’s proposal to add an enforcement mechanism to its four-part Internet policy statement, and it hopes the FCC will nix ISP plans for last mile priority charges on Web content.

Plus, the firm was and still is a huge booster of the FCC’s decision to permit unlicensed “white space” broadband devices on the 700MHz band. And Google just asked the Commission for “a proposed rule generally requiring that all content offered via [any multichannel video provider] be made available through competitive navigation devices able to offer consumers innovative and advanced features.”

Meanwhile, Verizon has petitioned for big changes in the government’s Universal Service Fund system, wants the FCC to ban mobile transmissions in some bands close to its licenses, and “urges the Commission to undertake a targeted spectrum inventory that would examine all spectrum in the range of 400MHz to 5GHz that is not already allocated for exclusive use, and consider reallocating significant portions of these bands for future mobile broadband use.”

This month Google and several other parties met with the agency and urged it to take the steps needed “to build a complete legal and evidentiary record to confirm the agency’s oversight authority” over ISPs, including under the common carrier provisions of the Communications Act if need be.

Actually, most of these proposals sound good, or at least reasonable. But taken as a whole (and there are lots more examples we could cite), they add up to something more than that “light regulatory touch” that the CEOs always say they want—at least on op-ed pages.