Be Broadband, the well-known UK ISP, has this week criticised plans by Google to roll out a 1 Gb per second fibre to the home network in the US with a trial involving 500,000 people in the pipeline. The UK ISP believes it is very dangerous to allow a company such as Google to be both controlling access to the Internet and the content which users will be presented with.
This is not the first time that Google has stepped into something of a controversial area of the Internet as it looks to spread its tentacles to each and every area of the worldwide economy. Ultimately, if Google continues to increase its influence over the online arena we will almost certainly see a fightback from ISPs as well as governments around the world. The situation with Google is turning into a mirror image of the Microsoft saga which saw the company controlling large areas of the PC market only to become a target of regulators around the world.
The very fact that the Google’s US fibre-optic network trial will be going ahead would suggest that regulators have no problems with this at the moment although this could change in due course.