The Type of Neutrality That Matters

The whining match over network neutrality has been at the expense of other issues that could have just as many implications.

For instance, Greg’s story of How I Almo$t Tricked Google Into Making Me Millions

Great idea, right? By replicating the Mozilla business model (albeit in a much more sneaky way), Greg ended up make over $100 before Google got suspicious and shut him down without a single payment.

The funny (as in weird) thing about his story is that he only did one thing wrong - he switched the Google search plugin on public computers and effectively giving malware to their other users.

But that was it - the only thing he did wrong. Everything else seems to be pretty legit, at least in an isolated context.

This gets to some of the questions regarding advertising that may have to eventually be decided in a courtroom.

If you make an Adsense page that is successful, then why should Google arbitrarily be able to take that away from you?

Obviously, it’s not okay to be throwing up your own Adsense on Google search results on someone else’s computer, without permission. That’s a form of malware, no doubt about it.

But what if I’m a school, and I want to have search ad revenue supplement my investment on a lab of computers. Why can’t I? So what if it makes money and drives up ad rates? Isn’t this supposed to be a market?

Maybe it’s the echinacea talking, but I think the ad market could use a healthy dose of marxism.

Then again, couldn’t everything?