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This article gets it right. The NYT was way off. And a bunch of net neutrality organizations (and I strongly support net neutrality) jumped on board out of either paranoia or the desire to gain public attention, without carefully checking their facts. I would add that net neutrality is strongly in Google's financial interest. Google makes almost all of its revenue from advertising, and the lion's share of that advertising is on pages displaying search engine results. The greater the diversity of content available online, the more people will go searching for it, and as they search, they view and click on ads. That is what fills Google's coffers - not the various services that Google delivers to users itself. I find this to be a very important point: that Google's corporate interests on the matter of net neutrality are aligned with those of the public at the present time because Google benefits from having a rich diversity of easily-accessible content on the Internet (not just its own content, but content on the Internet in general). Whereas certain other corporations might like to restrict access so as to force the public to choose their own offerings, that would not be consistent with Google's business model. That's why I believe that Google is sincere in its support for Net Neutrality. Another interesting theory regarding what Google and Verizon might be cooking up (involving location of Google's servers on Verizon's properties, which does not threaten net neutrality) can be found here (ironically, on the NYT site itself): http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/08/opinion/08cringeley.html?_r=1
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