How Google’s Alphabet restructuring helps protect the Web as we know it

[Commentary] When Google announced it was restructuring itself as Alphabet, the company insulated itself from what conservative critics have long warned would happen as a result of the Federal Communications Commission's network neutrality rules -- the regulation of Web sites like Gmail, Google search and Maps. This may be pure coincidence. But it nevertheless has gotten the Internet industry's attention, because it plays into a dispute over the meaning of net neutrality for businesses everywhere. Could the FCC's rules eventually allow the government to regulate Internet content, not just the pipes it runs on?

Setting aside for a moment that it would probably be political suicide to do so, here's how the regulation could have occurred as long as Google Fiber remained part of Google. The FCC's net neutrality rules classify companies that provide access to high-speed Internet as "telecommunications services." Google Fiber is considered just such a service -- and by extension, so was Google at the time the rules went into effect. This made Google and all its Web apps theoretically subject to many of the regulations that the FCC applies to phone companies, such as its privacy rules. As an Internet provider, Google could have been covered by these federal regulations. Now that Google Fiber is separate from Google, however, it reduces what risk there was (it's hard to say just how concrete or hypothetical the risk was, because we haven't really seen the FCC try to flex its net neutrality muscles yet). If the FCC wants to try to use its new telecommunications powers over Internet providers to regulate Internet content, it'll have to make an example out of some other company, not Google.