WebProNews

Rogers Internet in Canada provides its subscribers with an advisory when they are approaching their account's bandwidth limits, by injecting that notice into a web page they are viewing.

Google Frowns On Rogers Injection

The example of Rogers dropping a notice onto Google's homepage began making the rounds yesterday. Some people called it a threat to net neutrality, which seems a little too extreme an assessment.

Matt Cutts called the practice "pretty uncool," but noted this was not the official Google party line.

"It may be your only chance to see the word "Yahoo!" on Google’s home page in three different places," said Cutts. Rogers offers broadband service co-branded with Yahoo.

The official line from Google appeared in the Toronto Star, where the search advertising company expressed concern about reports of Rogers' practice:

"As a general principle, we believe that maintaining the Internet as a neutral platform means that carriers shouldn't be able to interfere with Web content without users' permission," the Google statement said. "We are in the process of contacting the relevant parties to bring this to a quick resolution."

That bit about contacting relevant parties sounds like someone at Rogers received a wakeup call from Google's legal department. We don't see a problem with Google taking issue with advertising appearing on its minimalist homepage, but as far as neutrality, Rogers is not targeting specific pages with its injected advisories.

Perhaps Google will send Yahoo a bill for this homepage ad placement. We can only imagine how much an advertiser would willingly pay to show up on Google.com.

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