Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

Welcome to the Schminternet!

Although Google CEO Eric Schmidt (pictured here) took pains in a press conference yesterday with Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg about net neutrality policy to distance the search giant from the idea that it could be part of any new “private” Internet, that did not stop a lot of pundits from crying foul.

And also making up one of the best monikers ever for the possibility of a new toll-heavy information superhighway.

That would be the Schminternet!

The term was a word coined by media blogger Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine, accidentally mangling Schmidt’s name perfectly when making a Yiddish joke in a post to Twitter: “The Schminternet=not the internet. Comes with new fees.”

It was only the beginning of the pointed tweets by Jarvis:

“If you take your iPhone from your wi-fi outside it moves from the internet to the schminternet?” and “So if you launch, say, a new video university, is that internet or schminternet?”

Indeed, the Google (GOOG) and Verizon (VZ) convoluted explanation of the plan left it open to such discomfort, because of the nagging notion that the public Internet would eventually get the shaft for a private one that had different rules.

Also left out of the Google/Verizon chit-chit: Wireless broadband, which is where all the action is happening today.

Would that be on the Schminternet? Or even multiple Schiminternets?

Noted Jarvis in a blog post today:

So, ol, grandpa internet may chug along giving us YouTube videos of flaming cats, but you want to get that while you’re out of your house? Well, that’s the nonnet. I can hear the customer “service” rep explaining this to us:

“Oh, no, sir. That’s not offered on the internet. That’s on the schminternet.”

You want something new? Anything created after 2010?

“Schminternet, sir.”

Jarvis and others are right to be questioning the Google-Verizon policy, since it seems to suggest a balkanization of digital distribution, which seems counter to Google’s stated interest in an open Internet system.

But, just in case, Jarvis–who penned the book. “What Would Google Do?”–has bought the Schminternet.net domain.

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First the NSA came for, well, jeez pretty much everybody’s data at this point, and I said nothing because wait how does this joke work

— Parker Higgins via Twitter