Negatively. A heavy regulatory burden will raise Google's costs to enter into this business. In particular, any last-mile network that Google would build would be much less valuable to Google if the government requires Google to be "net neutral." Of course Google wants to discriminate in favor of its traffic--and why shouldn't it? It built the network!

Government enforcement of "net neutrality" is a great idea if we want to cement the role of the incumbent operators.

Your post seems confused.

There's nothing in a net neutrality demand that would change Google's costs as such. One might argue that neutrality might impact Google's potential profits - but since Google already has such a large portion of the net's traffic, it's main business model has involved a neutral net and they have been a strong advocate. Since they profit from a large portion of Internet traffic, their aim has been to increase this traffic to thus increase their profits (IE, the ability to shake-down Netflix is not worth anywhere as much as the other ways Google makes money - see: "world's largest advertising company").

On the other hand, some of their motive for entering the ISP business has been make sure the current operators respect net neutrality and don't engaging in sleazy that exploit their monopoly (throttling, ad-substitution, etc). If net neutrality were guaranteed, Google might feel less urgency in entering this business. On the other hand, they aren't doing this at a loss so they may well continue.

Also, Google has a vast internal network that carries it's internal traffic. This network isn't part of the Internet at all and won't be affected ever by net neutrality issues.

Discrimination does nothing in a network with no congestion. I hope Google isn't planning to operate a congested network.

I don't support the merger, but I do support your coinage of the title TimeCast. Make it so!