The earnings season kicked off last week with better-than-expected results from Alcoa (AA) and Yum! Brands (YUM), while Marriott (MAR) and Pepsico (PEP) met consensus EPS estimates. This week, bellwether companies Intel (INTC), General Electric (GE), Google (GOOG) and JPMorgan Chase (JPM) are scheduled to report their third-quarter results, and analysts polled by Thomson Reuters are looking for earnings growth from all of them.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel announced the acquisition of McAfee and joint ventures with General Electric and Nokia (NOK) during its third quarter. Analysts forecast earnings for that period to come to 50 cents per share, which is up 34.0% from the same period of last year. The number one semiconductor maker's revenue for the three months ended in September is expected to total $11.0 billion, or 17.1% more than a year earlier. Looking ahead to the full year, the forecast thus far is for earnings of $1.94 per share (+44.8%) and $43.3 billion in revenue (+23.4%). The per-share earnings topped analysts' expectations in the past four quarters, by as much as a dime per share.

Google (GOOG) has been all over the news recently -- if it was the small acquisitions or the proposed net neutrality deal with Verizon (VZ). But perhaps more seriously are the different articles in the media about how the Web is changing and how that's going to affect the search engine giant.

The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet is the provocative title of a Wired article published Tuesday. Chris Anderson explains how we changed our habits from using the "wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display." Most importantly, he adds, "it's a world Google can't crawl."

There was an interesting read over at Slashdot.org today. In a story last night from the Associated Press, it looks like Time Warner Cable Inc. (NYSE: TWC) may be testing out a web metering service for its internet access.

The company is testing a service with new Time Warner Cable Internet subscribers in Beaumont, Texas where customers will have a monthly allowance for the amount of data with a $1.00 charge per gigabyte. The company had already warned back in January that it was going to test rates and test some metered and tiered internet access services, so this isn't likely to be a bomb dropping into the school yard.

Slower services of 768 kbps with a 5-gigabyte monthly allowance are going to run $29.95, while their fastest and larger service with fast downloads at up to 15 megabits per second and a 40-gigabyte cap will run $54.90 per month.

The FCC has an understanding with the broadband providers in the telecom and cable industries. All consumers and websites will have the same access to bandwidth. A site that takes up very little in terms of data transferred from an internet company is treated no better than YouTube, which uses a lot of bandwidth capacity.

The FCC is charging that Comcast (NASDAQ: CMCSA) has broken the net neutrality pact. According to The Wall Street Journal, "Comcast stands accused by software companies, public-interest groups and academics of degrading customers' ability to use file-sharing software, which enables users to send high-quality video files over the Internet."

While broadband subscribers and websites would all like to be treated as equals, they do not all use equal internet capacity. Video sites not only use more bandwidth, they can take capacity from other customers on the network. Cable and telecom companies do not have infinite access to push and pull bits though their systems. To improve that access they would have to spend billions of dollars to upgrade their cooper and fiber lines.

The time may come, and it may be soon, that the democracy of the internet goes away. Consumers and web properties who fill the "pipes" with content may well have to pay a higher toll.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 24wallst.com.

The FCC says that cable company Comcast (NASDAQ: CMCSA) is slowing service to some of its customers, especially those who use a great deal of bandwidth on video downloads and peer-to-peer software applications. Comcast says it is simply managing its network so that it does not get overloaded and hurt service to all customers.

The debate came to a head yesterday. According to The Wall Street Journal (subscription required), "Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin warned cable giant Comcast that the government is `ready, willing and able' to stop companies from improperly hobbling Internet traffic."

The FCC position is a little out of touch with reality. Telecom companies and cable firms do not have an unlimited amount of bandwidth to offer each and every home. At some point, the pipes do become overloaded. The cynical view is that these large companies want to charge heavy users more money for taking up more bandwidth. What is probably more accurate is that, unless there is some governor of internet use, the system will slow for everyone.

A cup can only hold so much water.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.

Google shares closed down to $373.43, a decline of $4.86 or 1.28% from Tuesday's market close. With Google vigorously defending net neutrality -- not for itself, but for potential smaller businesses o the fringe of the Internet -- it seems as though Google *may* be talking a little, slight or tiny hypocritical stance here. Are you sure that Google does not want network neutrality to become a forgotten memory for itself?

The company stands to lose billions, potentially, if access to advertisers is malformed or if customers stop using Google for searches and, of course, everything else Google offers. I doubt any of this would happen. If Google were forced to charge for some of its services due to the abolishment of net neutrality, would you pay? For email? For searches? For maps? Ditto for Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com, etc.

This sounds like a goofy analogy, but then, so is the lobby effort by the large telecom firms who apparently want you, the consumer, to pay -- again -- for the networks that 1) are already built, but are being upgraded and 2) for access to a "data pipe" that you, as a consumer, are already paying for. The last time I looked, Internet access was not free (with some exceptions like hotels and unsecure hotspots from your neighbor's house).

Brian White has worked in various executive positions in technology and telecommunications and now focuses on editing and writing.

Google is finally getting off its haunches and is threatening antitrust lawsuits if the high-speed ISPs end up abusing power  should U.S. legislators enable them with network neutrality dissolution (well, effectively that's what it is). In this scenario, I have to side with Google here -- the passing of information over telco or cable networks is data no matter how you look at it: voice, video, websites, FTP, BitTorrent, eBay, VoIP -- it does not matter. Or does it? There are those who say that BitTorrent file-sharing traffic is responsible for 30% of Internet traffic today. That's quite a whopper.

But are the telecom backbone providers prepared to, one-by-one, start singling out specific uses of their networks to tier service levels and prices on? I'd love to see that -- and I can only imagine the wave of lawsuits against telecom companies if they choose to do this. What makes some data more valuable than other data, and who sets that rule? How is it defined, measured and prioritized? What a jumbled mess. Someone's opinion on the importance of data is just that -- an opinion.

Merchants who make their living on Google traffic (to find customers) and auctioneers on eBay who may their living selling have just as much priority as the Fortune 500 company using the public Internet to create VPNs for employees all over the world, yes? Whoever will have the monumental task of defining this global Pandora's Box will need some migraine medicine, and quickly.

The internet is really a set of tubes? Well, that's what Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) claims. In a bizarre attempt to explain why he voted against Net Neutrality amendment he attempted to explain how the internet worked with statements like the following:

"I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially."

While this complete ignorance of how technology works in any sense may benefit companies that can throw lobbyists against a wall until people like this Senator become worried about how internet 'tubes' work, can government and tech-dependent small businesses really interact safely?

The "Net Neutrality" debate is confusing, and I'm not the only one who thinks so. Andy Kessler from The Weekly Standard calls the issue "bizarre" and "hard to understand" and opines: "both sides are off their rocker." He argues that the answer is not regulation. The telcos and cable companies, he says, are loathe to upgrade their networks -- it's expensive, and, why would they without the government stepping in? They want neutrality regulations to be quelled because "without the ability to extract money from the webbies for the use of their not-so-fast Alexander Graham Bell-era wires (forget that you and I already overpay for this), AT&T or Verizon might not have any business model going forward."

Kessler's "modest proposal" is creative and a little diabolical (ergo: I love it). "Maybe the incumbent network providers--the Verizons, Comcasts, AT&Ts--can be made to compete; threatening to seize their stagnating networks via eminent domain is just one creative idea to get them to do this. A truly competitive, non-neutral network could work, but only if we know its real economic value. If telcos or cable charge too much, someone should be in a position to steal the customer. Maybe then we'd see useful services and a better Internet. Sounds like capitalism."

What does the blogerati think about the idea of seizing broadband in the name of eminent domain?

With Google's billion-dollar advertising baby riding on the backs of telecom's billion-dollar data lines, can the internet search behemoth afford to potentially lose millions of customers if tiered and priced internet backbone service comes to fruition? The Network Neutrality debate currently underway in the U.S. Congress could prove the most severe threat to Google and other internet companies in quite some time, if ever.

The one card Microsoft has here is that it has products customers actually buy -- hard, physical products with revenue streams attached. Yes, those streams are being challenged, but the title fight is far from over. Google, with all the power and usefulness it has to billions of people worldwide (just a guess there), stands to have issues if the path to its services becomes harder, or worse yet, more monetarily painful to the bulk of customers that visit www.google.com and all the other Google services each and every day.

Well, Google appears to have a friend with the U.S. Senate Commerce Chairperson Ted Stevens, who has added a new section to his proposed bill aimed at preserving consumers' ability to surf anywhere on the public Internet and use any Web-based application. This is all according to the latest draft obtained by Reuters this weekend. The rules of telecom are being re-defined here in an age of open customer access and corporate profitability priorities. The winner will control the planet. Well, not literally. We'll leave that to international superheroes.

Google's trading day today was comprised of standard fare, as the GBuy release is pending with great fanfare in a few weeks. GOOG shares closed down today at $384.39, a drop of $2.14 or 0.55% over Tuesday's market close. The question of the hour for Google is how it is going about business with the threat of network neutrality stirring in the U.S. Congress right now. Google stands to lose if big telecom firms are able to start tiering internet usage across their networks based on who the sender and receiver of the data is. Google CEO Eric Schmidt even has a letter up asking Google customers to directly contact congress members to give a voice to the fight.

With Google's GBuy setting up a celebrity deathmatch with eBay's PayPal service, this will, quite honestly, settle the debate over whether Google can produce more than a few products that actually catch on with consumers en masse. Google's internet search business is, by far, the market leader, and it's Gmail service, while lauded by users, still has not gained much marketshare against what I consider inferior alternatives such as Windows Live Mail and even the new Yahoo! Mail. Will GBuy buck this trend?

If any company should be more interested in the fierce net neutrality debate that continues to heat up on Capitol Hill than Google, will it please stand up? I didn't think so -- in fact, Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently published an open letter to Google users on the subject.

After reading what Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf  had to say on the subject as well, Google probably has the most to lose should the money-grubbing big telecom firms win in their wishes to control Internet access with tiered services and such. Cerf is widely considered as the "father of the Internet" and is now in the employ of Google. Read Cerf's letter to the U.S. Senate here (PDF).

Should big telecom just give customers big and tall a "data pipe" in which to do anything and everything they need? Well, this is what's been great about Internet access until now -- it's open to everyone and anyone with just a slow or fast data connection. What you do over that connection is nobody's business but your own.

Meg Whitman swung the massive club of her one million-plus eBay membership today, calling on each of them individually to get involved in the net neutrality debate in a personally-addressed email. She argued against the doctrine of "pay to play" to use the "fast lane" of the internet and said, "The bottom tier -- the slow lane -- would be what is left for everyone else. If the fast lane is the information 'super-highway,' the slow lane will operate more like a dirt road." Her missive asked each member to follow a link to send an email to their congressperson.

The debate, which pitches the internet backbone providers (like Comcast, Verizon and Time Warner's cable unit) against the biggest bandwidth users (like eBay, Google, Amazon.com, Microsoft and Yahoo!) is growing more bitter by the minute. Whitman's atypical move of sending email to her many members is seen as an unconventional approach in a battle that, to date, has failed to explain itself well to voters; although investors, certainly, can understand that the potential for huge profits hang in the balance.

The Net Neutrality debate is taking on a fever pitch as Congress considers legislation that would, in essence, allow AT&T, Comcast and other phone and cable operators to charge for "premium" service, including data-heavy VoIP and video. Google, Amazon and other providers of data want to keep the content delivery the same for all -- and prevent operators from charging for preferred placement.

At its heart, the legislation would allow content machines to bid for priority delivery. In Craig Newmark's words, "[should] Yahoo ... be allowed to outbid Google to slow down Google on people's computers?" The group he supports, "Save the Internet," says no. Mike McCurry, former White House spokesman and co-chair of the very confusingly-named "Hands Off the Internet" group, say yes. He echoes Chicken Little as he tells Newmark in a Wall Street Journal debate, "the current Internet is creaky and will suffer congestion if we don't invest in improvements. The network operators prepared to make those investments need to get a return and one way is to charge a premium for managing huge bandwidth content differently."

It's a very confusing argument, as they seem to be both arguing for less government involvement and at one point Newmark commends McCurry for "cleverly using Colbertian 'truthiness.' "

Imagine an Internet environment in which you were taxed each time you downloaded an itune or searched for the directions and customer reviews of that trendy bistro you were headed to this weekend. Or perhaps, somewhat less ominously, imagine that Internet content providers from the behemoths such as Google, Yahoo!, Apple and Amazon to the little guys such as your favorite foodie blog paid the tax which pressured margins for these companies.

Yesterday, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce rejected an amendment proposed by Representative Ed Markey which would inhibit discrimination of Internet traffic. The vote shuns FCC involvement and serves as a defeat for these Internet companies and a victory for major cable and telecom companies such as Comcast, AT&T and Verizon which own the "pipes" that contain the flow of Internet traffic

This net neutrality debate has been heating up big time in recent months as these "pipes" companies pursue an active lobbying effort to keep government regulation away from controlling how they charge those who utilize their infrastructure.

Both sides have a point. On the one hand, it seems like it would be grossly unfair for your Internet provider to allow slow connections to specific sites that you love to visit and have grown to love. On the other hand, the telcos and cable guys do own the pipes.

Personally, I have mixed feelings about it and simply don't want to see it become prohibitive for the little guys to fire up and operate cool and innovative new websites.

Nevertheless, how net neutrality unfolds in Washington over the next two years or so will have a huge effect on the landscape of the web we all surf daily though. At this point it is impossible to predict the resulting terrain. The details will require close scrutiny for those who have a strong interest in the Internet experience or the companies involved as votes such as yesterday's shift the dynamics of who might wind up paying for Internet traffic.