WHEN elephants fight, the saying goes, only the grass gets trampled.

Last week, two elephants  Google and Verizon  came together to propose a vision for the Internet that represented what many characterize as a retreat by Google from its past strict adherence to so-called net neutrality. The phrase net neutrality, really more of a rallying cry than a technical term, describes a policy that would prohibit Internet service providers from exploiting their role in delivering information to favor their own content, or the content of the highest bidders.

The two companies were presumed to be on opposite sides of this issue since Google bases its business on an open Internet and Verizon, among other things, sells access to the Internet. For the sake of getting commitments from Verizon to support a “neutral” Internet delivered on hard wires, Google wrote on one of its blogs, it agreed to some exceptions: no neutrality for the Internet delivered wirelessly and for “additional, differentiated” online services.

But how do things look from the perspective of the grass? Is there reason to worry when two elephants join tails?

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Far below Google and Verizon or Facebook and AT&T on the information network are the small, independent Internet service providers like Riseup.net, a nonprofit collective based in Seattle that hosts e-mail and e-mail lists. As one link in the chain of the Internet, hosts like Riseup already operate at the mercy of the corporations that do most of the moving of packets of information across the Internet.