Slashdot Mirror
Google Won't Pay Bell South
grandgator writes "Google has offered
a clear response to Bell
South's proposal to charge content providers an additional fee for access
to their network: They won't pay. In an email, Google's Barry Schnitt told the
folks at networkingpipeline:
'Google is not discussing sharing of the costs of broadband networks with
any carrier. We believe consumers are already paying to support broadband access
to the Internet through subscription fees and, as a result, consumers should have
the freedom to use this connection without limitations'"
Of course they want to clamp down. The money is in the content, not the backbone, so they want to limit content to that which they have a financial interest. This way, it can be slow, expensive, and limited.
What might make more sense would be a pay-per-use plan, where you pay a flat rate for X amount of bandwidth or whatever and more if you use more. But of course if customers don't like the complication, they will choose another ISP.
What I fear more than anything else in this whole "tiering" push is the following:
BS eventually implements a tiered QOS policy. Google responds by saying, "fine. You charge us for the pipes, we'll charge you for the content that makes them useful." Cue the lawyers, who huddle up, then spit out a cross-licensing agreement such that BS pays Google exactly what they charge Google for the pipes. Google goes away happy; nothing has effectively changed. BS goes away not particularly happy with Google, but in a position where they absolutely can demand a net positive cash flow from content providers with less market clout than Google.
Consider VOIP: there are enough players in the VOIP game, and it's a small enough market, that no one company has the market leverage to demand much from BS. At the same time, a fairly small change in BS' service (a little bit of lag here, a little bit of jitter introduced over there) will result in completely destroying the VOIP company's ability to serve customers.
It'll end up being the same thing as the way large companies wield their patent portfolios. It means everything goes on just fine for the big players, but the little guys get screwed in the process.
I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that Google doesn't cave on this, even if BS offers up a cross-licensing agreement. Here's hoping "don't be evil" covers this.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
what would you do in this situation?
"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - Major Mike Shearer, UK
Yes, thanks Google for standing up for us all. All Google had to do was refuse to give their money to someone else. Let's think this situation through before applauding Google's altruistic nature.
Funny,
All the US Telecoms have benefitted over the years from thier status as "Common Carriers". From reduced regulation to reduced tax burdens. Now they want to play both sides of the fence? I'm a big capitalist, but that's just not right. Frankly, I think the FCC should simply revoke the common carrier status of ANY ISP that tries to pull this BS. It should be done retroactively to the date of ISP's incorporation or founding, whichever is earlier. The retroactive tax bill can then be calculated, and the ISP should be forced to pay the entire thing in one LUMP SUM.
Just the threat of instant bankruptcy should be enough to knock some sense into these twits.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Still it's ridiculous for the ISPs to think they can get even more money this way... If they all start going through with this horrible idea, then they better drop my connection fees down to like $20 a month or something. I could see maybe a double tiered service perhaps this way... like $20/month for the craptacular we charge your webservices too version and then the usual $50-60/month we all pay now for "unlimited" access. I mean, I'm with Comcast myself...but I'm sure they'll be following in the same steps as Bellsouth pretty soon too...all of them will. God I hate corporate America :(
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
Hi -
I am old enough to remember when most online access (dialup, of course) was based on some kind of per minute / per hour type of fee. Various responses evolved, including off line email readers to suck down email as fast as possible and then hang up, to CompuServe encouraging various software companies to do their official online support there and then get a kickback of the per minute charges they got their customers to pay for at CompuServe.
Anyway, it was Sky Dayton and Earthlink that pioneered the flat rate "all you can eat" dialup pricing which is still pretty standard in the U.S.
So today is it really fair for many people to pay say $30 a month for broadband when some of them only surf and check email for maybe an hour a day while others are online downloading music or video 24/7 ? So changing pricing at the user / consumer level does make sense.
TWR
We have given your proposal the attention that it deserves, and offer the following counterproposal:
We will allow you to continue to offer our service to your customers, at no additional charge to you, and you will save the immense amount of money that it would cost you to explain to all of your customers whey they can no longer get through to Google, and why they shouldn't switch to another internet provider that does offer Google access.
who don't have a vested interest to hold the voip down.
You mean "to hold their voip down." Time warner is already pushing their own voip, and they'd probably be more than happy to degrade the service of anyone using any other voip provider.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Google just needs Me Bell to delay a bit so they can unvail there gNet. I mean, I assume there's a reason for them buying up tons of dark fiber. If I do have to pay for priority access to certain IP address, can't I just pay one... for a proxy server IP? If I didn't have to pay extra to access Google.com at high speed, Google could (and would) make there own proxies or something of the like to relay our DNS requests at Google-Fiber-speed. Something like web accelerator.
I agree! That's why we need consumer pressure as well. I cancelled my BellSouth broadband yesterday, after they made the announcment, and told them why. We need to encourage subscribers to boycott BellSouth as well as content providers to refuse to bend to the blackmail.
Oh, and fwiw, I'm cancelling my BellSouth phone service and moving to voip over my new broadband conneciton, and I'll acutally save 50% of my monthly costs doing this.
Only pressure from both sides will wake these corporate goons up.
I think everyone is missing the point. The current ISP pricing models are based on a fixed amount of anticipated bandwidth usage per-customer. If content providers start streaming movies and a lot of other large-bandwidth content, the available bandwidth will be used up quickly and the Service Providers will need to spend $$$ increasing their infrastructure.
What Bellsouth is saying is that they want to try and recover this money from the content provider who are making the money (via advertising, subscriptions etc...), not directly from the consumer.
The important thing here is that Service Providers aren't going to improve their infrastructure with their own money. The more bandwidth they determine you will use, the more you're going to have to pay for using it.
Bellsouth already has several broadband pricing options for different connection rates.
Up to 256 Kbps/128 Kbps - $24.95/mo
Up to 1.5 Mbps/256 Kbps - $32.95/mo
Up to 3 Mbps/384 Kbps - $37.95/mo
Up to 6 Mbps/512 Kbps - $46.95/mo
Given the details in this story: Feds seek Google records in porn probe, I'd say they are definitely not evil. At least not at the moment.
I mean we pay for our download/upload bandwidth on the user end. The companies pay for it on their end already.
:-)
So already the content user and the content provider have paid for their upload/download bandwidth agreements.
Now they stroll out and want to extort the content provider. Hey, you want your users to not run into trouble, you need to pay us some money to protect your interests, otherwise it could get messy for them. Sheesh!
Didn't google buy some dark fiber. Google ISP. Lightweight no frills, no throttling. Sign me up.
i'm going to write a book
and then, with any luck, a publisher will pick up my manuscript
and then all i have to do is give $10,000 to the publisher for them to publish and distribute it!
huh?
hey bell south: that's not reality
you opened up a can of worms you shouldn't: at best, YOU should be paying google
you just had to be as greedy as humanly possibly, didn't you?
morons
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
These activities have not been without consequences, however. People in Louisiana are figuring ways of fighting back. For instance, many people now have their phone service with AT and T, or Eatel (both of which are cheaper). Another good trick is that people in appartments are having a single BellSouth DSL subscription, that they then share with their neighbours, using a cheap wireless box from Wal-Mart. BellSouth don't seem to realise how their actions are influencing their revenues. Perhaps in the light of this latest silliness, people in other parts of the country should take similar steps against BellSouth, especially in cases where they are a monopoly, or duoploy broadband provider.
It is intereresting that two oligopolized industies, the local telecoms and the recording industry, are currently deploying the indentical propagandist tactict; Both are conflacting the issues of tiered prices with higher prices.
./; As strong is the opposition here on ./ to tiered pricing, that would instantly switch to approval of an equal magnitude if recording companies advocated for a tiered pricing scheme in which $0.99 was the maximum cost, with some tunes available at lower prices.
In their dispute with Apple over the price of an iTune, recording companies justify a proposal to BOTH tier prices AND to raise prices for some tunes above $0.99 by ONLY arguing the mertis of tiered pricing. The merits of tiered pricing aside, iff instead they correctly identified their proposal as a plan to BOTH tier AND raise prices, then they would not be arguing deceptively. If record company executives proposed keeping the weighted average cost per tune at $0.99, charging less than that amount for some tracks and more for others, then they could legitimatley advocate for that scheme on the merits of tiered pricing because that proposal would be only about tiered pricing. But the issue is in not really tiering at all, either among advocates in the record industry or opponents on
So now with the telecoms, we see copycat propaganda; proposing BOTH tiering prices AND raising prices, and defending that conjunction of acts on the merits of tiered pricing alone. What appears to be a merititious argument about tiered pricing is deviously conflated with a scheme to raise prices. Neither Google, nor all the slashdotters who have argued here against tiered pricing really oppose tiered pricing per se. Instead, they oppose the higher prices which telecoms seek to introduce in conjunction with tiered pricing. If Bellsouth had proposed paying Google money instead of chargeing them a fee, this would also have been tiering. Google, rationally, would be in favor of receiving payment from Bellsouth.
The convergent rhetorical tactics of separate industries owes to their shared oligoplostic nature. Normally the penalty to a seller for raising prices is reduced sales. This is, like, why I have been so unsuccessful at selling my AA battery for a $1,000,000.0. The quantity of AA batteries demanded at that price seems to be 0. If I want to make any money, I had better lower the price. But for oligopolies, this pattern of an inverse relation between the price and the quantity demanded does not apply; They can raise prices without reducing sales, or at least to a greater degree than they could in a more competitive market. But there is a downside for ologipolsits when they raise prices: That downside is not reduced profits, but public backlash and political and legal action against them. With propaganda, oligopolists compete against consumers in the political realm to raise prices. The shared propagandist tactic of conflating price tiering with price raising is no coincidence; all oligopolists have to hoodwink the public somehow and what works for one works for another. In fact, it does seem to be working: some of the public goes along because they approve of tiered pricing while most opponents have fallen for the trick and argue against tiered pricing instead of correctly identifying their opposition to price raising.
Of course, In competitive markets, it rarely is worthwile to propagandizie on behalf of higher pricing, because even if you successfully supress political opposition with propaganda, you ultimatly loose sales and profits with higher pricing. This is why, when you go to the grocery store and notice that the price of filet mignon has gone up $0.20, the increased price is not accompanied by a representative of the beef industry explaining the market efficiencies of tiered pricing.
As a consumer, both of internet service and music, more competition among suppliers would benefit me, so I advocate for that. With internet service, acheiving more competition i
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
choosing between the least bad of two candidates reminds me entirely too much of politics.
Heh, and you can blame politics for that situation actually... kinda sad.
2 decades ago, I used to look at what the typical consumer could get from their telco in the USA with some envy. Things like local calls being effectively free (which made hanging out on a BBS all day long and such an option...), being able to go into a shop and buy yourself some random phone and connect it and the like..
Those things were virtually unheard of overhere in Europe. Local calls were and in cases still are charged per minute or per second even. Being able to connect my own equipment (legally that is) is also something that is 'relatively' recent.
Nowadays there seems to be little reason for envy. I have a wide choice in local providers now, even for the last mile (former national telco is forced to sell them off when the customer wants another provider), a wide choice of dsl providers, and with that amount of competition, also very decent prices (currently around the equivalent of $50 for 24mbit downstream, 1mbit upstream) and conditions (things like fixed IP, being allowed to run servers from your home connection etc are pretty standard), and, part of the cause of this, a local government that seems pretty much convinced that they should never again allow for a monopoly on a specific form of communications infrastructure.
The only "realistic" price for anything is what it sells for.
Yes, in some theoretical sense, but not in the sense that the transaction is a rational one to make. Buyers can make mistakes. Anyway, once you own it, there's no guarantee that someone else would pay the same price, so this theoretical price has changed already; without a buyer ready to shake on the deal, you have to come up with a value through another analysis.
There is an intrinsic value in an enterprise, which is the present value of the stream of revenues that the enterprise will produce in the future. Nobody has a crystal ball to know the future stream of revenues in advance, nor do they even necessarily have a good value for the appropriate discount rate to apply. So the true value is shrouded in mystery.