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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'"
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.