Google Wireless Patents Published

Ian wrote to mention a ZDNet article about several patents on wireless technology held by Google employees. From the article: "The patent applications, filed by Google employees Wesley Chan, Shioupyn Shen and former Google product management director Georges Harik, propose lowering the cost of wireless access by offsetting the costs via advertisements on the service. Google, which receives the bulk of its revenue from advertisers, is seeking to expand its potential advertising base by moving further into the wireless market."

Comments

Master of the obvious...

[Alex P Keaton in da]

I will be master of the obvious- Giving things away for free is not a business model that leads to big profits. Give away ad supported free stuff is a different story....
I would take free wifi in exchange for looking at some ads-

Re:Master of the obvious...

[Anonymous Coward]

That is obvious. Which means it shouldn't be patentable...

GooglEvil

[Doc Ruby]

Patents on business model ideas, not working machines, are evil.

Re:GooglEvil

[Tim C]

There is a school of thought that would maintain that the ends do not justify the means, and that if google is serious about doing no evil then it should not participate in such practices, as doing so only serves to further legitimise them.

Re:GooglEvil

[szembek]

Not necessarily. If they enforce the patent it would be a different story, but sometimes companies have to take out patents just to protect themselves. It seems the trend is if you don't patent every possible idea in the world, some bullshit company will and then they will sue you. Look at Eolas. We'll have to see how this pans out though.

Re:GooglEvil

[Doc Ruby]

Instead of injecting themselves with poison, they could tell some reporters the other guy is competing unfairly by doing it.

Instead of patenting a business practice, Google could document their use of it as prior art, protecting themselves from a later patent.

"Everybody's doing it" is bad logic that most successful people outgrow when we become adults. That maturity might take longer for jocks, nerds and lawyers, but it's available to practically everyone.

Re:GooglEvil

[Doc Ruby]

Prior art is proof against later patents, and a lot cheaper - and less evil than even the threat to monopolize an idea.

Re:GooglEvil

[shawb]

Most of the cost of getting a patent is searching the existing documents to determine if the idea you implemented has already been patented. Once that is done actually getting the patent is quite trivial. And defensive patents can be argued as less of an evil than not getting them. If google gets hit by a submarine patent, there is a good chance they can pore through their patent library and find something the other guy is violating. Then they can threaten countersuit, or have the other party just give up the lawsuit because of the PR and financial emberrasment it will become. Not having the defensive portfolio could open google up to so much attack from other patent holders that A)they must resort to using more evil tactics in other business arenas to remain solvent or B)they go out of business, and their market niche then gets replaced by some other company, presumably one that already holds a near monopoly in the field (Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL?) so you get a tiny bit of the Devil You Know or the Devil You Don't Know.

I think Google is just growing up and realizing that "Do No Evil" is not strictly possible, but it does for the most part seem to be the goal they are striving for.

Huh?

[Gryle]

I'm not a programmer, but it sounds like Google is trying to patent a business model rather than an actual technology.

OK, guys...

[Otter]

I understand why patents and IP rights are crucial for innovation, and why the problem is lousy patents, not patents as a whole. These filings, though, sound like textbook cases of lousy patents. So, are all the GSycophants here going to engage in the same hysterical screeching we're getting two stories down on the E-Bay case, or is Google going to get the same approval Transmeta got?

Stop the madness

[Anonymous Coward]

Under the patent, the browser's appearance would be modified to reflect the brand associated with the wireless access-point provider.

Defensive patenting or not, this kind of crap has really got to stop.

One JavaScript Line Away ...

[hagrin]

... from having their entire business model come crashing to the ground. I have been thinking about the masses, the grandmas, etc. that don't have ad blocking software and that actually do see these advertisements, but how long will it take before the Operating System makers *cough* Microsoft *cough* start trying to "help" the user by blocking competitor ads by default through the OS and Windows Updates and deploying their own ads instead?

Many corporate enviroments already filter out ads through content blocking on their networks and that's a huge consumer market that aren't being reached (heck, I do all my "work" from work). How long until Cisco, Dell, etc. turn on this content filtering as their default policy?

Do these actions (blocking competitor content at either the network or OS level) constitute anti-trust activities?

I have a man crush on Google, no doubt, but I really wonder how they plan on succeeding with their current business model 10 years down the line. Or maybe, by then, everyone will be vested and no one from there will really care.

Dear Google

[twifosp]

Drop the do no evil charade. Creating patents based on prior art is not "good". Freei internet, netzero, and more have already provided a service just like this. Because it's wireless instead of wired has no technical merit and is just like Microsoft patenting the double-click. Creating patents on an idea that doesn't have technical merit is not "good". Creating large demographic databases to sell to advertisers to further feed a corrupt consumer society is not "good". Google knows more about its frequent users online & purchasing habbits than they know about themselves.

Drop the motto or start practicing what you preach.

Sincerely,
The-Not-Easily-Fooled

So obvious that it was already done w/dialup.

[khasim]

I remember quite a few dial-up schemes that were supposed to be "free" and "ad supported".

They seem to have all failed.

Why was this patented?

Ad-Supported Access

[ajkst1]

After reading this, it reminds me of the late 90's when people were handing out "free" internet access in exchange for showing ads on your screen. This is how NetZero got their start. I think the offer of free wireless internet is more appealing than free dial-up simply for the speed increase. Also, screen resolution has gotten higher, allowing for more usable space than with the ads from before. Anyone who actually used the free dial-up services knows what I'm talking about. The ads took up close to 25% of the screen. It was a little ridiculous.

If Google does what they did with GMail and have small, text-based ads that are relevant to what's being viewed, then I think it would be a viable option. Google doesn't like flashy banner ads, so I think this would be a better service. Only time will tell.

Nobody seems to be mentioning the most obvious use

[BuffaloBandit]

If I were Google, which I'm not, I would give away the free wireless without any special patent because it's only going to help me. Why? Because Google ads are already all over the mother-loving internet. I don't need to create new ad space, it's already there, but what I can do is fine-grain my targeting so that instead of serving up an ad for a national mortgage broker, I can serve up the ad for the mortgage broker within 1 mile of the hotspot. It seems like a brilliant plan to me. You are reading an Email through Gmail that mentions Dentist, what is in the ad space? Dentists in your area. Even without creating new space the premium price that Google could charge for this would offset the cost of the WiFi. Sure, it assumes that those using the WiFi would be coming in contact with existing Google ads, but that's pretty much inevitable... and just for good measure, make the user sit through a 30-second rich media advertisement before they can roam free (like Salon's Day Pass). But that's just my 2-cents. Google doesn't even have to do anything like NetZero. They already have presence throughout the internet and once they can offer targeted ads by hotspot, they will have an advantage over overture and everybody else doing contextual advertising and once they've taken over the market they really will have a monopoly and then they can do whatever they want. But if Google doesn't already have this patent, I'm claiming the IP right now for the good of a competitive market.

how hard is that?

[corbettw]

I've not read the patents, just the basic idea in TFA. The first one talks about modifying a browser's appearance to serve up ads when connecting to a wireless access point. So here's what you do:

1) Modify DNS so that every request gets 'wifi.google.com' appended to it (so 'slashdot.org' becomes 'slashdot.org.wifi.google.com'). Make sure DHCP is pushing your DNS servers. Correllary to this, block access to port 53 off your network.
2) Have every request get rewritten with the same IP address, or group of IP addresses.
3) Have a proxy server on that/those IP(s) serving up pages. The proxy discards the 'wifi.google.com' bit and gets the actual page from the real site, then rewrites the HTML, putting the original content in a frame beneath a smaller frame serving Google ads based on the content of the original page.

There's some fleshing out to be done there, especially regarding cookies and https, but nothing that couldn't be hammered out with a whiteboard, two markers, and a six pack of Diet Berries & Cream Dr. Pepper (yumm, tastes like happy!).

Considering pretty much every broadband provider I'm acquainted with is doing something similar (at least they're doing points #1 and #2), how much of a stretch is it to do #3? (Normally, the only do it for the first request, requiring you to accept their TOS. Hotels usually require it on every initial connect.)

Now, I don't know for certain that this is what the Google engineers have come up with. Maybe they're much more clever than I (nah, couldn't be). But whatever it is, it's going to look very similar to this. And if I can come up with this solution two minutes after reading the words "show ads on a browser to pay for wifi", how in the world could they think it qualifies for a patent???