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

[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.

Huh?

[Gryle]

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

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

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???