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AT&T Calls Google a Hypocrite On Net Neutrality
NotBornYesterday writes "AT&T is accusing Google of being a hypocrite when it comes to Net neutrality because it blocks certain phone calls on its Google Voice service. 'By openly flaunting the call-blocking prohibition that applies to its competitors, Google is acting in a manner inconsistent with the spirit, if not the letter, of the FCC's fourth principle contained in its Internet Policy Statement,' Robert Quinn, AT&T's senior vice president focusing on federal regulation, said in a statement. Google blocks certain calls to avoid high costs due to a practice known as traffic pumping. Rural carriers can charge connection fees that are about 100 times higher than the rates that large local phone companies can charge. In traffic pumping, they share this revenue with adult chat services, conference-calling centers, party lines, and others that are able to attract lots of incoming phone calls to their networks. Google responded by saying that the rules AT&T refers to don't apply to Google Voice for several reasons. Google Voice is a software application that offers a service on top of the existing telco infrastructure, it is a free service, and it is not intended to be a replacement for traditional telephone service. In fact, the service requires that users have a landline phone or a wireless phone."
No, I think it's more akin to "Oh yeah? Your mother wears army boots!"
It's not even the 'battleground of business'. It's a 5th grade playground.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I see no problem.
Google is just protecting itself from unscrupulous end-line telcos.
One major difference between what Google's doing and what AT&;T would like to do: AT&T wants to block/limit something the user wants to do and that they are doing deliberately, when the blocking benefits AT&T and negatively affects the user. Google is blocking something the user doesn't know (before they get the bill, at least) would happen and didn't ask for, and the blocking benefits the user (by keeping them from being unwittingly charged a large sum of money) and not Google. The whole reason those rural numbers are used, after all, is specifically because they can charge high rates without it being apparent from the number that the charges are going to be any higher than normal. They're used to deceive callers into thinking the call's a regular one and not one that'll be charged at a premium rate. Blocking that deception is, IMO, just ever so slightly different from keeping a user from using a service they want to use.
HAHAHAHAA!
Yeah - you've got a point. From my end, I used to work at ATT back in the evil early 80s, and it was one of the most corrupt and arrogant places I was ever involved with. And they were always the people bringing a knife to a gun fight - fighting this year's war with last year's technology and last decade's strategy. Clusterfuck central. There are ways to deal with all of this, but ATT lacks the creativity, and Google is too opportunistic to work any of it out. Sigh. Trainwreck on the count of three... 1... 2...
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Since when do telcos abide by the spirit of the law?
Looking first at broadband penetration, they want everyone to have broadband. At 4x the speed of a 56kbps modem. With download caps. And traffic shaping. Who's violating the spirit of the law?
Moving along to cell phone inter-operability. Although many telcos allow you to use outside phones on their networks, actually unlocking a phone is nearly impossible (with a few exceptions). Granted, they've subsidized your phone purchase. But you subsidize their paycheques.
Next topic: Phone number portability. It wasn't that long ago that you couldn't actually move your phone number when you left your portable phone company for another. So much for portability.
Finally... It's AT&T. They outsource (and violate the american dream!) and barely train their call centre employees. It is impossibly difficult to get out of a contract, even when they've violated the terms, and they charge for checking your voice mail and receiving text messages. Although they're legally allowed to do that, it violates the spirit of only paying for time that you use!
... also, they're owned by satan, but that's beside the point.
Hmm, I just realized. IIRC AT&T (like most phone companies) offers a premium-rate-call blocking service themselves. One that you have to pay for, if they're like the others I'm familiar with. Google's blocking makes it unnecessary to pay for AT&T's blocking. I suspect that's why AT&T's upset.
I quite agree.
Just for a second, suppose AT&T have got a point. That still wouldn't turn Net Neutrality a bad idea.
This is just a corporate level ad-hominem attack: Google are hypocrites, therefore they are Wrong, and their ideas are all Bad.
I reckon AT&T must be getting desperate if they're scraping this far down into the bottom of the barrel.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
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What the hell is AT&T smoking? Net Neutrality has nothing to do with phone service at the phone network level. Net Neutrality is all about internet network packet delivery and it is basically an Internet Service Provider issue, not about phone service. Last time I checked Google isn't an ISP (to third parties) while AT&T is for a large chunk of this country and as a major packet routing network (aka backbone provider) between various ISPs. AT&T trying its best to spread FUD as usual as it did in order to get laws passed to ban Municipal ISPs.
This space is not for rent.
This doesn't have anything to do with 900 numbers, it has to do with toll calls to rural telephone carriers. They are allowed to set arbitrary rates that AT&T and other LD carriers must/should pay. To entice calls they offer free conference call systems or other services that cause people in other areas to call these toll numbers.
So, in the honest-to-goodness telephony market, there are a bunch of dodgy rural providers who rip you off when you call a number in their fiefdom. As is poorly explained in the summary and article, they're trying to maximise the number of calls to their numbers - by selling them to sex line and chatroom operators and sharing the connection revenue.
AT&T and a load of other telcos have complained about this as they are hoisted by their own petard (free calls to landlines), and the net neutrality principle. The FCC are being painfully slow in sorting this out and giving the rural providers a good bitchslap.
I don't blame Google for not routing to these numbers, there are clearly defined prefixes for premium rate services and this is just a dodge to get round that. Eventually the loophole will be closed.
Where's the Kaboom?
There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom.
Funny, I thought the whole "net neutrality" issue was due to connectivity providers abusing the high cost of entry and exclusive agreements with local government to maintain an oligopoly so they can shaft people. Google just runs on top of existing infrastructure.
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The user doesn't get charged at all, just the phone company. The rural phone companies are exploiting a sideways subsidy meant to allow them to charge more for connections to rural homes by redirecting calls to large call centres through their networks. It's a shell game.
My land line and cell phone are both on ATT. To keep bills low, I don't have long distance (or anything else) on my land line, and I make sure never to go over my minutes on my cell plan (Giving credit where credit is due, the rollover minutes [which I did not have with verizon] do help to make this possible. So, if I am at home, I use Google voice to make out going calls via my land line. I can call anywhere in the country for free, and I'm not using my cell minutes. I can see why ATT is mad about GV, and all I can say is "Ha Ha!"
San Francisco Photographers
All of this is based on a crazy fee structure created by the big telecoms in an effort to drive out smaller competition. There has been a multi-decade war of defining fee structures that look fairish but are anything but that in practice followed by some provider finding a loophole and raking in a fortune. That, in turn, causes the large providers to demand a re-structuring all while pretending the last one wasn't their idea. Lather, rinse, repeat endlessly.
All of this is exactly the sort of double dipping they want to implement for the internet and it's 100% anti-neutrality.
Fundamentally, cross charging other carriers is bogus since each already got paid a fair fee by their own customer to provide the service. That is, I have a phone and I pay a monthly fee for it. That fee is in part for the service of accepting incoming calls for me and connecting them. I have already paid the call 'termination fee'. If my provider refuses to connect a call for me to my paid for phone line (presumably if another carrier originating the call refuses to pay termination fees), they are ripping ME off by not providing what I paid for.
So, actually, Google is pressing for proper neutrality in the VoIP world by refusing to participate in an anti-neutrality scheme that was in-part created by AT&T.
The lack of neutrality on the phone network exists because AT&T (along with the other Regional Bell Operating Companies, aka "ex-AT&T's" aka "Incumbent Local Exchange Comapnies") lobbied for it and they did so out of a belief that *they* owned the most valuable phone network resource (lots of subscribers) and could use the lack of peering to block competitors from entering the market (even though that was THE reason the courts caused the RBOCs to be created) by charging the competitors (CLECs) huge fees to access AT&T's customers which the CLECs would, in turn, have to pass on to their customers. Who'd buy phone service from Vonage if they had to charge you 15 times as much as AT&T or Verizon just so that Vonage customers could sometimes dial AT&T or Verizon customers?
Now the "incumbent" ISPs are making the same mistake in believing that *they* control the most valuable Internet resource (again, lots of subscribers) and want the right to charge connection fees. So what if somebody repeats what happened in the phone network world and starts up a small (restricted customer set) top-tier ISP and promises to give Google or Youtube absolutely free Internet service with the expectation that the ISP will recoup that cost (and much more) by charging the "incumbent" ISPs huge fees to connect people with Google's servers? Cha-Ching!
You'd think these people would learn from their mistakes...
A few days ago, The Iowa Department of Commerce Utilities Board put a stop to traffic pumping in Iowa. It seems that a number of small telcos like "The Farmers and Merchants Mutual Telephone Company of Wayland, Iowa" were overcharging long distance carriers for "terminating" large numbers of long distance calls that were actually shipped elsewhere. (Unlike the Internet, there is inter-company billing within the telephone system.) This service was used mostly for conference bridges and dial-a-porn. Sprint, which offers flat-rate long distance service within the US, was losing money on calls to those numbers. So Sprint blocked them and filed a complaint with the Iowa authorities.
Iowa ruled this week that the telcos were overcharging, had to stop it, and had to give the money back. Sprint also had to stop blocking, which won't be a problem once the rates come down.
The FCC is working on this problem nationally, but the worst offenders just got shut down.