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In EU, Google Accused of YouTube "Free Ride"
An anonymous reader passes along a Financial Times piece that covers a push by EU telecoms to get Google to pay them directly — years after US ISPs began rattling that sword, to little effect thus far. "Some of Europe's leading telecoms groups are squaring up for a fight with Google over what they claim is the free ride enjoyed by the technology company's YouTube video-sharing service. Telefónica, France Telecom, and Deutsche Telekom all said Google should start paying them for carrying bandwidth-hungry content such as YouTube video over their networks.... Some European telecoms groups fear Google will reduce them to 'dumb pipes' because the internet search and advertising company pays the network operators little or nothing for carrying its content. Rick Whitt, a senior policy director at Google in Washington ... said Google was spending large amounts on its own data networks to carry its traffic to the point where it is handed over to telecoms companies round the world." Note that FT.com operates on a "first few per month free" paywall basis.
Google had to, sooner or later, start fighting such a fight. Interesting is that European, and not Asian or American, ISPs are engaging it. Who wins this fight ? It could have a big impact upon how the internet looks in a few years.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Google bought some bandwidth to be able to send site content to users. Those users bought some bandwidth to be able to receive it. What's the problem?
If you look at the other pole, users in these areas are getting 'free content' instead of paying for it. What about those profiting directly from Internet users? Commercial streaming services, premium usenet providers. This is just a desperate attempt by telecommunication companies to remain relevant.
Some European telecoms groups fear Google will reduce them to 'dumb pipes'
And I 'dumb pipe' is all I ever expected from my ISP, and it is what I'm paying for! If they want Google to pay for delivering the content, I will get access for free, right? Bullshit.
Yes, those poor telecoms that gives their users free access to the internet must be paid back by Google. How does Google dares to provide content and expect the charity telecoms to be the only ones that pay for those bills. I'm outraged.
Wait a minute....
Then why my telecom is sending me a monthly fee?
Dear telecomns, in case you have not noticed: you are 'dumb pipes' and always were. Get over it, stop whining and start providing the bandwidth you advertise.
Google should just tell those telecom companies to block YouTube from their networks if they think it's taking up too much bandwidth. Let's see who suffers.
The European Telecom operators should know that we, Internet subscribers, pay for our connection top Euros to be able to access sites like Google, Gmail or Youtube. Google is offering most of their services for free to their users and we, as clients of the Telecom companies, are already paying.
At least, Spain's Telefonica CEO demonstates he's just a parasite that doesn't know about what he's talking except getting more money from Google and their clients. If you understand the Spanish talked by a almost drunk man, you'll get the point watching this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVADWAxOZtg
If they complain about high traffic from google/youtube they should block them and let their users decide themselves if they want a ISP that will provide these services.
If we're not going to buy into net neutrality, why does it follow that google should pay the telecoms? Why shouldn't they pay google for enhancing their service?
If google stopped serving pages to people connecting through specific ISPs, those ISPs would go under. Who here wouldn't change their provider if they couldn't get google? You wouldn't really be on the net without google.
Like, the customers? If I'm paying for 10GB of data at 10Mbps each month, and the ISP is oversubscribed to uselessness, that's not Google's vault, that's the ISP's false advertising at work.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
This is like suing a car manufacturer because somebody got run over by a car they created.
Our culture doesn't get smarter, it just finds new ways of being retarded.
If you push it companies might start doing exclusive deals with other ISP to use their web services and if, for example, they take YouTube to others ISP banning telefonica out of it well... you can shove your hyperexpensive Internet fees up your sore asses.
Dear
Than an asshole pipe.
Note to telecoms: You were, are, and always will be, dumb pipes. Stop complaining, it used to be that you guys made respectable money selling dumb pipes to people who needed them. Of course, that was back before you became a bunch of bloated gasbags intent on squeezing every last packet out of the internet.
120 characters isn't enough to explain it.
Gotta agree with you guys, those guys don't understand that they are and always have been 'dumb pipes' and it was never free, they charge their freaking users already.
Get off the f'in greed wagon and stop trying to screw everyone.
Dear Mr. NuttyProf,
we have noticed you've been having a personal web site since 1993. With the statistics you graciously provide publicly we gather, that your site gets accessed several dozen times per month. Since we provide the channels bringing your content to our customers, we'd like to request you to review the attached contract and initiate a monthly fee of $14.95 in order for us to continue to serve your needs in the high quality you have come to expect of us....
Sincerely,
AnyOfTheLargeISPs
the taxi driver does not want ot be paid for the ride alone but also depending on the content of your baggage. Be prepared for a strip search.
broken analogies aside: the enduser alraedy paid for the bandwidth. Google does probably not pay for its bandwidth - more likely it has peering arrangements with most carriers. Being a major carrier itself this is the normal business.
I sniff greed and envy on the Telcos sides. "baaahh...this one makes more money than we do! Government, please help us to take a shar from its cake! Even though we do have a different business model we still feel entitled to a share on other companies income!"
its disgusting
It's not like these telecoms customers are paying them for access to the Internet, so they need to get their revenue from somewhere. Oh, wait...
This is not cable TV, you can't "unbundle premium channels", stop clinging to your ancient business models and come up with a good one.
What I don't think they've fully thought out is the end-game. Possible options:
1) Google pays them. Google then starts getting invoices from every ISP around, from the little mom-and-pops to the tier-1s demanding a cut of the pie.
2) Google cuts them off so that the above doesn't happen. These ISPs customers start screaming "Why am I paying you for access to the Internet, when you aren't providing it?" and they start switching to other providers that aren't pulling this.
Come on, telcoms! You're already charging users for access to the Internet, and the businesses they visit for access to the Internet. How many more times do you need to get paid?
They seem to think they're in a position of power because they control the "eyeballs", but those eyeballs will go to another provider if you don't provide access to the services they want.
Telefónica is like neandertal people, really. I have read some declarations from the director, and I was forced to check the date.. I was like a talk from the dictator Franco. And France Telecom is everything that is wrong with corportations plus everything that is wrong by govern owned industry.
Can these two companys die, please?
-Woof woof woof!
Indeed. The bit that really got me was:
Some European telecoms groups fear Google will reduce them to 'dumb pipes'
That is really all that they are, or at least should be. They are not content providers, they are merely facilitators.
which is totally what she said
There's a net neutrality conference organised by french regulators with people from google and FTC, video stream is available RIGHT NOW with real time english translation here: http://video.arcep.fr/arcep_13042010_en.html
All this bitching, be it in the US or the EU, is just about the telecoms wanting to double-dip. All bandwidth is paid for, one way or another. In the case of extremely large connections, like connections between Tier-1 ISPs, the cost is shared between the two ISPs. When they peer, it is an agreement where they say "You pay the costs of your equipment and lines, we'll pay the costs of ours, and we don't charge each other anything to trade data." At every level down from there, it is paid by a smaller consumer. If you are a smaller ISP, you pay the bigger ones for access to their networks. Individuals, businesses, etc then pay those ISPs for access to their network. All the bandwidth is being paid for.
They just want to double charge. They want to tell Google that they should have to pay because Google's data goes over their network.
Of course, if push came to shove, I'd bank on Google winning. Dumbass ISP X says "Ok, we are throttling Google traffic and/or blocking Youtube." Google says "Ok, we are blacklisting all your IPs and showing your users a page that explains what dicks you are and what you need to change for us to restore access." My bet? Consumers get furious at their ISP and either force a change, or simply switch to a new one.
It's the combination of these two points which makes it so noxious. We (as consumers) have been encouraged to treat broadband providers as another passive utility company, as fundamental to modern life as electricity and gas. Now they're trying to have it both ways, and suggest that at the same time, they're an active participant in content consumption and should be compensated at both ends.
So, which is it? Passive utility, to be taken for granted and paid monthly without a thought, or active content platform due recognition but with responsibility for quality of service? Something tells me that either way, consumers will not be the winners here.
sig:- (wit >= sarcasm)
Providing bandwidth for their users to do what they want? Is that the purpose of ISP?
Or is there any other purpose? Like laying down ground rules, like the Ten Commandments:
1. Thou Shalt Not View Video Online
2. Thou Shalt Not Use Too Much Bandwidth
3. Thou Shalt Pay Through Thy Nose
4. Thou Shalt Obey Everything
5. Thou Shalt Hath No Right
6. Thou Shalt Be Grateful
7. Thou Shalt Giveth Us All Thy Money
8. Thou Shalt Sacrifice Thy First Child For Us
9. Thou Shalt Let Us Screw You
10. Thou Shalt Not Complaint
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I don't want the telcos to be anything more than dumb pipes. That is what I am paying them for. I am not paying them for Google's contents.
Excelent strategy telecoms... lets try to predict this:
1- You block Google related pages
2- People screaming
3- Google says with a coolface "PROBLEM ISP CUSTOMERS?"
4- Google creates Google ISP "We now provide internets also... and TV... and Phone? Google Telecom here?"
5- ????
6- Bankrupt Telecoms regret step 1 but prefer saying that google monopolized everything.
Yes, pulling out of Europe is a valid option. No customers there.
“These guys [Google] are using the networks and they don’t pay anybody,” he[César Alierta, chairman of Telefónica] said.
No, we, the users, are using the google services and we already pays you for this access.
There is not a single Google service that is not reliant on network service,” he [René Obermann, Deutsche Telekom’s chief executive] said. “We cannot offer our networks for free.”
And you don't, we still pays you for this service.
STFU and deliver what we want and pays you for.
who shot the cat in the hat to experiment is insane
A dumb pipe is precisely what you are, and should continue being.
If the total amount of money paid by customers to the ISP is not enough to cover the bandwidth costs in the YouTube age, instead of going after Google, they should increase their prices so what the customer pays is enough to cover the outgoing bandwidth costs.
But they dont want to do that because they will loose customers.
Those YouTube megabytes are being requested by end users. It is they who are getting the "ride" - and it is usually not free. Google/YouTube is just making content available on demand - as is just about every other data supplier on the net except spammers. The only people getting a free ride are spammers, because they are using a "push" mode. Before they stop or slow my YouTube, which I want, let them do something about spam.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
To make a comparison, I think the Telecoms companies should be just like the water company. At the end of the day, they provide a pipeline, of sorts, which provides a medium. You turn the tap on, you get water. It is not the water company's prerogative to come to your house and boil your kettle. They give water, you pay for it and use it how you like. If only the telecoms/ISP would realise this, and accept their place, everything would be a lot easier.
in france they want to tax google (obviously paying for traffic wont work, taxing might)
this brings money to the gvt, which is controlled by the companies anyways.
On one hand we have content providers like Murdoch saying Google should pay them for the content Google is providing access to.
And on the other hand we have telcos saying Google should pay them because they're providing access to Google's content.
It's the fate of any success story; Google has money, they want it for themselves, and they think it's easier to get Google's than to earn their own.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Yeah, yeah, you're all saying "this is crazy, I've already paid for my bandwidth"...and you're all correct, but: /. passim : FCC in USA, filtering in Australia...)
As we've seen here recently, common sense or 'fairness' seems to have little to do with ISP regulation and/or behaviour.
(See
Here in Europe, many countries tax blank media and playback devices [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy] in order to 'compensate' artists for 'lost' revenue.
How long before Europe's telcos, (most of whom have strong lobbying power), actually get something like this either legislated, or get Google to cough up some money just by threatening to get it legislated?
They're already trying to grab some of Google's ad revenue:
"French President Nicolas Sarkozy is mulling a recommendation to impose a tax on Internet ad revenues in France. The proposal is aimed at helping the French culture industries survive the new digital age. But critics say it is absurd, unworkable and will do little more than prop up failing business models."
[http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,670837,00.html]
Given that it was a European (well, Briton, but it is on "that" side of the Atlantic), working at a European facility, that mucked up a perfectly good Internet with this "web" thingie, all of the non-maintenance traffic other than mail, telnet, and ftp should be billed to the EU, plus a royalty for Al Gore, since he invented the entire thing.
Isn't this just a trick so that they can later collude and increase the service charges across the board? Get publicity of their faux-plight and then go - "See, we tried to give you guys cheap internet but.."
Or maybe they're just testing the waters to see what they can get away with w.r.t. setting precedents. On a related note, this a systemic problem with overzealous capitalism. Every quarter the profits and revenues must go up - more, more, more. After a while, when you can't really drive them up any more, what do you do? (DRM?) Please note that I'm not arguing to abolish capitalism. I quite like it and have benefited greatly by it. As with all things, capitalism too has its flaws.
I've noticed that whenever I watch a video on youtube that google use some my MY bandwidth too to send it to me! They seem to think they can just do this without paying me a penny for it! How dare they! :)
The ISPs have it all backwards, presumably with full knowledge of the real problem. The customer pays for a connection to the internet. The customer then uses it to access popular services, like Youtube or Facebook or any other of this months fad.
Many ISP has vastly oversold their capacity to their customers and engaged in price fights that has made internet access well below what they should cost. They know its going to be a cold day in hell before the customers agree on a big price hike this late in the game so they try to wring money out of the popular services the customers use their bandwidth on.
Since the ISPs sell access to the internet they have nothing, absolutely nothing they can demand from services on the internet. They made this mess by charging to little for all to much bandwidth, well, sucks to be wrong dont it?
HTTP/1.1 400
TurboHercules, a French company in a fight with IBM, is puppeteered by M$.
Now M$ might just give a push to the European telecoms to try the same thing as in the US. C'mon, the attacks almost have matching checksums.
Due to higher market regulation in the EU and due to the fight taking place between European telecoms and en evil US corporation (Google), there might be more of a chance for the telecoms to win something.
Google bought some bandwidth to be able to send site content to users. Those users bought some bandwidth to be able to receive it. What's the problem?
Technically Google doesn't buy lots of bandwidth nowadays, the way people might imagine. They instead hook directly to many peers and at the backbones. That said, when the rest of us pay for "bandwidth", we pay exactly for building and maintaining the kind of infrastructure Google built themselves. But it explains why on the surface you can spin it like they did.
[dumb pipes] is really all that they are, or at least should be.
Actually, google itself is not making any content either. Its users are.
....any ISP that thinks Google isn't playing fair should just not allow connections to the Google Empire for their customers.
Then we'll see how long it takes for the free-market to self correct. I give it about 30 days, most of that time being required for the ISP to staff up their disconnections department.
The actual bad thing is that they want to use other businesses to join them, but that have a complete different problem with Google.
To increase the pressure on Google, the telecoms groups are interested in finding common cause with content owners such as media companies, which get little or no money from the technology company when it aggregates their content on Google News.
How do I uncompress my MD5 archive?
and this is just plain fucking stupid..If those ISPs think Youtube hammers their precious network bandwidth, perhaps they should block Youtube for a change. And see what happens then..dumb pipes..
I didn't say they made it, I said they provided it. Services like YouTube are great for providing everyday users with a high availability, high bandwidth platform to reliably distribute their content to a large audience (regardless of the merits of said content).
which is totally what she said
I was replying to an AC who was going on a "USA USA USA" rant - sorry for the confusion. Should have quoted him.
Do telecoms know how many people belive that internet is "google.com"? I've seen hundreds of people entering urls at the search box of google.com. And if you ask them to write the url at the proper place they look at you with puzzled faces... What google should do is pull the plug. Customers will not understand why they are not getting internet on their connection.
just say: "If that's to much bandwith for you, then just block youtube". I know i wouldn't buy an ISP for internet without youtube.
"This starts to look like a circular dependency. We might as well not charge anybody and thereby save money on accounting."
Remminds me of the story about the rich man and the poor village....A rich man walks into a hotel in a poor village where all the bussinesses are in debt. He gives the hotelier $100 for a room on the condition that if he doesn't like it he will take the money back and leave. The hotelier gives him the keys, confident the rich man will like the room he takes the $100 and pays the grocer for the food he bought on credit. The grocer takes the $100 and pays back the farmer the money he owes him, the farmer uses it to pay back the blacksmith who then goes to the hotel to pay off his debt to the hooker who in turn gives it to the hotelier for past rent. The rich man comes back dissatisfied with the room, takes the $100 and leaves the village. Nothing has changed but the village is now debt free.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Actually, google itself is not making any content either. Its users are.
Maybe not the content, but they're providing a very expensive service. The huge amount of storage space, the development that goes into the platform and the data centers operating all over the world are what makes youtube so usable.
That's what they should be, they are ISPs...
Maybe their concern is that it'll become obvious to everyone that they're dumb pipes, and that they're dumb pipes whose business model, pricing infrastructure can't cope with piping all that well.
Youtube can live longer without these ISPs than the ISPs can live without youtube. If users can't access youtube, they'll happily switch ISP to get at it.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Not picking on you personally but will you people stop calling them "pipes", anyone with half a clue about the interwebs knows they are called "tubes".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
They're right that someone's getting a free ride - only it isn't google.
My telecoms provider sold me my contract for a connection to the internet on the basis of the ability to:
-Download Music
-Download Films
-Watch TV & Videos online
-Play Games online
-Email, chat and web
How much are they paying Google et al for that?
Duh. STFU and just stop peering with them if you don't want the traffic. Of course then your customers won't get anything back when they request pages from Google. Good luck with that. Maybe they'll feel better when you pass along all your network cost savings to them. Right.
Bullshit PR aside, the facts are plain: Your continuing to peer with Google is proof you believe you derive positive economic value by serving Google's content. Given this reality, maybe now you can explain carefully why Google owes you something?
And when you're done answering that question, how about this one: Why is it that with TV distribution it's the cable providers paying the content providers, not vice versa as you'd propose Google do? Why shouldn't you be owing them money, for turning your dumb pipes into something people will pay $50 a month for?
This is journalism? Does the Financial Times just run press releases now?
Now it seems that my innocent advice ruined everything... I'm sorry.
I heard those comments months ago in Spain from Cesar Alierta, CEO of Telefonica. He sounded flamboyant and depreciative, almost threatening his own clients to cut the pipes if Google would not share their benefits with them.
TELEFONICA is been called TIMOFONICA ( scam-o-fonica) by spaniards for years for their greedy approach to the business, with all the benefits they made during the .com bubble era and the consistent poor service, and high prices they delivered during the 90's when they where an almost monopolistic ISP in Spain. Now that they are been side-tracked by new business models that make benefits out of offering 'gratis' services they are suddenly surprised for not been able of making loads of money by barely making their job, and they are simply jealous.
Let me tell you something: we are all ready to show then our middle finger.
FT has been with current company for a long time and Murdoch does not own this company.
The real problem is that many mobile ISP's (like Telefonica) have unlimited data plans on mobile phones. Guess what; some people actually use those. Big ooops. But not all countries have this, so it is unlikely they will be able to get Google to pay for their stupidity.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
The bandwidth google uses is paid for: by ISP customers. Those customers just happen to choose to go to Google. Furthermore, there is additional accounting of bandwidth done at the point where large ISPs interconnect; any imbalances are negotiated and paid for there. But, of course, ISPs don't have any leverage there either, because if the throttled connections to Google, their customers would go elsewhere.
What these ISPs want is to impose additional costs on Google (which Google somehow has to recoup) so that their services become more attractive in comparison. These companies want government to intervene to give their uncompetitive offerings a boost in the market.
And they are right: Google turns them into dumb pipes. And why not? These companies are there to provide cheap connectivity. We don't want them in the content business and we should actually pass laws preventing telecom companies from doing anyhing with content.
no, just call that one ISP's bluff and wait for them to cut off their own customers.
when they keel over and die with no customers left you can stick their head on a spike as a warning to the rest of the ISPs
(people *will* change their ISP if they get dicked around like that, so google won't lose them for long)
Peering links are the subject of negotiation and the ISPs don't seem to understand their position.
I pay for my internet link. I'm not providing anything my ISP wants other than cash. I pay a competitive rate cause my ISP has competition that I'd churn to.
The lower link tier ISPs pay for their uplinks because the higher tier ISPs provide a service they want.
Google gets good deals cause they pay heaps for data centers and their own comms links and the ISPs that they peer with save when they connect.
If somebody said they could save me 6-7% of my upstream charges if I gave them a port on my router I'd jump at that deal.
If you don't like the deal that google is offering don't accept it. You just have to pay your upstream peers for the traffic. If you don't like the deal they are offering either churn to somebody else or don't offer access to the complete Internet. I guess that if you didn't offer access to the complete Internet then your subscribers would churn to somebody who did.
One of the advantages of the Internet is the tiered structure. I pay my ISP to negotiate the routing with their peers/providers. They pay for their access and hopefully have agreements for local routes that make that cheaper.
do you think this is a coincidence, right 2-3 days after the u.s. courts killed net neutrality in favor of comcast ?
Read radical news here
Your kidding right ? i'm paying my ISP for the bandwidth what's youtube got to do with that ? Now quite sure i understand the reasoning for some kind of pay.
I notice that all on the companies mentioned are ex-state-owned companies. Basically they're the old monopoly telecoms who got to lay the telephone lines in the past using taxpayer's money and later got privatised, keeping ownership of all that infrastructure.
Even though in most (maybe all) of the countries where those companies are based laws were passed forcing them to provide access through their lines to any company wanting to work as an ISP (a boon to competition and why Internet access is faster an cheaper in most of Europe than in the US) they are still meaningful because they own the last-mile infrastructure and get paid by ISPs that use those lines to provide Internet access.
They still retain many of the bad habits from their days as a state own monopoly (big, fat and uncompetitive) and have only remained in their positions because of the huge barriers to entry in the landline telecoms infrastructure business.
Given that I would say that these big, fat behmots are worried about high-bandwith Internet services because they have in fact not updated the infrastructure:
- Until now they were relying in advances in xDSL technology to provide ever increasing speeds on top of the existing POTS copper lines. This improving of xDSL technologies is now slowing down while at the same time government have suddenly discoverd it's fashionable to rant about the need for universal high-speed Internet access to "liberate Europe's creative energies" and "Create the jobs of the future". This means that a critical mass is building that would lower the barriers to entry (or make it a better investment) to lay fiber-to-the-home.
Once other companies have replaced enough of the installed base of last-mile POTS copper wires with fiber these guys (who never had to face any real competition in the landline telecoms business) will likelly shrink to nothingness.
This is why they're trying to hold the tide.
somebody mod parent up I have no points but he's sitting at 0 and I agree with him 100%!
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
Then why my telecom is [charging] me a monthly fee?
For the same reason that channels on basic cable TV collect money from both the cable operators and the advertisers.
Deutsche Telekom is pretty damn evil. Try to cancel your subscription if you're leaving the country. Good luck...They will charge you every which way possible. Oh, and they charge per minute for customer service. Try to move your connection to your new apartment. Sorry, that requires that you sign a new 2 year contract. Oh, and when you finally do, it will take months before they switch you over. And they will switch it over incorrectly the first 3 times.
Google to ISPs: We are spending an awful lot of money on providing content to your users, without us you wouldn't exist. Please pay 1 cent per video downloaded last monts (send bill to ISP)
ISP to Google: We won't pay.
Google to ISP: you have 30 days, or we will stop providing your network with free content.
ISP to Google: Uhh, ohh, can't we just be friends and call it even ?
They are dumb pipes.. when are they going to realise this? No one looks to ISPs to provide them content, except from those that choose to have an email account with them.
From France:
César Alierta, chairman of Telefónica, said Google should share some of its online advertising revenue with the telecoms groups, so as to compensate the network operators for carrying the technology company's bandwidth-hungry content over their infrastructure.
"These guys [Google] are using the networks and they don't pay anybody," he said.
Mr Alierta said that if no revenue sharing agreement was possible between the internet search engines led by Google and the network operators, regulators should supervise a settlement.
More from France:
Stéphane Richard, France Telecom's new chief executive, said: "Let's see the development of digital society in terms of the winners and the victims. And today, there is a winner who is Google. There are victims that are content providers, and to a certain extent, network operators. We cannot accept this."
From Germany:
René Obermann, Deutsche Telekom's chief executive, said Google and others should pay telecoms groups for carrying content on their networks.
"There is not a single Google service that is not reliant on network service," he said. "We cannot offer our networks for free."
And this common theme:
To increase the pressure on Google, the telecoms groups are interested in finding common cause with content owners such as media companies, which get little or no money from the technology company when it aggregates their content on Google News.
All of the above mentioned people can suck Googles Googly balls and then the balls of the collective of every customer who subscribes to their pathetic services and will immediately switch to another provider and probably will participate in an antitrust lawsuit.
This is why NET NEUTRALITY is important yet once more! This is what the greedy slimy pathetic leechy bloodsucking parasitic vomit-inducing bastards that these corporations are want from you.
You can't handle the truth.
That's all an ISP is supposed to be. Customers pay ISP for access to the internet (Google pays ITS ISP for access to the internet), paid for network traffic travels between Customer and Google.
France Telecom is actually worse, they make their workers suicidal because they also try to suck the lives out of them, the management of France Telecom are vampires.
DUMB PIPES
Maybe not the content, but they're providing a very expensive service. The huge amount of storage space, the development that goes into the platform and the data centers operating all over the world are what makes youtube so usable.
Same with telcos. The communication lines they provide from my home to internet exchange centers and from there to all over the word, are what makes internet so usable. It's still dumb pipes, though. Like Google, they provide capacity rather than content.
The business models are different, though: telcos are paid by their users, Google is paid by advertisers, so it can be free for users. If telcos start changing their business model, I expect my internet connection to be free.
Technically Google doesn't buy lots of bandwidth nowadays, the way people might imagine. They instead hook directly to many peers and at the backbones.
That kind of network isn't free either. Google pays for its bandwidth by building their own network. They still pay.
And they are dumb, too, although that was optional.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
The problem seems to be that at least here the Telecoms are not happy anymore selling just the "dumb pipes", but they want to also try and sell services. They see it as unfair that they are late in the game and someone is already providing free (for the consumer) services that they have a hard time competing with.
I am an example of a very bad customer, since I don't buy my ISP's video on demand, mailboxes, computer security packages, backup services and many other services. I just want a pipe and the bandwidth from them.
They are already being paid by their customers for the bandwidth used. What do they expect? to be paid twice!
Just think of all the people that sign up for Internet service because of youtube, and not a single ISP is paying Google for this privilege.
There is no Zaphod the 42nd agrees with the post moderation.
If you stop visiting them, if you stop linking to them, they will either open up or die. Either way it's no big loss.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
We shall see Google acquiring ISP all over the globe in 3...2...1...
Democracy is for the people; you only vote once per season and we'll do the rest of the work for you don't have to.
Um, yes. That's what they are.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I guess when you build out fiber and peering stations you get that for free. Here I come, top 5 network providers!
If they aren't dumb pipes does that mean the ISP's will pay Google as part of the settlement if someone successfully sues youtube? If they want to play that game it has to work both ways.
Telecoms are also demanding a share in the profits of any business transaction conducted via telephone. "Companies have been getting a free ride for too long now, using our services to make a profit, and it's time we get our fair share." This follows the announcement by the Wall Street Journal that they will start suing people who make money off of the stock market after perusing the Journal's stock quotes, without giving Murdoch a cut of the profits.
The telco's are already being paid by me, the paying customer (one who's being bled dry in Belgium if you actually want a usefull connection), they can go STFU.
Perhaps Google should become an ISP. They'd hardly agree to giving money to other ISPs and they could punish the annoying ones by stopping/slowing traffic from Google's own servers.
I think it's completely reasonable: the telecoms companies should charge Google for transmitting bits, and Google should charge the telecoms co's for access to Google and Youtube. It would be interesting to see whether telecoms customers were that keen on an internet service that didn't include the world's most popular sites.
Honestly, it turns out that the internet is a network of networks! You transmit data in order that your data is transmitted. If you decide not to play ball, others won't play ball with you. And in a battle of you vs the world, there's a predictable outcome.
This may seem like a great idea to these companies right now. It won't look like such a good plan when they understand the extent to which they are dependent on the goodwill of others. Refer to SCO for a lesson in being a good community member.
"Common carrier status"
As far as I know, there is no such thing in Europe - it is an American status, not one that is applicable worldwide.
Have a look at soylentnews.org for a different view
Customers pay to have access to request files and get the content they want. Some telcos want the content provider to pay to upload that content as well. I wonder if that model would work for FedEx. Imagine a package being shipped from company A to customer B. Company A already pays for the shipping--a cost typically passed on to the customer. What if FedEx wanted a payment on each end--a charge to company A for picking up the shipment and a charge to customer B for delivering it? I don't think anyone would tolerate that, because the company is getting paid twice for the same shipment.
I realize that transfers along data networks are a little different, because the file may enter the stream on one network and then exit the stream via another, but it still seems like the telcos are trying to milk the cow from both ends.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
... will it be free for the telecom's customers?
My other UID is lower than this one.
The higher suicide levels among France Telecom employees seems to be true. The article I read on it (in the Economist IIRC) said that it was probably something to do with it being a privatized form where things were not going too well in internal-management terms. (I may have misremembered that.)
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
they could punish the annoying ones by stopping/slowing traffic from Google's own servers.
I think that would be seen as Bad by most legal systems.. and by most Google employees in fact.
which is totally what she said
That's like asking car manufacturers to pay road tax :-/
Amazingly retarded... these telecoms companies (aging dinosaurs) are just pissed cause they cant compete with the success of Youtube, just cause they oen the 'pipes' they want to own everything on them also.
In fact, I thought you could make *lots* of money being a "dumb pipe" provider.
What's wrong with being a profitable provider of infrastructure?
Everybody "peers" at some point. As an end-user (and most website owners too) we don't have enough money to peer with any of the big players. That's why we peer with our ISP's (or host our servers at somebody else's datacenter) to provide this peering. We don't necessarily pay for bandwidth (as those agreements may vary from dedicated bandwidth pipes to pay-per-bit bandwidth) but we all pay to peer to other networks.
Google is big enough that they can peer themselves. They chip in at the point of the core routing infrastructure just like all the other ISP's, datacenter etc. Google is it's own private ISP. When ISP's want Google to pay for bandwidth usage on their networks, they would (if they were honest) also have to start charging/paying each other to use each other's bandwidth whether it be their customers BitTorrenting between each other or connecting to a server in a datacenter.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I didn't say they weren't. But it's apples and Oranges. Youtube is a service which relies on IP traffic, whereas telcos sell Internet connections to facilitate just such traffic. As far as they are concerned, Youtube traffic is the content that the customers want, and have paid for.
Okay, let me explain how the Internet works.
First off, I pay an ISP -- AT&T, Qwest, Level 3, whatever, someone leasing their lines and paying them maybe -- for access to the Internet. That means I plug into your shit, you plug into your Tier 1 provider's shit (if you're not Tier 1), and the Tier 1 providers are all plugged in to each other.
Now, another person pays an ISP for the same thing. This person might have an agreement much different than mine; they may be an ISP buying a hook-up to Qwest, for example. Or maybe they're a content provider, and they've got a contract that says they can have so much upstream. At any rate, they pay someone, they plug into the Internet.
Okay, get this.
I'm paying you for access to the Internet.
They're paying their service provider for access to the Internet.
Since we both have access to the Internet, we can both communicate.
Guess what? Your agreement says I have access to those resources and I can connect to them. Their agreement says they have access to the Internet and I can connect to them. Nobody owes you anything, we all already paid.
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Google is now providing the traditional email, storage and content services that were once part of the expected role and expense of running an ISP.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
It seems to me that the audience the telecoms are addressing are the European regulators. What the telecoms want is for government to set a price for the bandwidth Google is "using", and to force Google to continue "using" this bandwidth and to pay the government-set price. The key is to get a mandate both that google owes the telecoms (and not the other way around), and that Google is obliged both to continue providing its services and to pay for the privilege.
From the telecom's point of view, it's a neat trick if they can pull it off.
Some European telecoms groups fear Google will reduce them to 'dumb pipes
This is exactly what a telecom company SHOULD be. They should concentrate on telecom and NOT on content.
One could almost argue that telecom companies ganging up on a company like Google is anti-trust - using an oligopoly in one industry to leverage another.
AccountKiller
How dare you give them profit (but not as much as they hoped)! Just imagine if a restaurant owner acted this way. "Google, you ordered thirty six-foot sub sandwiches for your giant party, but you didn't buy our drinks, which are our biggest profit margin. How dare you use canisters and a rented fountain dispenser? We can't do business with you any more."
Of course, that analogy doesn't make sense; it's more like a store owner that Google pays to have its Nexus One phone put on a endcap for high visibility, Google provides the Nexus One (content), and People buy it from the stores. Hmm, I just realized that according to this latest analogy, the store owners(ISPs) should be paying Google for the Nexus One (content), otherwise, no one could buy it at the stores.
Usually from some dumbass who doesn't understand the business. Like a CEO. Or Rupert Murdoch. Why doesn't it go farther than that? I assume Google either threatens to cut those ISPs off completely from their services, or they point out that (at least in the USA) they have enough dark fiber around to deliver faster, better internet to any given service area. Either option would be a death blow to most ISPs.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Dear ISP:
I am considering signing up for X Mb/sec, I expect to be able to use it, and 24/7 if I wish. What is this "acceptable use" and "monthly bandwidth limit" wording in the contract? How can you possible advertise a bandwidth rate, ask me to sign a yearly contract, then renege within your own wording and say I can only have X GB/month? By my calculations, X rate over Y time = much more than you say I am entitled to. Are you engaging in bait-and-throttle tactics here?
Sincerely,
Mom
What do customers need from their ISP other than connectivity to other services on the Internet? Most ISPs have stopped offering NNTP service, and I don't think most people use their ISPs e-mail servers. All I want from my ISP is "dumb pipe" service.
you're telecoms groups, you're supposed to be "dumb pipes". Charge me a fee, give me bandwidth, stay the fuck out of the way. Stop trying to control my traffic.
Beyond time for a wifi mesh internetwork anyway.
I think Government / User should start thinking Internet as "Road" in real life. It should be a government's job to make sure the road is good, and free for everyone (from tax). No private company should dictate how many time you can walk on the "Road" (Internet) and how popular you're (such as Youtube). If that's the case, then New York City should start charging all retail store or company that attract so much tourist into Manhattan for the "Road" that they maintains.
Some European telecoms groups fear Google will reduce them to 'dumb pipes' because the internet search and advertising company pays the network operators little or nothing for carrying its content.
That's because they *are* dumb pipes. That's their bloody job, moving bits around. That's all I'm paying my ISP for... I don't use their portal or email account or anything. Get used to it... you worked hard enough to become dumb pipes, throwing out services that you could actually provide more efficiently than websites like Usenet... you made your bed, sleep well.
I live in Switzerland, and I pay a pretty hefty price to my ISP for the bandwidth I consume. What content I access from my computer through their network and how much data I can transfer to and from my systems is stated in a contract I made with my ISP. I would not condone my ISP forcing Google through government force to pay _again_ for the bandwidth I'm paying them for. Fortunately it seems my ISP isn't on the list, lest I would break contract with them right now for being abusive. I wish they just try to block Youtube to their customers if Google doesn't pay. I bet they would go bankrupt in a month. It is Youtube and bandwidth-hungry services that fuel the need for large bandwidth. Were Youtube not to exist, and those ISPs would have a hard time selling their high-bandwidth broadband services to customers that wouldn't need them for anything. ISPs _are_ dumb pipes, they need to get over it or start being competitive doing some other business. These ISPs on the list seem like the kind of corrupt corporations willing to immorally extract money from anyone they can. I hope they all die a horrible death.
I agree that they are dumb pipes, however, that got me thinking about the arrangement I have with my cable company. What's the difference between the data (content) I am receiving over my net connection, and the data (content) I am receiving as my television service? I don't mean the bits and bytes here, I mean the actual content. My cable company would like to call themselves a 'content' provider, but they aren't making those television programs, they are simply passing them to me through a pipe. That being said, why should that part of my service be any different from my internet?
This is sticky because I realize that the actual content providers GET PAID to have their shows broadcast/provided. Does that mean that the internet is upside down? Should the local ISP's actually be paying Google for their content?
If google said we're not paying tough
and an ISP blocked them, their customers would just leave for another ISP
Remminds me of the story about the rich man and the poor village....A rich man walks into a hotel in a poor village where all the bussinesses are in debt. He gives the hotelier $100 for a room on the condition that if he doesn't like it he will take the money back and leave. The hotelier gives him the keys, confident the rich man will like the room he takes the $100 and pays the grocer for the food he bought on credit. The grocer takes the $100 and pays back the farmer the money he owes him, the farmer uses it to pay back the blacksmith who then goes to the hotel to pay off his debt to the hooker who in turn gives it to the hotelier for past rent. The rich man comes back dissatisfied with the room, takes the $100 and leaves the village. Nothing has changed but the village is now debt free.
And that's is how things would work in a sane world. (Minus the prostitute.)
And by "Sane" I mean, "Free of Usury". In fact, things would work even better than that, because the Sun keeps pumping energy into the system. The planet is one gigantic solar collector. Logically, scarcity should only ever be a temporary situation at the worst of times because there is simply so much raw energy freely available. But that's not how it works in reality. Why?
Because of the cowardice of the Dark Side and their fear of the Universe and their resulting desire to control all variables so that nothing can hurt their precious, delicate little selves.
I've been trying to boil the idea down to a single sentence. I've not quite managed it yet, but this is what I've got so far to explain how the world has been set up in the ultimate con job. . .
All the money in the world is provided by the banking system. The way all of that money first gets into circulation is by being borrowed by the public and by governments. Borrowing is done at interest. If the banks decide to call in all of those debts, then all the money in the world is now gone. Except interest is still owing. So where does the money come from to pay that interest?
The money isn't the valuable thing. Debt IS, because it automatically creates slaves.
The banks create slaves, and thus control over the entire populace.
That's the con job. It is exactly this simple, and it is exactly how it was intended to work by those who created it.
The way out of the trap is to unplug from dependence upon interest bearing currency. There are many ways to do this. Can you think of any of them? Double points to those who can solve for the big ticket items, such as housing.
Have a nice day!
-FL
Just think - If the only websites you knew about was the ones that you found by clicking links on websites that you started with or ones you learned about from other people. For example: Digg or Slashdot would lead to many new sites, but pdp11.org might not take you much out of it's content realm. A vast portion of the Internet would be unavailable.
The store owners do pay Google (or HTC) for the phones. That's why they are called resellers.
They were dumb pipes even before... Imagine how it would be if they were not, you are talking on the phone with a friend and one of you mentions Pizza, suddenly a local Pizza delivery place is connected in to the conversation and asks if you would like to order a Pizza (You and your friend were actually just talking about how the Pizza made you both sick recently)
Or even more chilling, one of you mentions some thing that, taken out of the context of your conversation, seems dangerous or illegal - and the phone call is dropped. You were planning an attack in World of Warcraft or one of the Battle Simulators and click, no phone call anymore.
No Telcos have *always* been dumb pipes.
I wasn't talking about phones. I was talking about ISPs, Google, and bandwidth. Phones were analogies.
google pays its end of the deal to connect. check.
customers on these isp ends pay their monthly fees, check.
if these fuckers wanna double dip in such a greedy manner, try that shit on your customers..
oh wait they wont tolerate it? oh! then why do you think a multi-billion dollar company will?
shut the fuck up, last miles. if you hate the internet so much, stop carrying it and let smaller companies who wish to provide internet run the show.
I dunno how it is in europe, but in the US, last miles are almost 100% subsidized by taxpayer dollars, "their" infrastructure is really the government's by proxy, and by another proxy, the taxpayer's. The taxpayer sure isnt getting a free ride, neither is google.
If anyone's getting a free ride, it's these phone companies.
pot meet kettle.
Yesterday, ESPN told me I could watch video of a baseball game live on ESPN3.com. However, when I clicked the video, it said that my ISP was not an "ESPN3 affiliated service provider".
I am guessing ESPN3 charges ISP's to access the video streams, not unlike how broadcasting companies charge cable / satellite companies to carry their channels.
I think we all share a laugh when data service providers complain about being dumb pipes, because that is exactly what they are and should be. But if this move is successful for a monster like ESPN, expect others to follow....not good for us consumers.
youtube already costs too much to run as it is. If these retarded taxes and fees are charged, youtube in Europe would no longer be profitable. And "do no evil" does not mean "take one for the team"
google as a corporation would rather cut their losses than subsidize funny cat videos for the euro zone.
if these are passed through, expect proxy networks to become big business.
"To increase the pressure on Google, the telecoms groups are interested in finding common cause with content owners such as media companies, which get little or no money from the technology company when it aggregates their content on Google News."
If the telecoms say that media companies are right in asking for money for access to their content, then the telecoms should pay the media companies, since they aggregate their content, giving the user one data pipe to access the entire internet. Basically (by this argument) the telecoms should pay Google, which in turn should pay the media companies.
Basically they're the old monopoly telecoms who got to lay the telephone lines in the past using taxpayer's money and later got privatised, keeping ownership of all that infrastructure.
You say that like no one had to pay for the companies and their infrastructure. When a state-owned business is privatized, it is sold off to investors, either through shares or lock, stock, and barrel (shares can also be given away to citizens, but this type is far less common). So the state, and by extensions the tax payers, are compensated for the costs involved in building out the infrastructure.
So when you say these new private enterprises "kept" the ownership of the infrastructure, you're betraying your profound lack of knowledge in how these things work. Which means everyone can safely ignore the rest of your post, however coincidentally insightful it might be.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
It should be some form of illegal 'conflict of interest' for a company to be both a content provider and an ISP. No company can do both. That includes subsidiaries of a bigger company. I suppose we can't prevent board of director mixing though.
> From the telecom's point of view, it's a neat trick if they can pull it off.
Well, given that the "regulators" are also their largest shareholders...
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The ISP's customers have already paid for this bandwidth. This is just pure greed.
Actually, I think the taxi driver want you to pay him to take you to the Hotel, but then wants the hotel to pay him for *everyone* *any taxi* delivered in that day.
peering arrangements is a form of payment, just not paid in cash, but in a service. Otherwise the carriers would not have agreed to it.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
Back in the the day the telcoms were in charge with their SS7 networks etc. which had intelligence in the network and nodes (voice mail etc.) and dumb end points(phones).
By embracing the Internet (end-to-end, stupid network, rich end points) they became nothing more than dumb pipes. With QoS etc. they try to go back to what it was, by turning the net into something it's not - controllable.
(insert telecom)'s services will ad value to your company's business, but not that much value, well... at least not obscene amounts of value.
Your analogy with the cable providers is a bit flawed given the fact that cable providers all provide different type of content and charge according to wich content channels they provide, whereas internet is one big chunk of content, and users are not interested in buying a fragmented internet. Also, internet is unicasting, whereas cable is multicasting, meaning that infrastructure charges with cable are constant. With the internet, infrastructure costs tend to rise with time, with the amount of customer remaining constant.
It would be a pleasure to continue this conversation with you.
Aye... the taxi driver is saying, "You are going to see a block buster movie in my cab. The people that made the movie owe me some money!"
So your charge for the ride is different depending on if you are going to pick up groceries (the farmers owe the cab driver money) or to a lawyer (the lawyer owes the cab driver money) or for a tryst with your mistress (your mistress owes the cab driver oral sex).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Dear ISPs, you *are* dumb pipes. We pay you for the transference of bits over your network. Google pays their ISPs for the transference of bits over their networks. You and the other ISPs can either bill each other for the bits that come from one network onto the other, or forego that mostly pointless excercise and build general agreements in the ilk of "you pump my bits and I'll pump yours". This is called peering, and while your marketing and/or financial departments may not actually be aware of it, you are already doing it.
In other news, the water companies want the grenadine manufacturers to pay them because they're transporting lemonade ingredients over their facilities, and they shouldn't have a free ride - they're not dumb pipes, after all.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
You seem to have setup your own strawman and proceeded to attack it in your argument.
I never said that the values for which those companies were sold did not reflect their ownership of the infrastructure.
No, but you implied it by saying the previous incarnation of these companies had their infrastructure paid for with taxpayer funds, then the new private companies got to "keep" that infrastructure. They didn't keep it, they bought it.
Words have meanings, and if you can't be bothered to use the right ones to convey your thoughts you're going to continue to have misunderstandings like this. You need to do a better job of expressing yourself.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
You know... they attract too much attention to this the EU will realize this is a cash substitute and hit them with a vat.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Maybe their concern is that it'll become obvious to everyone that they're dumb pipes, and that they're dumb pipes whose business model, pricing infrastructure can't cope with piping all that well.
No, their business model if fine, they make a lot of money, they just, you know, want more money.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
1. Iceland is not a member state.
2. Greece and Poland are bigger than most EU members.
3. Greece has gotten very, very generous help from the EU so they're certainly not complaining.
Scene from Wendy's:
Customer walks to the counter and order's a burger. Wendy's business model says the customer should pay and the customer does and enjoys the burger.
Wendy's goes to the BEEF supplier and says: Where's the BEEF? We need more! The Beef supplier complies. Wendy's hands them a bill and tries to walk off with the BEEF. Wendy's figures they are just providing a BEEF distribution service.
What most people don't know is that this happened to my Grandfather during the Great Depression. He was a Saskatchewan farmer and shipped a calf to Toronto. They sent him a bill because the calf didn't fetch enough to cover the transportation costs.
My Grandfather shipped no more calves to Toronto. Maybe some people in Toronto went to bed hungry.
In fact the telecommunications industry has been double dipping for YEARS. Google may well be able to negotiate a peering arrangement. The VAST MAJORITY of companies that provide internet content are NOT in a position to peer. So they pay for the privilege of providing free content for the telecommunications industry and clients who are often mum and pop ISP's.
Google might have enough clout to fight this. Most content suppliers have no chance. This is a very unfair business model. The ones who pay the price are the consumers who might be missing out on websites created by some very talented people. Then we have web masters and graphics artists many of whom spend a great deal of time and money one school and tuition while learning their craft. They are looking for careers that might not materialize.
How many people remember the Dot.Com Bubble? For those interested in economics I'll provide this link to Eric Janszen's website: http://www.itulip.com/ Eric writes of the technology bubble in a number of articles.
Eric writes that the action of the FED after the technology bubble burst leads directly to the housing bubble and the present recession. The issue is that a lot of the reason the tech bubble burst is _because_ there was no workable business model. Companies that tried to create internet content went bankrupt.
Look here: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/02/0081908
How many billions of dollars were lost by investors as the internet unfolded and the dream of "if we build it they will come" unfolded? Well - we did come. Unfortunately there was no money in it for those who were living the dream!
I say the greed of the telecommunications oligopoly had a lot to do with this.
Except the GP never said laying fiber was free. He said, and rightfully so, that Google doesn't buy bandwidth the way people imagine that they do. The way they "buy" bandwidth is by laying their own fiber and hooking into other peers.
Scene from Wendy's:
Customer walks to the counter and order's a burger. Wendy's business model says the customer should pay and the customer does and enjoys the burger.
Wendy's goes to the BEEF supplier and says: Where's the BEEF? We need more! The Beef supplier complies. Wendy's hands them a bill and tries to walk off with the BEEF. Wendy's figures they are just providing a BEEF distribution service.
What most people don't know is that this happened to my Grandfather during the Great Depression. He was a Saskatchewan farmer and shipped a calf to Toronto. They sent him a bill because the calf didn't fetch enough to cover the transportation costs.
My Grandfather shipped no more calves to Toronto. Maybe some people in Toronto went to bed hungry.
In fact the telecommunications industry has been double dipping for YEARS. Google may well be able to negotiate a peering arrangement. The VAST MAJORITY of companies that provide internet content are NOT in a position to peer. So they pay for the privilege of providing free content for the telecommunications industry and clients who are often mum and pop ISP's.
Google might have enough clout to fight this. Most content suppliers have no chance. This is a very unfair business model. The ones who pay the price are the consumers who might be missing out on websites created by some very talented people. Then we have web masters and graphics artists many of whom spend a great deal of time and money one school and tuition while learning their craft. They are looking for careers that might not materialize.
How many people remember the Dot.Com Bubble? For those interested in economics I'll provide this link to Eric Janszen's website: http://www.itulip.com/ Eric writes of the technology bubble in a number of articles.
Eric writes that the action of the FED after the technology bubble burst leads directly to the housing bubble and the present recession. The issue is that a lot of the reason the tech bubble burst is _because_ there was no workable business model. Companies that tried to create internet content went bankrupt.
Look here: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/02/0081908
How many billions of dollars were lost by investors as the internet unfolded and the dream of "if we build it they will come" unfolded? Well - we did come. Unfortunately there was no money in it for those who were living the dream!
I say the greed of the telecommunications oligopoly had a lot to do with this.
Google's existence is one of the only reasons that many people pay to use your bandwidth in the first place.
Without Google and without Google's sites like YouTube, there is no reason for most people to have high-bandwidth connections.
Google depends on people having high-bandwidth connections, but more than that, the ISPs depend on Google; they depend on there actually being content available, because without that content from companies like Google, most people wouldn't have a need for an internet connection.
Google is lucky enough that most ISP's are eager to peer with them just to avoid having to pay their transit providers for the traffic. The ISP I work for would happily string a 1Gbps to pretty much anywhere Google wanted to in Denmark, and allow Google free access to our customers. Alas, we're too small, and when there was talk about making all the small and medium-sized ISP's in Denmark gather in one place and offer Google an exchange point, Google said no. Denmark doesn't have enough traffic to make it worthwhile for Google to bother with a national exchange point.
If the large transit providers start playing hardball with Google, Google can bypass them for a whole lot of customers. The only other content providers I know of in similarly enviable positions are Youtube (which is Google again) and Akamai.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Isn't the FT owned by one Rupert Murdoch? He's currently winding-up the nanny-state muppets who buy The Sun regarding Facebook's unwillingness to put a useless button on their site "to protect children". The button in question links to one of the fake charities that plague the UK (this one being CEOP). Following the money leads to.....MySpace, a Murdoch-owned competitor (in his eyes, at least), hence his
Murdoch is scumbag and I hope Facebook are able to sue for defamation/libel/whatever they can throw at him.
"How dare you provide the interesting, high-bandwidth content that help us sell our high-priced internet connections! We want a piece of that action!"
Yes, ISPs, it's time to demand your rights! And the movement is growing:
Justice will roll like a mighty tide!
Google, you ordered thirty six-foot sub sandwiches for your giant party, but you didn't buy our drinks, which are our biggest profit margin. How dare you use canisters and a rented fountain dispenser? We can't do business with you any more.
Actually, that would be a fairly reasonable thing to do. Once profit margins get below a certain point, it makes sense to concentrate on other business, even if you're still 'making a profit' there. Perhaps they have a fixed amount of sandwich-making capacity and would really like to sell them with drinks. (Of course, the real solution is to charge more for sandwiches and less for drinks, but presumably their prices are some sort of 'people are stupid and overpay for drinks' trick and makes sense for them.)
But that's not this. This is more like having a sandwich store next door to a zoo and demanding that the zoo start paying the sandwich place for 'providing' food that people eat while strolling through the zoo.
Phrased that way, that makes sense for about a half a second. People just came to the store/ISP and paid for something, which they then ate/used while using someone's else stuff for free. No one owes anyone anything.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I'm not sure whether that is your point or not, but you make it sound as if the behavior of these European ISPs is due to their state history.
It isn't. What these ISPs have realized is that in the current Internet format, they are relegated to stodgy, low-growth, dumb-pipe company status. These types of companies stagnate in their share price and have CEOs who do not go anywhere, don't get golden parachutes and certainly do not get rock-star billing.
That's the problem right there. Every telecom CEO knows this. They know that they can make money and an honest living as a dumb-pipe infrastructure provider. But they don't want that. They didn't get to be CEO because they're happy with what they have. If they want to be hailed as a superhero CEO and get a $100 million compensation package, they know that they need to transform their companies into being at the core of the Internet. And the only way that that can possibly happen is through tiered pricing (where the tiers consist of sites, not data rates) and legalized protection racket for successful websites.
Down that road is madness. But these people don't care. This is exactly the fight that everyone was worried about: the fight to keep the intelligence on the edges of the network, and away from the inside.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
When was the last time any ISP was in the news for doing something *not* evil?
I honestly can't remember...
Telcos bill their customers for data, and want to go to the regulators to also charge Google/etc. Fine. But, while the regulators are looking into it, perhaps they could also look into things like the "4 euro/week" subscriptions to wallpapers and ringtones, plus the premium SMS charges for 1-in-30 drawings of movie tickets, etc. The telcos' cut of those interesting money-transfer operations may not be big enough.
Telecoms really want google to pay for the bandwidth usage generated in response to explicit requests by the customers of the telecom? What fantasy land do the execs in these companies think their living in?
This is why we have peering arrangements to improve connectivity and lower transit costs. At some point this means ultra popular sites rightfully get a "free ride" as telecoms naturally want to peer directly to lower their transit costs and more is sent than received.
What I would do if I were google is partner with Akami or roll my own content server for videos and other static high bandwidth content that telecoms will want to co-locate in their data center for free so that requests for videos are resolved locally lowering the telecom transit costs and providing better service to their end users.
Like peering good network engineering is all about finding creative win-win solutions *NOT* about whining about link utilization and acting like a spoiled little bitch.
Actually they're not to be found because YOUR culture SUCKS so badly you can't sell intelligent programming in the American market. Nevermind the fact that Americans are such IDIOTS they don't know any other languages and can't stand subtitles.
I know he's a troll, but I still feel like replying because I've thought about it a lot. The average American idiot is the reason the US creates such a lot of crap, and we [Europeans] get exposed to the same thing later. At least *we* have some real quality of our own [but a lot less in quantity].
The troll also tries to create the illusion that it's somehow "American" companies involved. We all know that a lot of the global Internet traffic is controlled by huge European companies (Telefonica, TeliaSonera etc).
Why don't you get off the European invention called the World Wide Web (See Tim-Berners Lee (British) @ CERN, Geneva, Switzerland).
Maybe they'll feel better when you pass along all your network cost savings to them.
LOLOLOLOL. You owe me a monitor cleaning. :-)
Great point. I think the concept of "pass the savings along to the consumer" died about a generation and a half ago.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
If the ISPs don't want to be just dumb pipes, they will have to meet the requirements. Firstly, they must stop being dumb. As long as they are dumb, they won't advance. To not be just a pipe, they'll have to build something else their customers will want more than they want google. I suggest they get busy hiring the world's best and brightest for premium salaries and start building various internet based services that their customers actually want enough to willingly forgo access to google.
If they are dumb and all they have built is a pipe, they shouldn't be surprised that they are considered to be a dumb pipe.
25 suicides or so.
The problem that FT has (apart from being a dinosaur) is that most of their employees are functionaries, so they can't sack them (even regular employees are difficult to sack here in France, but at least it's doable). What they did then was that they shuffled people around into positions and places that management knew they wouldn't like, hoping they would quit on their own. This practice has since been put on hold.
VPS-like shared hosting, on under-crowded servers.
I hardly have to imagine. I used to go to a sub shop and get the cheese veggie sub (cheapest) and a free cup of water. One older women there obviously hated me and started charging me for water.
I doubt "legal systems" care, as they only care about breaking the law, and Google doesn't have to trade with anyone.
What I mean is that it would probably break antitrust laws in several countries as it could be seen as it could be seen as taking advantage of monopoly conditions if they started purposely treating non Google ISP customers as 2nd rate citizens, effectively forcing everyone over to their own service.
which is totally what she said
I'm sure that they did, as you say, buy the infrastructure rather than just having to keep it. I'm equally sure that, in most cases, insiders and cronies of one stripe or another got to buy it for a small fraction of its original value, probably in exchange for all kinds of promises that the buyers never kept and never intended to keep.
Yes, a few years ago a telco president made some bone-headed remarks like that which were echoed by other bone-headed telco presidents, and public opinion spanked them very loudly, even before Google had acquired YouTube. It won't happen again in the US. Europeans like to talk about this sort of regulation, so they can get away talking for a while until reality sets in. Asia's a much more diverse market, ranging from countries like Korea which have huge bandwidth to everybody's home and short distances (so it's not a problem) to China with its well-known censorship problems to places that still act like they've got monopoly telcos run by politically-powerful rich families (even though they're technically deregulated) to places that still run networks on barbed-wire.
Eyeball connectors need content providers and vice versa. Access to content is why people buy fast broadband connections, whether that's canned content or peer-to-peer. It makes financial sense for any connectors and providers who are big enough to matter to peer with each other, especially in markets like Europe which have large exchanges so you don't have to do long-haul part yourself (or buy it from a long-haul carrier.) Any broadband eyeball connector company that doesn't want to peer with Google is free not to, but especially in a competitive market, they risk losing most of their customers who to carriers who will let them watch videos of cats doing silly things. Also, as one content provider said to me once, we're peering with carriers A, B, and C, and if you don't want to peer with us, you're peering with all of them so you'll just get the same bits the hard way and miss the last-mile sale.
Pure long-haul carriers are in a slightly different situation, since they need to do business with the broadband eyeball connectors and the content providers, and get money somehow. It's probably more annoying to them to haul YouTube around unless somebody's paying them, but they usually don't do free peering with geographically concentrated players, and at least in the US, Google's supposedly hauling most of the bits around themselves.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I don't understand this at all. They were able to upload hundreds of terabytes of data without paying anything, and everybody who used Google's didn't have to pay to download the stuff? How is this possible? It seems like it would be charged not zero times, but twice; once for Google to upload it, and again for whoever downloads it. How do I watch a bunch of HD videos on YouTube without paying my ISP? How do I host tons of HD videos without paying my hosting provider? I'd really like to do this too! How come everyone else can except me?
I'm not sure I understand the argument those ISPs are presenting. They feel that google should pay them for what, exactly? Distribution? That's not quite how the Internet works - you don't push things out to your users like that. Users pay their ISPs to get their packets to their destinations. Accordingly, there is really nothing wrong with being a dumb pipe as an ISP. That is what you are being paid to do. I'm not really sure what more it is these ISPs want to get into (or why). There are also implications for network neutrality here. If it suddenly matters what you are doing with the packets (providing a service, for instance, or uploading things generally), and ISPs are allowed to develop a paradigm that differentiates services from each other like they were television channels, network neutrality will be no more.