Sunday, January 22, 2006
Call it Gissel
Lessig: The Anti-Lessig Reader Wiki. I've created a wiki for work critical of my own work. It's here.
[Later...] I just corrected the original (mis)spelling of the headline, thanks to alert reader Markus Pirchner.
Google to BellSouth: Go Tier Yourself a New One
Google has rebuffed to an outrageous demand by BellSouth, in which the phone company proposed to charge Google for access to its customers. Bill Smith of Bell South told reporters that he wanted "to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc." Google has responded with an unequivocal no -- a flat refusal to pay blood-money to carriers to keep them from discriminating against its services. Honestly, what the hell is BellSouth thinking? The whole point of an ISP is that it delivers the same packets as every other ISP; anything else is substandard.
BellSouth wasn't thinking. They were doing what big carriers usually do, which is look for ways to make big money with tiered service to big customers. Dumb, perhaps, in this case; but predictable.
Cory's linked source was Preston Gralla's Google: We Won't Pay Broadband Cyberextortion in Networking Pipeline. Preston wrote,
Google told Networking Pipeline's Paul Kapustka in no uncertain terms that it won't give in to the cyberextortion. And despite reports to the contrary, Google says, it isn't talking with any carriers about the issue.
Google's Barry Schnitt told Paul in an email: "Google is not discussing sharing of the costs of broadband networks with any carrier. We believe consumers are already paying to support broadband access to the Internet through subscription fees and, as a result, consumers should have the freedom to use this connection without limitations."
Also from Preston at Networking Pipeline, Broadband Users: Feds Should Ban Cyberextortion:
Hard on the heels of Google saying it won't pay cyberextortion to BellSouth, Verizon, SBC and others, comes a survey that says consumers are worried that Internet providers may block access to Net services -- and the feds should take action.
The survey, released by a coalition of consumer groups including the Consumer Federation of America, FreePress, and Consumers Union, found that more than 75 percent of Internet users polled worry that they won't be able to freely choose an Internet service provider or fear they will have to pay twice for some Internet services.
Some 70 percent fear that Internet providers may block or impair access to Internet services or sites, such as VoIP. And fifty-four percent want Congress to take action to ban Internet providers from engaging in the practices.
My only quibble, as always, is with the term "consumer", which is nearly always a degraded form of "customer".
We don't just consume broadband. We use it. We pay for it (meaning we're customers) More importantly, we now also produce on it. All of blogging is production, not consumption. So is everything you see on the Web.
As I've often said before, there's plenty of money in helping the millions, even billions, of producers out there. Far more than in extorting a few extra bux, along with a few extra lawsuits, out of Google and Yahoo.
And no, I'm not playing word policeman when I bust people for using the word "consumer". I'm plaing economist.
The most important economic fact about the Net, is that it allows billions of people to produce as well as consume, and to participate in countless markets, in ways and to degrees that were never before possible.
There's money in helping that along. Lots of it.
That's where the carriers should be looking for the future. Not in pissing off those same people, along with the large producers already doing a good job of serving this new market environment.
[Later...] Tim Bray just pointed me to The Coming Tug of War Over the Internet, in the Washington Post. The writer says the issue is "a matter of heated debate on obscure blogs and among analysts like me".
If this guy is an analyst, why is he saying this?
Whether or not you agree with Whitacre, you can understand his frustration. Companies like Google and Yahoo pay some fees to connect to their servers to the Internet, but AT&T will collect little if any additional revenue when Yahoo starts offering new features that take up lots of bandwidth on the Internet. When Yahoo's millions of customers download huge blocks of video or play complex video games, AT&T ends up carrying that increased digital traffic without additional financial compensation.
If Yahoo and Google need more bandwith, they pay for it. Simple as that.
[Still later...] Washington Post screws up, by Tim Bray, who writes,
While the details of the deals by which the big boys buy bandwidth are closely-guarded secrets, the notion that any of them can dramatically increase their net traffic without paying for it, that notion is just wacko. I've sent Christopher Stern, the author, an email, but this silliness is already on the streets of Washington in a few hundred thousand dead-tree instances. The difference between blogs and the mainstream media is that when we screw up, we can mostly repair the damage.