EU to Telecoms companies: Try charging Google and we’ll take action
geek.com
geek.com
I guess in their dreams they would charge content providers (“You want to get your content to our customers? Pay!”) and they would also charge customers based on the content they want to see (“You want access to content from this one content provider? Pay!”).
Now you pay only for bits, whether it’s a bit from aunt Annie or YouTube doesn’t really matter. Let’s hope it stays that way.
I think the toll booth would fit in more with some US areas where there's only 1 ISP available (AFAIK).
If you have a cable connection then it's probably owned by Sky (murdoch) already.
Think about that the next time you adjust your 401k holdings.
Google has no-charge peering agreements with the companies which are complaining. Google's traffic is so vast that a major carrier which doesn't peer with Google would endanger other high-volume peering agreements or (less likely) pay more in transit charges to reach Google.
Tier 1 carriers play this game amongst themselves all the time except Google is different since it's main business isn't being a telecom carrier. In this instance Google is well known and making money out of the web and old incumbents think it's their money. None of the old incumbent telcos want to reach the stage of Cogent (think Ryanair for internet transit) where they are just dumb pipes.
This is what happens when accountants try to understand how BGP works.
And why are they making this particular argument they are making now and don’t demand something which might sound more reasonable like regulating the market of peering agreements or something?
They are making this argument because Google is an easy target. Tier 1's have complained about low cost pricing from Cogent for a while now but complaining about a company few have heard of doesn't make headlines.
They don't demand peering regulation because I think they want to avoid the complex system of termination fees and special rules for smaller carriers etc. that regulation of the phone system brought. Peering works well; Google delivers traffic on a carrier-scale and other carriers will just have to accept it.
This is what BT (the UK's effectively monopoly phone co) did. The introduce a system (phorn) that monitored all your browsing and replaced the ads with ones by it's customers more targeted to your 'interests'.
It got found out when it removed all charity's ads following an earthquake and also replaced all the ads on a sesame street type kids site with ones based on the father's browsing the night before!
This was illegal but somehow the government never got round to prosecuting them - in spite of the EU telling them to.
XYZ ISP would have a killer selling point ("we have Google!") and would almost certainly make a killing...
(– edit: could you please explain why that seems wrong or like a trollish comment to you?)
Blocking access to Google services would be suicide for an ISP. Customers would leave for other ISP's if they could, and sue for false advertising (you said it was internet access, not "Comcast's private network" access!) if they couldn't.
Google has already made it clear they won't pay ISPs to carry their traffic, so any attempt to collect fees would effectively result in a block. The market has solved this problem already; adding regulation would simply create more work for lawyers.
Against that, you offered an assertion without reasoning -- "some sort of regulation is necessary". Your assertion is wrapped in vaguely dismissive filler words -- "honestly sounds like" and "maybe?" -- that suggest you think your assertion is so self-evident no one could contest it.
Perhaps that's not what you meant; but the second possible reading is that you're not taking any stand at all, just repeating (5 levels deep) one contested opinion, "maybe". Either way, it's not adding info or novelty... which can draw downvotes.
I don’t know whether it is. I don’t even know if my assumptions are correct. Maybe this is no failed market at all and it’s just normal and good that ISPs have no-charge peering agreements with Google.
Sometimes a question is just a question and not some veiled attempt at taking a stand :)
What these ISP want is: when one of their customers wants to access a google site, google pays them for the traffic that goes over their network.
What doesn't make sense with that is that the traffic is already paid for twice, once with the customers subscription and another time before the data reaches this particulars ISP's network. (If google peers directly with them, they have some sort of deal currently, if the google doesn't then the ISPs inbetween already have a deal with this ISP for the traffic). In effect they are trying to find a way to charge another time for something that already paid for.
In a competitive market, an ISP wouldn't be able to pull this off because its customers would revolt if services that they cared about weren't there.
Nevermind that access to things like Youtube is exactly what CREATES demand for internet service. You think people are paying for broadband so they can send emails faster??
What they're saying to Google is "if you don't stop creating so much demand for our connections, we're going to go out of business!" Which can be simplified to, "we don't charge enough to cover our costs!"
Which is either false (likely) or indicates that they're incompetent. But it's nobody else's fault, least of all the fault of services that ISP customers are paying to access.
In the US most people only hear about her when she slaps a big fine on an American company, but she's been making a lot of waves in the EU for actually walking the walk instead of just talking the talk. The Economist has covered her extensively, with a sort of disbelieving awe.
Legal action doesn't seem like a conducive way to encourage that idea....