The Google Tax
nathancampos.me
nathancampos.me
Clearly Nathan Campos has no idea how the internet works. Negotiations about charging for traffic is normal business, and has always been.
> The user fees should be equivalent to their connection speed, not their usage, which apparently is something that ISPs can’t understand too.
This is practiced for some land networks (in France, most of them) because the traffic is still good enough and most people are not generating so much traffic, but this can not happen on mobile network because of the much limited capacity. Limiting the rate is the way to guarantee that the mean traffic does not explode, saturating the whole thing.
> French President Francois Hollande warned Google on Wednesday that his government would legislate a so-called Google tax if the company doesn’t reach a deal with French media companies.
Orange is not a media company, and the rest of the post recognize that and talks about ISP.
I have no idea how Google's peering arrangements are set up but I doubt that this is the only transit arrangement Google has ever ended up in.
There is something nonsensical about this whole matter (as reported by the blogs) that triggers a flag for me.
More info -
(tl;dr; the peering traffic between Cogent and Orange are too imbalanced; Cogent handles Google's traffic)
In this case, the US telecommunications operator Cogent claimed, among other things, that France Télécom was compromising the peering system (enabling exchange of traffic flows between networks, free of charge) used by transit operators, by requesting payment for opening up additional technical capacity for access to Orange subscribers. Regarding this claim, the Autorité considered that in view of the highly asymmetric nature of the traffic exchanged between France Télécom and Cogent, such a payment request does not in itself constitute an anti-competitive practice inasmuch as this type of remuneration is not uncommon in the Internet industry in cases where a significant imbalance exists between the incoming and outgoing flows exchanged between two networks, and is consistent with the overall peering policy adopted by France Télécom, with which Cogent is familiar.
However, the Autorité also noted a certain lack of transparency in the relationship between the domestic network of France Télécom (Orange) and its transit operator business (Open Transit), creating a potential for margin squeezes. France Télécom agreed to make commitments to prevent such situations and enable appropriate monitoring.
http://fastnetnews.com/dslprime/42-d/4881-france-telecom-fre...
"Hollande said “Those who make a profit from the information” produced by media companies should participate in their financing."
It's depressing to see so many examples of the abysmal understanding of the internet that so many politicians seem to have. Ignorance can be forgiven to a certain extent, but not even making an attempt to try to understand the situation - just spending five minutes on google or wikipedia researching the Googlebot will tell you about robots.txt - is inexcusable.
Public and state ignorance of computers and the internet are leading us down a very dark path; there needs to be an effort to try to educate our political representatives, or we risk a future where legislation like SOPA is passed purely out of ignorance of what it means.
So basically your position is binary: Either don't allow your site to be indexed by Google or accept that they are going to profit from your content.
If you don't see why companies and governments see more shades of grey in this situation then the only person who is ignorant is you.
Nonsense. If you want to put "no access" in robots.txt and then go to Google and negotiate a fee from them for removing it, you're perfectly entitled to do that. But you know perfectly well that the value of search traffic to your site is worth more to you than the value of indexing your site is worth to Google or any other web search engine, so any such negotiation is not going to end with a payment from the search engine to you.
And passing a law wouldn't even change that. All it would do is create an explosion of transaction costs as every single website has to negotiate with every search engine to not pay to be included in the index. Which if anything would only cement Google's dominant position in web search forever as any of its smaller competitors are bankrupted by transaction costs. Unless, of course, the law allowed some kind of standard technological means of allowing a site to specify that it doesn't require any payment to be included in the search results... like robots.txt.
"So basically your position is binary: Either don't license your movie's streaming rights to Netflix, or accept that they're going to profit from it."
You may want to think through your statements a step or two further before throwing around accusations of ignorance.
Google is not responsible for this traffic, it is the user requesting it. I consume YouTube, search, etc. content because I request it, not because Google tells me to.
I just hope the EU slaps French politicians for this one.
They could have let Orange stew or force the French government's hands by proposing legislation that would have created a huge popular and technical uproar.
It seems to serve no purpose, other than some unknown short term motivation - which has never been a characteristic of Google - to accede.
There is no way French media companies or French government will back down now they have forced Google to draw first blood on itself. It also sets a global precedent against them and other Internet companies.
According to Orange's CEO, Google just can't do without Orange in Africa - and that's likely to be true.
Sources (in French, sorry!):
http://frenchweb.fr/trafic-france-telecom-se-fait-remunerer-...
http://pro.clubic.com/entreprises/orange-france-telecom/actu...
I'm a little surprised the response wasn't to delist every Orange property from the Google search engine and block access to any Google property for any Orange customer. It seems to me that doing so would effectively render Orange's mobile broadband offerings dead globally, for the five minutes the discussion would last. Presumably someone at Google decided that such a strategy was too risky legally and/or in terms of poisoning relations with ISPs more generally.
Orange is also an highly trusted ISP in France, and (unlike Free) counts many corporations among its clients. Google probably would not risk alienating those clients by engaging in an open conflict with Orange.
All in all, I don't think any other French ISP would have been able to wrestle such a deal from Google.
The ISP is delivering advertising from which Google benefits and which its users are not explicitly requesting. Charging Google is analogous to a cable provider charging an advertising agency when that agency wants to place ads on behalf of their clients.
Other Google services such as Analytics, tracking cookies, and JavaScript libraries also use capacity without considering the effect on the provider's bandwidth.
Again, this is a plausible position. It is plausible because Google is generating revenue regardless of the ISP's customers' interest and the source of the data is outside the ISP's network.
Charging Google is a reasonable alternative to charging their customers for something which may be of little value to them.
The webmaster has decided that the content hosted on http://example.com includes some HTML, some off-site resources (maybe images hosted on a CDN, maybe some ads, maybe some Javascript hosted elsewhere).
Are you going to charge CDN owners too given the user doesn't 'know' that websites often use a CDN to host their content? What about jquery.com for hosting the version of jquery the site uses (if they don't host it themselves)?
Why are ads special? Simply because the webmaster is being paid by the ad network? In the CDN case, money flows in the opposite direction -- the webmaster pays the CDN. Why shouldn't the ISP take a cut of that transaction too?
If a website has ads the implied contract is that you get access to this content in exchange for having these ads on the screen. Why does an ISP get to take a cut out of that agreement between the webmaster, the ad network, and the user? They are already compensated by the user to deliver all the bytes the user's computer requested to them.
If an ISP is unhappy with how many bytes the user is requesting, and how many of those bytes come from a particular source (e.g. Google) then they need to renegotiate their contract with the user.
I am not a lawyer, but the implied contract argument doesn't seem to hold water. Google and the ISP aren't in privity - unless of course there is a contract between them such as the article provides. I'll leave aside the applicability of common law principles to France in regard to the theory of implied contracts required as a premise to the argument.
This is the logical consequence of people moving their activities from decentralized, open services (email, IRC, and usenet) where revenues are generated (and cost incurred) at the ISP, to centralized, closed services (Facebook and twitter) where cost, revenue, and control is centralized by the platform owner.
The natural response will be for Google and Facebook to compete (or simply threaten to compete) with residential ISPs, forcing some sort of accommodation by the ISPs, and binding ISPs to the media platforms (Facebook, Google, et. al.) in ways never before seen.
The French government supported _media companies_ (which is a nice way to say "old-school newspapers"), or at least tried to pressure Google into reaching an agreement with them. That's a whole different issue, which just happens to be mentioned in the same article.
> "The ISP is just a dumb pipe to connect the user to a server, nothing more."
What OP means is:
> "Ideally, I would like the ISP to act as a dumb pipe..."
The reality is that ISP's can do whatever the heck they want, subject to the regulatory environment and the level of ignorance of their customers.
ISP's are a lot of things, "dumb" they are not.
Everything they bring is either crap that degrades your experience and is hard to out out or costs you additional money. Non-exclusive if.
Hint Which companies got raided over the 35 hour week a few years back not French owned ones.
Are we sure that the event of Google paying Orange referenced in the article is not simply Google paying a small fee due to the bandwidth consumed by the end user when the Android OS is updated on the Orange networks? side note, usually that download is nto counted towards user limits as usually its also sometimes a security update.
Why is it weird? Because since free.fr badly messed up and decided to give the finger to net neutrality, a french minister did ask free.fr's CEO to come explain himself and to fix the situation as soon as possible with Google.
Basically free.fr was planning to remove Google ads by modifying the HTML served to users and even the socialist running France at the moment thought that violating net neutrality like that was not acceptable (in their own words it was a violation of net-neutrality and france is very much pro-net-neutrality).
And Orange is an ISP, just like free.fr. Not a media company.
So I wonder if the author of TFA isn't confusing two different things: the right to archive / link to french magazines / publications (like Lemonde.fr) and the net-neutrality issue.
IMHO users are paying for a service and companies unable to cope with the bandwith their users are demanding shouldn't use fake adverts to advertize bandwith they cannot provide.
In addition to that: go Google, wire the entire europe with fiber and let's be done with these lame ISPs ; )
On one hand, there is a peering problems between some French ISP and Google and they don't agree on who should pay for the interconnection costs.
On the other hand, some French newspapers are complaining about Google News.
However, as the case is, it may be very difficult to distinguish between Google the ISP and Google the content provider, and it seems from the article that this might be the case of people confusing Google the ISP with Google the content provider.
This was DNS based, not DPI/proxy.
> And Orange is an ISP, just like free.fr. Not a media company.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_(telecommunications)#Sub... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_(telecommunications)#Con...
Yay! you go and tell them what the internet is and how to run their business since they have no idea http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_%28telecommunications%29
>> If their users are using too much bandwidth and the costs are higher than the profits they should start to rethink the price of their service, not go after Google saying that they are evil for transferring all that data.
That's one option, the other is to approach Netflix, Google or whatever and negotiate. NEGOTIATE is the keyword and you need to keep in mind that different countries have different laws.
Raising prices on everyone because xx% makes Youtube Orange's largest bandwidth hog could make the rest of your customers mad.
Negotiate implies a free market. There is no free market for access to an ISP's residential customers. They have a complete monopoly over the ability to send packets to those people, resulting in a market failure that requires government regulation to avoid monopoly abuse.
>Raising prices on everyone because xx% makes Youtube Orange's largest bandwidth hog could make the rest of your customers mad.
Do you have some evidence that xx% is actually simultaneously some small percentage of users and still use enough bandwidth as a small minority to require a nontrivial price increase for all customers? Raising prices on all users in order to pay for expansion to meet demand created by a substantial majority of users is not exactly unreasonable. Especially if the remaining minority is offered the chance to buy a less expensive connection with insufficient capacity to stream video, since they by definition don't want to do that anyway.
This kind of theory is ridiculous. It is like saying that there is no free market in the sale of carrot, because as soon as I enter a shop that sells carrot and start to buy some the other shops have no ability to sell some to me at the same time.
Now there are some situation where you get something that looks like more a real monopoly, e.g. watter supply. But ISP in France is nothing like a monopoly. Pretending otherwise with utterly contrived theories is complete lack of good faith.
You are very indignantly failing to understand that there is more than one market in play here.
Some user, Joe Smith, subscribes to Orange as an ISP. That user may have other choices; Orange may have competitors. That is not the market I am referring to.
Once Joe Smith and however many thousand others like him subscribe to Orange, Orange has a monopoly on those customers. If you are a content distributor, it is not possible for you to send packets to any of those customers without going through Orange. You must, at some point, connect to their network in order to reach those customers. Other than government regulation, nothing stops them from charging monopoly rents for anyone to make such a connection.
The content distributor has no control over what decisions end customers make in choosing between ISPs. Their choice or lack thereof is completely irrelevant since the content distributor has little if any ability to influence it: Maybe if you're YouTube you could cause an ISP to lose sufficiently many customers through having slow or no access to YouTube, but probably not even then since if YouTube's competitors are still fast customers are more likely to blame YouTube than Orange, and if you are the little YouTube competitor then it's totally hopeless because Orange can just cut you off if you don't pay whatever they ask and the large majority of their customers won't even notice.
Internet service is not a carrot. If you need a bunch of carrots you can still get all of them in one place and if that store mistreats you in any way you can choose from multiple alternative suppliers. If you need to reach the entire general public, each and every ISP can hold you up for access to their subset of the customers, because you don't need 100 carrots, you need 1/100th of every carrot in the world. There is no way for you to go to Free and negotiate with them for access to Orange's customer base. It doesn't do you a lick of good to get twice as much bandwidth to Free's customers if your problem is not enough bandwidth to Orange's customers. You have to negotiate directly or indirectly with Orange, who can hold up all comers.
They can raise price on xx% of their customers who use youtube that much.
Before raising prices (maybe not the best thing business wise) hey are trying to see if Google pays first. This is business, if Google could force Verizon to even pay for G's datacenters, they would. Nothing personal. Maybe Google will share some of the youtube ad money
Remember the outrage when Comcast and others imposed or wanted to impose caps?