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Hint Which companies got raided over the 35 hour week a few years back not French owned ones.
A plausible case can be made for charging Google based on the amount of traffic generated by their products which is initialized outside of the subscriber's control. 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…
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 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.
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.
"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.
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 ; )
Does anybody know why Google didn't refuse these charges? This sets a really awful precedent.
Orange has a very strong presence in Africa. It leveraged this presence to have Google pay for their Internet trafic in France and Europe: Orange is pivotal to Google's success in Africa. 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/…
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.
This sounds like a run of the mill peering negotiation[1]. The unusual thing here is a company getting press coverage for it. 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. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering
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...
That is really weird... Especially the warning about president Hollande about the Google tax. 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…
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.
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.