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The Google Tax

nathancampos.me

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Re: The Google Tax

#21

Post by taligent »

hazz wrote: post #15

"Google has also been faced with demands for compensation from content providers such as newspapers, who charge the search giant makes lots of advertising revenue from referencing their material." "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…

> just spending five minutes on google or wikipedia researching the Googlebot will tell you about robots.txt

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.

Re: The Google Tax

#22

Post by brudgers »

rryan wrote: post #12
brudgers wrote: post #10

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…

I disagree. A user requesting http://example.com is that user requesting everything that the webmaster of example.com wanted example.com to include. This includes ads. 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…

Advertising is just the most obvious example of something which other networks - such as cable television - charge the content provider to deliver to their customers.

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.

Re: The Google Tax

#23

Post by AnthonyMouse »

OGinparadise wrote: post #20

Clearly Orange has no idea how the internet works...The ISP is just a dumb pipe to connect the user to a server, nothing more. 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…

>That's one option, the other is to approach Netflix, Google or whatever and negotiate.

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.

Re: The Google Tax

#24

Post by AnthonyMouse »

taligent wrote: post #21
hazz wrote: post #15

"Google has also been faced with demands for compensation from content providers such as newspapers, who charge the search giant makes lots of advertising revenue from referencing their material." "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…

> just spending five minutes on google or wikipedia researching the Googlebot will tell you about robots.txt 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.

>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.

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.

Re: The Google Tax

#25

Post by tonfa »

martinced wrote: post #16

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…

> Basically free.fr was planning to remove Google ads by modifying the HTML served to users

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...

Re: The Google Tax

#26

Post by taproot »

Silhouette wrote: post #17
krallin wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/…

So this is essentially a textbook case of monopoly abuse, with the twist that because it's across borders they're getting away with it? 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 f…

I'm not surprised at all, they've backed down to almost everything confronting them in the past and this is certainly not out of character. I guess it's more profitable to simply pay up than fight. Which sucks, because Google is in an incredibly powerful position to change the world for the better (and in many more instances than this alone.)

Re: The Google Tax

#27

Post by krallin »

Silhouette wrote: post #17
krallin wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/…

So this is essentially a textbook case of monopoly abuse, with the twist that because it's across borders they're getting away with it? 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 f…

Orange does have a strategic position in Africa where Google (for the moment) doesn't. I'm not saying Google needs Orange, but it is indeed a strategic partner.

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.

Re: The Google Tax

#28

Post by Wilya »

I'm sorry, but "Google apparently accepted to pay the fees (even worst since the government is also forcing a decision favorable to the ISPs)" is pure nonsense. You misread your source. The French government doesn't give a damn about peering negociations.

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.

Re: The Google Tax

#29

Post by polemic »

Stopped reading at:

> "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.

Re: The Google Tax

#30

Post by pilsetnieks »

jre wrote: post #19
martinced wrote: post #16

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…

Those are definitely two separate problems : 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.

To clarify a bit - essentially Google is its own ISP, they are peering with Tier 1 ISPs directly so this case may well be a peering negotiation gone wrong which would have nothing to do with network neutrality.

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.

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