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The Google Tax

nathancampos.me

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Re: The Google Tax

#31

Post by temac »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #23
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 Oran…

> 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.

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.

Re: The Google Tax

#32

Post by temac »

pilsetnieks wrote: post #30
jre wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The article contains great confusion about ISP matters and "content" matters, but I don't see how Orange and Google should give a fuck about "content" matter (including the political circus) when they are negotiating peering agreements‎. If they do somehow, they this would be in very bad faith, but there is no sign they have done so in this story.

Re: The Google Tax

#33

Post by darkarmani »

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.

It's very easy to not let google index your content. What exactly is the problem here?

Re: The Google Tax

#34

Post by guard-of-terra »

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…

You do not understand how the internet work either. I hope you fail.

They can raise price on xx% of their customers who use youtube that much.

Re: The Google Tax

#35

Post by guard-of-terra »

polemic wrote: post #29

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.

But they really should be since they can't usually bring any useful service over a "vanilla" internet.

Everything they bring is either crap that degrades your experience and is hard to out out or costs you additional money. Non-exclusive if.

Re: The Google Tax

#36

Post by AnthonyMouse »

temac wrote: post #31
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 Oran…

> 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. 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…

>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.

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.

Re: The Google Tax

#37

Post by OGinparadise »

guard-of-terra wrote: post #34
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…

You do not understand how the internet work either. I hope you fail. They can raise price on xx% of their customers who use youtube that much.

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?

Re: The Google Tax

#38

Post by wutbrodo »

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.

Why in god's name would Google index a site if there was no benefit in it for them? The whole point of the relationship between search engines and sites that allow indexing is that it's mutually strictly beneficial (otherwise one party would pull out of the transaction since neither party is forced to remain in the relationship). I'm a little flabbergasted that it's necessary to describe how a transaction works in an HN thread, given that it's probably the single most fundamental unit of even the most basic economics. The "shade of grey" you're referring to is forcing Google to index the site and forcing them to pay to do so (in essence, mandating that a private corporation enter into a transaction against their will).

"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.

Re: The Google Tax

#39

Post by guard-of-terra »

OGinparadise wrote: post #37
guard-of-terra wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do not understand how the internet work either. I hope you fail. They can raise price on xx% of their customers who use youtube that much.

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 ca…

The outrage is justified: the ISPs in certain countries try to deliver as few service as they can get away with. Instead of making their service cheaper and faster each year (as it works in most of the world) they try to make it slower and more expensive. Of course there is the outrage. They should find a way to finally deliver something they can be proud of.

Re: The Google Tax

#40

Post by josephby »

Orange knows exactly how the internet works. They’re just trying to change it for the worse.

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.

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