Category: Business

Google has announced an end to its monopolistic advertising agreement with Yahoo!:

However, after four months of review, including discussions of various possible changes to the agreement, it’s clear that government regulators and some advertisers continue to have concerns about the agreement. Pressing ahead risked not only a protracted legal battle but also damage to relationships with valued partners. That wouldn’t have been in the long-term interests of Google or our users, so we have decided to end the agreement.

This is good. But Google didn’t strike out completely yesterday, as it successfully bent the ear of the FCC toward wasting the whitespaces on their hare-brained “Wi-Fi without testosterone” scheme. You win some, you lose some.

Technorati Tags: net+neutrality, Google, FCC

David Smith confronts the Google myth for The Observer, including accounts of the pilgramages politicians take to Google HQ:

Shortly after Obama’s pilgrimage to the ‘Googleplex’, it was the turn of David Cameron. Cameron was accompanied there by Steve Hilton, his director of strategy, who has since moved permanently to California with his wife, Rachel Whetstone, Google’s vice-president of global communications and public affairs (she is also godmother to Cameron’s eldest son, Ivan). Andrew Orlowski, executive editor of the technology website The Register, says: ‘The web is a secular religion at the moment and politicians go to pray at events like the Google Zeitgeist conference. Any politician who wants to brand himself as a forward-looking person will get himself photographed with the Google boys.’

Washington, also, is keen to bathe in Google’s golden light. Al Gore, the former Vice-President, is a long-time senior adviser at the company. Obama has been taking economic advice from Google CEO Eric Schmidt and received generous donations from Google and its staff. Google will be omnipresent at the Democratic and Republican national conventions, providing software for delegates such as calendars, email and graphics. ‘Google has moved into the political world this year,’ says its director of policy communications, Bob Boorstin, a former member of the Clinton administration.

Google’s staff in Washington include five lobbyists, among them Pablo Chavez, former general counsel for John McCain. This year Google moved into new 27,000-square-foot headquarters in one of Washington’s most fashionable, eco-friendly buildings. Visiting senators and congressmen can now share in the famed ‘googly’ experience of free gourmet lunches, giant plasma screens and a game room, named ‘Camp David’, stocked with an Xbox 360 and pingpong.

None of this much impressed Jeff Chester, the executive director of the small but influential Center for Digital Democracy, when he was invited there. ‘It puts all the other lobbying operations to shame,’ he says. ‘They invite politicians into their Washington HQ to give advice on using Google to win re-election. It is the darling of the Democratic Party and there’s no doubt that a win by Obama will strengthen Google’s position in Washington.’

Undeterred by criticisms of his benefactor, Google’s professor of piracy rights, Larry Lessig, congratulates Google’s boys at the FCC for protecting the Google monopoly in a rare foray into the world of the written word. It’s quite amusing and utterly deranged.

Technorati Tags: net neutrality, FCC, Google.

It’s rare that I read anything by Vint Cerf these days that doesn’t make me laugh. He’s taken to making outlandish statements that foment PR crises for Google such that they’re softened and re-framed in a few days. Writing on Google Public Policy Blog he simply buries us in the obvious and contradicts himself:

At least one proposal has surfaced that would charge users by the byte after a certain amount of data has been transmitted during a given period. This is a kind of volume cap, which I do not find to be a very useful practice. Given an arbitrary amount of time, one can transfer arbitrarily large amounts of information. Rather than a volume cap, I suggest the introduction of transmission rate caps, which would allow users to purchase access to the Internet at a given minimum data rate and be free to transfer data at at least up to that rate in any way they wish.

And here I thought pricing tiers were all standard practice all over the world. But he’s obviously not talking about that so much as providing a Committed Information Rate for low-cost residential Internet access like the much pricier business accounts have. You can tell who pays the bills in the Cerf household.

He also does the Kevin Martin two-step, applauding ISPs for raising the priority of VoIP:

In my view, Internet traffic should be managed with an eye towards applications and protocols. For example, a broadband provider should be able to prioritize packets that call for low latency (the period of time it takes for a packet to travel from Point A to Point B), but such prioritization should be applied across the board to all low latency traffic, not just particular application providers.

…and then slamming the means by which this is done:

Over the past few months, I have been talking with engineers at Comcast about some of these network management issues. I’ve been pleased so far with the tone and substance of these conversations, which have helped me to better understand the underlying motivation and rationale for the network management decisions facing Comcast, and the unique characteristics of cable broadband architecture. And as we said a few weeks ago, their commitment to a protocol-agnostic approach to network management is a step in the right direction.

So prioritizing is good, but not prioritizing is better? These people need to take some logic courses.

But I’m being too mean. Adam Thierer finds something to like about Cerf’s statesmanship:

But we know that countless more technical disputes will arise in the future at every layer of the Internet — not just with Comcast and BitTorrent. Thus, if we are really going to achieve “a broader dialogue and cooperation across industries” then what we really need is the equivalent of a multilateral trade negotiating process or forum to achieve sensible resolutions to complex technical difficulties surround Internet network management.

I am not prepared to say whether a new, formal organization is needed to accomplish this or if existing institutions and individuals (academic, trade associations, etc) might be able to work together to make this happen. For example, and I am just thinking out loud here so don’t quote me on this, what if we had the Internet Society working in conjunction with several major industry trade associations and some respected academic institutions to form some sort of collaborative, dialogue-oriented dispute resolution process? Sort of GATT or WTO for technical Internet dispute resolution.

Certainly that would be preferable to a politicized FCC taking over the show and making all these technical decisions, no? I’d be interested in hearing some input from others.

A relevant organization is not a bad idea.

Technorati Tags: net+neutrality

Truth is stranger than fiction. This report in ZDNet suggests that Google may well find itself in the crosshairs of net regulators gone wild:

Google clearly wants the FCC to make sure that other private companies’ networks are open equally to all Internet services. Now, it will be interesting to see if that applies to networks in which Google is involved.

On Friday, the Commission takes up the question of whether Comcast Corp., the nation’s largest provider of high-speed access to the Internet, is “secretly degrading peer-to-peer applications,’’ as the FCC agenda puts it.

As Multichannel News reports, Google Inc. is pressing the Commission to provide clear guidance to broadband network owners on acceptable ways of managing Internet traffic.

Google is shortly to become a network operator, a partner with Comcast in the Clearwire 4G network. Google intends to secure itself pride of place with a Google button on the Clearwire phone, a violation of all that is holy and neutral. This should be fun.

Technorati Tags: Google, FCC, net neutrality