In EU, Google Accused of YouTube "Free Ride" 449
An anonymous reader passes along a Financial Times piece that covers a push by EU telecoms to get Google to pay them directly — years after US ISPs began rattling that sword, to little effect thus far. "Some of Europe's leading telecoms groups are squaring up for a fight with Google over what they claim is the free ride enjoyed by the technology company's YouTube video-sharing service. Telefónica, France Telecom, and Deutsche Telekom all said Google should start paying them for carrying bandwidth-hungry content such as YouTube video over their networks.... Some European telecoms groups fear Google will reduce them to 'dumb pipes' because the internet search and advertising company pays the network operators little or nothing for carrying its content. Rick Whitt, a senior policy director at Google in Washington ... said Google was spending large amounts on its own data networks to carry its traffic to the point where it is handed over to telecoms companies round the world." Note that FT.com operates on a "first few per month free" paywall basis.
Where is the greed tag? (Score:2, Informative)
Net Neutrality Conference video stream (Score:3, Informative)
Re:But the fact is - they are dumb pipes (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Seems perfectly reasonable to me... (Score:2, Informative)
The second option you give may sound nice, but we've seen this happen too many times in the US:
User 1: My Internet connection sux and I'm paying top money for it! ...
ISP: Well, we advertised "up to," so that really means that you can't get more than that.
User 2: Just change your provider, idiot!
User 1: I wish I could...
User 3: Yeah, just change your provider!
User 1: There are no other providers.
User 4: Change the provider already!
User 1:
There are many regions in Europe where the same applies, and you fail to account for the fact that multiple telecoms have requested this from Google, which means that if Google gets blocked by two or three, there will be a lot of people ending up with a connection to a "broken" Internet. If this was a fair market and we had real competition and _each_ user had the possibility to choose from at least 5 providers, shit like this would never happen.
Re:Seems like the bandwidth has already been paid (Score:3, Informative)
Google bought some bandwidth to be able to send site content to users. Those users bought some bandwidth to be able to receive it. What's the problem?
Technically Google doesn't buy lots of bandwidth nowadays, the way people might imagine. They instead hook directly to many peers and at the backbones. That said, when the rest of us pay for "bandwidth", we pay exactly for building and maintaining the kind of infrastructure Google built themselves. But it explains why on the surface you can spin it like they did.
Re:Interesting (Score:3, Informative)
FT is owned by the Pearson Group. It is not a Murdoch paper.
Re:Interesting (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Isn't someone already paying for this traffic? (Score:3, Informative)
It is possible to get more, but uncapped connections are completely unaffordable. I can't remember the numbers now, but I think it started somewhere around R1000/month for fairly low-speed ADSL, line rental not included.
For the benefit of others who, like me, had no clue: about $137 USD (source [xe.com]) plus whatever line rental costs are.
Re:Interesting (Score:1, Informative)
And fourth, the EU is lagging behind the USA on all these fronts anyhow. As the summary says, the major USA ISPs have already voiced this particular threat.
Of course, it's okay when it's USA company vs USA company, but replace one of those with a damn foreigner and it's a different story. Not that US-based xenophobia is all that different to xenophobia anywhere else, I suppose.
Re:Interesting (Score:1, Informative)
And it is not like the ISP's can really do anything about it. What are they going to do? Block youtube? Happily we have quite some competition here in europe between ISP's and the customers will just vote with their feet
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Informative)
They were always dumb pipes. They pretended that they had content in order to push out the small ISP's. When people learned what the Internet was about the stopped using the ISP's content. Too bad the small ISP's are no longer here to testify.
Re:Interesting (Score:3, Informative)
*facepalm* ISPs have never been common carriers.
Re:Common carrier status (Score:3, Informative)
And in the US it has never applied to ISPs no matter how many times it is falsely claimed on Slashdot that ISPs are common carriers.