Sensible Erection | Google Could Be Your Next ISP

Thursday, 18 March 2010

quote [ Google plans to connect these homes to the internet at blistering speeds of 1Gbps."I think Google is gearing up to be potentially quite a formidable competitor to existing telcos and ISPs, given their moves into the infrastructure level." ]

Battle of the behemoths is about to begin.

[by serenitynow@11:05amGMT] [+2]

Comments

lilmookieesquire said @ 11:07am GMT on 18th Mar
Google bought my family. :(

serenitynow said @ 11:13am GMT on 18th Mar [Score:1 Insightful]
It's ok man, it's probably just for scientific experiments.

Naruki said @ 12:44pm GMT on 18th Mar
They're still in the Labs, but when they get out they'll be unlike any other family out there!

DirtyBirdy said @ 1:33pm GMT on 18th Mar [Score:1 Funny]
here's hoping they come out as gmail and not wave

graham said @ 3:15pm GMT on 18th Mar [Score:1 WTF]

mwoody said @ 8:05pm GMT on 18th Mar
That clip is a lot funnier in context, when you know it's a callback to an earlier episode.

jaxtraw said @ 11:14am GMT on 18th Mar
This is getting interesting. When are Google going to fall afoul of anti-trust legislation? Considering teh comical persecution of Microsoft over browser bundling and media player, it'll be intersting to see how long it takes for Google to find itself in the naughty corner.

BTW, is anyone else finding google images loading very slowly at the moment?

serenitynow said @ 11:18am GMT on 18th Mar
I guess it depends on what legislation covers the move. In any case, they could just seperate that part of the company, as Microsoft was almost forced to do.

mrklipp said @ 12:19pm GMT on 18th Mar [Score:1 Insightful]
The problem in an anti trust case is not a company being active in different markets, it's a company that uses it's monopoly of one market to fuel an expansion into another.

Microsoft had about 91% of the OS market share in 2009 in the US, Google has only about 63% of the browser market share for that time period. Microsoft has a *much* tighter grip of the OS market than Google could ever hope to maintain, you can change browsers by typing in a new URL, if you want to change your OS, it's incomparably more difficult.

They just don't have the same control over their market that got Microsoft into trouble.

mrklipp said @ 12:20pm GMT on 18th Mar
browsers should read search engines, but that's probably already obvious.

jaxtraw said @ 12:41pm GMT on 18th Mar
Microsoft has never had a monopoly in the OS market: DRDOS, Apple, Unix/Linux. It has no "grip" other than people choosing to use DOS/Windows over competitors. That's it.

Apple has a "monopoly" of OSs for Apple computers. Apple users are happy with that; they like both the machine and the OS, which is why they buy them. But nobody's stopping somebody writing another OS that runs on Apples. There just isn't a market for it, because the "monopoly" is serving its customers well.

mrklipp said @ 1:07pm GMT on 18th Mar [Score:2]
If 91% of the market isn't a monopoly, I'd love to hear what your definition of one is.

serenitynow said @ 1:13pm GMT on 18th Mar

mo·nop·o·ly /məˈnɒpəli/ Show Spelled[muh-nop-uh-lee]
–noun,plural-lies.

1. exclusive control of a commodity or service in a particular market, or a control that makes possible the manipulation of prices. Compare duopoly, oligopoly.

2.an exclusive privilege to carry on a business, traffic, or service, granted by a government.

3.the exclusive possession or control of something.

4.something that is the subject of such control, as a commodity or service.

5.a company or group that has such control.

6.the market condition that exists when there is only one seller.

7.(initial capital letter) a board game in which a player attempts to gain a monopoly of real estate by advancing around the board and purchasing property, acquiring capital by collecting rent from other players whose pieces land on that property.

jaxtraw said @ 1:18pm GMT on 18th Mar
Er, well, a monopoly is total control of the supply in some sector of the market; an absence of competitors. I know some people, including economists, like to use the word to mean any company that's bigger than they like- I saw an astonishing thing on the BBC website a while back describing a 25% market share as a monopoly- but that doesn't make it so.

A monopoly is a single player market.

We also need to consider what counts as a market sector. For instance, I have lots of competitors (many free!) in the "webcomic sector" but I'm a monopolist in the "dickgirls by Jaxtraw" sector. We could thus see Apple as monopolists of Apple computers etc, but not as a monopolist in the computer sector. What counts as a sector, when products are not homogenous? Suppose there are five bakeries in town, but only one offers organic bread. Is that company a monopolist, or in a competitive market?

jaxtraw said @ 1:19pm GMT on 18th Mar
erratum- ...including some economists...

Naruki said @ 2:06pm GMT on 18th Mar

In economics, a monopoly (from Greek monos / μονος (alone or single) + polein / πωλειν (to sell)) exists when a specific individual or an enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it.... A monopoly is said to be coercive when the monopoly firm actively prohibits competitors from entering the field.

In many jurisdictions, competition laws place specific restrictions on monopolies. Holding a dominant position or a monopoly in the market is not illegal in itself, however certain categories of behavior can, when a business is dominant, be considered abusive and therefore be met with legal sanctions.

jaxtraw said @ 2:17pm GMT on 18th Mar [Score:1 WTF]
Then every business is a monopoly, and the word is rendered meaningless.

Naruki said @ 2:25pm GMT on 18th Mar
No, but you just derailed your last logic train.

serenitynow said @ 2:39pm GMT on 18th Mar

headlessfriar said @ 4:22pm GMT on 18th Mar
Is that Jim Carrey?

serenitynow said @ 4:26pm GMT on 18th Mar
Yep, from 'Me,Myself & Irene'.

mrcucumber said @ 11:59pm GMT on 18th Mar
Are they on a train?

Barnabas_Truman said @ 5:27pm GMT on 18th Mar
"Ma'am, don't you think your son is a little old to still be breast-feeding?"

lilmookieesquire said @ 8:41pm GMT on 18th Mar [Score:1 Funny]
BAM! You see that? No walls stop him! BOOM!

Sure the train derailed, but that's like 18 style points.

Krutz said @ 5:04pm GMT on 18th Mar
So a market where one player sets the prices for everyone else isn't monopolistic?

The U.S. Health Insurance industry would love it if your comics gave 'em a hand convincing people of that.

jaxtraw said @ 7:45pm GMT on 18th Mar
How does one player "set the prices" for everyone else? I don't know what you mean by that.

My comics are politically neutral. I try to be evenhanded. The "messages" in it have tended to be naively utopian vaguely progressive; there was a story about a race of blue aliens enslaved by white humanoids THAT JAMES CAMERON STOLE THE FUCKING BASTARD and a parody of reality TV and so on. I put a brand name on the sole of somebody's shoe a few months ago, and one of the readers objected about having such crass commercialism in the future. Readers are sensitive. Luckily, I'm in the free market so I have to shape my product to some extent to their preferences.

Also, as I have a monopoly on Lucy Lastique, I will be putting up the subscription price to $10000/month, and retire shortly to a tropical island which I shall have purchased, where I will bask beside a pool in which nubile dusky maidens frolic. Because I can set the prices to whatever I like!

Krutz said @ 8:40pm GMT on 18th Mar
You seem to have a problem with the idea of what exactly constitutes a monopoly in the legal sense. Lucy Lastique is a sub-set of "fictional character," which there is no monopoly on unless someone has a media company that's managed to get a very odd patent or trademark filing through the courts.

As an example of Microsoft's shady dealings via its dominance of the market, it had contracts that every computer supplier that could offer Windows (Gateway, Dell, etc.) had to install Windows on every computer it sold and charge customers for it. Even when customers didn't want Windows and requested that it not come on their machines, the company had to pay Microsoft for the unused license, and usually the user had the cost passed along to them. Basically, you couldn't survive as a volume seller of PCs without having Windows on them for the majority of your consumers, yet you couldn't not sell Windows if your customer didn't want it or if you wanted to offer a non-Windows machine.

And a simple example of how a player can set the price is in airlines. It was (and may still be) the practice that if an upstart airline is offering cheaper fares between city A and city B, a larger airline can lower its fares to those cities (making up the difference elsewhere) until it drives the upstart out of business (or until they can just buy it outright).

G. W. Bush said @ 1:35pm GMT on 18th Mar
No apple doesn't have a monopoly. Apple computers are no different then a dell, hp or other. The parts inside are the very same. The custom case and their choice of OS shipped is the only difference. Which of course you pay a premium for. Not unlike that of voodoo, falcon or any other custom computer product.

f00m@nB@r said @ 1:40pm GMT on 18th Mar
FYI, Apple computers can run Windows out of the box. In fact, Apple tells you how to dual boot. They can also run Linux, and have been able to since the PowerPC days. Linus himself had a Powerbook G4 running Linux.

jaxtraw said @ 1:49pm GMT on 18th Mar
Sure, but that's only fairly recently become more feasible with the switch to Intel processors. I was oversimplifying. Regardless, the computer comes with a "bundled" OS, and I'd think most users use that because they're happy with it?

Todomanna said @ 2:52pm GMT on 18th Mar
More like they're too lazy to change to something that works better.

f00m@nB@r said @ 3:02pm GMT on 18th Mar
Meh. I use Linux and Windows all day for work. I prefer using my OS X box at home: I have much fewer issues. And I can still do Linuxy devel work since it actually has a shell and free dev tools. Don't even mention the pile of shit that's called Cygwin.

f00m@nB@r said @ 3:04pm GMT on 18th Mar
Besides, people who buy Dells etc from retail outlets also keep running Windows because they're too lazy (or not knowledgable enough) to run something better, like Ubuntu.

f00m@nB@r said @ 3:05pm GMT on 18th Mar
*sigh* which was the point you were making. i need coffee: i came into the office with 3 pages from my machines.

jaxtraw said @ 3:28pm GMT on 18th Mar
They keep using Windows because it's fine for them. Geeks fail to grasp that most people don't give a damn about the OS; it's just part of the machine. They don't care about the fine points of kernels and coding. They won't gain anything by using Linux. Operating Systems are just a part of the machine, not something to care about on a geek level of "better". Linux isn't any "better" for their needs, though it is for some more technically interested people.

I used Windows. It runs Photoshop, Office, etc. That's all I care about. It's fine for what I do. I have the technical proficiency to install Linux if I wanted it, but I just don't need it.

gozar said @ 4:31pm GMT on 18th Mar
Right. I want a computer, not a hobby.

maryyugo said @ 6:38pm GMT on 18th Mar
For the typical home casual user, grasping and employing the complex GUI of any modern machine can be daunting. The older and less computer experienced (while young) the worse it is.

For Windows especially and Mac, there is a lot of help to be found because there is a huge pool of comparatively naive users. Linux users tend to be more nerdy and therefore harder for ordinary people to communicate with in plain language. Linux also tends to have holes and when you fall in one, it's arguably harder to get out than a windows problem or its more common. With windows, so many people of all levels of competence use it that it seems to be easier to get some help.

Having said that, no modern OS is suitable for a casual user. Someday we may have adequate error trapping and sufficiently deep AI-based layers of help to let "ordinary people" work out computer failures. That isn't now. And proper help is expensive. That's what screws casual users unless they're rich or connected to a business that has IT consultants available to all.

jaxtraw said @ 8:19pm GMT on 18th Mar
I think you consistently underestimate people, mary.

maryyugo said @ 7:13am GMT on 19th Mar
Nope. I am constantly rescuing neighbors and friends. They're not stupid but they're not mind readers or magicians. Some of the current generation will adapt easily to complex GUI's. How about the ghetto kid? The slightly slow learner?

It doesn't need to be this way. The systems have power and memory and they can do the work for the user. Eventually asking for help will get you some meaningful assist from some AI interface. But it won't be in my life time or even maybe in the lifetime of those who are now kids. Because too few IT professionals give a shit about the average home user. And at work, it's just, "fuck, I don't know how you do that/fix that. Just call the IT guy."

scabble said @ 12:05pm GMT on 18th Mar

1 Gbps is "blistering speed?" Hold on to your hats, it's going to be a wild ride.

Todomanna said @ 2:57pm GMT on 18th Mar [Score:1 Informative]
At the moment I've got about 1.5 Mbps. Most private citizens likely don't have more than four or five times that. Comparitively speaking, 1 Gbps is "blistering speed."

scabble said @ 9:46pm GMT on 18th Mar
Ah, and here we are several hours later, and I'm just noticing I even typed the "G" when I was thinking "M."

Oops.

GammaGoblin said @ 8:05am GMT on 25th Mar
That's faster than the data transfer rate to most harddrives so yeah.
The new bottleneck will be on your PC hardware.

Ebichuman said @ 1:17pm GMT on 18th Mar [Score:1 Informative]
I think this is really just about vertical integration. We don't notice it as much in the service sector--usually we think of it as buying factories and parts suppliers and so forth so that a product producer isn't beholden to another company, and can reap efficiency rewards. The principle is similar here, though it's a service market.

To explain:
The New York Times just posted a nice article about how Google/Apple's relation went south due to Android.

Essentially, the article says that Google created Android so that it could continue to "control its destiny" in the new mobile market. Letting Apple, Microsoft and the others define the OS and search integration could trap Google, or force it to be subservient to another company once we all go "mobile" for our search needs. Google isn't necessarily "expanding" its purview; it is trying to maintain a secure method of getting its search results (and its ads) to consumers without requiring any one else's permission.

If you think of potential net neutrality problems, it isn't surprising that Google is trying to secure its own ISP-level connection to users. Google's essentially afraid of this image, metered/tiered content pricing. They don't want existing ISPs to some day charge Google or customers special fees to efficiently deliver Google results and ads. So this too seems to be an effort at vertical integration, or as the NYT puts it, "controlling its destiny."

jaxtraw said @ 1:36pm GMT on 18th Mar
Sure, it looks like a smart move by Google.

The whole American net neutrality argument seems strange from here in Old Europe. We don't have any net neutrality, but ISPs haven't tried charging websites for access to their internet tubes; they just throttle high bandwidth/low priority stuff like bitorrent and usenet binaries, and the web at peak times, to keep their end user charges down (by needing less tubes infrastructure). The result is lots of ridiculously cheap ISPs with hopelessly throttled connections- me, I have an expensive ISP that never, as a policy, throttles anything.

The fear in America seems to be this idea of ISPs charging websites for access to customers. It doesn't seem very feasible, as there are zillions of websites out there to charge; it'd be a billing nightmare for the tubes owners. But OTOH, it would, interestingly, shift the costs burden from end users to content providers, which would ultimately mean cheaper prices for users and lower profits for Google- which some might think would be a good thing, what with this idea that internets are essential for life these days.

The scare represented by your linked image doesn't make any sense. ISPs only get customers by providing access to content. If they actually cut of the content, they're cutting off their own reason for existence. It would never fly as a business model. It's also a bit worrying that people, even on the progressive side of things, are seeing the net as a few big sites- wikipedia, disney, etc- even calling them "the cloud", a kind of dismal client/server model for the new millennium. That's a fundamentally strange way to see the web. Even if Google and a few others dominate certain areas like web apps and webmail, I very much doubt we're heading for a future with only a dozen or so .coms left.

Ebichuman said @ 2:44pm GMT on 18th Mar
I think you're misunderstanding who the "threat" of per-site charging is directed at. The picture may pose a more theoretical threat to a customer, but it's not really that hard to believe. It wouldn't be a billing nightmare because: (1) arguably most would just pay for the highest tier (which now had "value" because the ISP created lower "tiers" to differentiate it--though a consumer would essentially be paying $20 more a month for the same service they had previously), and (2) because all filtering would be automatic and not add additional work for the ISP.

But that's all secondary. The main target is the companies.

That was the main point of my post--vertical integration. An ISP might start telling Google and other companies, "I deserve payment for delivering your website. YouTube takes a lot of bandwidth, and we want compensation. If you want it to be delivered quickly, pay us a premium." Maybe you'd be willing to accept that that's just a theoretical concern, but a company with Google's profits? I think it's fair that they will be more diligent about protecting their interests through contingent strategies.

jaxtraw said @ 3:24pm GMT on 18th Mar
I think I addressed most of that. You end up with every website being billed by every ISP in the world; a contractual nightmare. The web isn't just a few websites. Even google itself is useless without the websites it provides links to. People routinely use the web e.g. to search for images, and porn, and stuff, and to link to this and that and the other. You can't simply limit it by "tiers" to a few .coms, and I find the concept that people are seeing the web that way worrying. It's a sprawl, not a cloud. You can't do per site charging. It's just not feasible, and I think that suggesting it is is just pure scaremongering.

But let's say it is. Well okay, let's say some big ISP says to Google, "pay us, or we cut you off". Google just says, "okay then, cut us off", sits back, and waits for the ISP to collapse under a storm of customer fury and class action suits brought by campaign groups on behalf of the customers over breach of contract. Even if some ISPs think they can try it, they'll never get it to stick.

f00m@nB@r said @ 4:14pm GMT on 18th Mar
The end user customers will just go to another ISP.

crom said @ 6:01pm GMT on 18th Mar
In my area, there are exactly two ISPs. A lot of places are lucky to have one.

f00m@nB@r said @ 9:49pm GMT on 18th Mar
I

f00m@nB@r said @ 9:53pm GMT on 18th Mar
I'm just parrotting the libertarian line. jaxtraw has said in the past that the only "tool" he wishes to have is the choice to stop patronizing any particular business. He eschews any legal tools for the consumer -- gov't getting involved in what should be a free commercial transaction between two private parties. I'm fairly certain he doesn't believe in popular campaigns (letter-writing, protests, boycotts, etc). That's why I found it amusing that he said people would resort to legal or popular action.

jaxtraw said @ 10:42pm GMT on 18th Mar
You don't understand libertarianism radical individualism (I am rebranding myself btw). The Libertarian movement (both of us) believe that civil society is a natural consequence of free individuals; that is, voluntary organisation such as various campaigns are a part of a free society. The hullabaloo about net neutrality on the internet is a classic example of individuals joining together over a common issue. Customers, workers, whoever have every right to form wahtever associations they like- consumer groups, unions, and so on.

Likewise, a customer (or group thereof) can take a company to court for breach of contract. Us Libertarians (both of us) are rather big on civil actions in fact. You should read some Murray Rothbard- his libertopia largely consists of people taking each other to court, with an occasional pause for a bite to eat. It's not my idea of utopia, but it illustrates that libertarians are not opposed to legal action. The courts in that scenario effectively replace government regulation by contracts. But then he was an anarcho-capitalist, and I'm not. I want a government, just a smaller one that doesn't make stupid new laws all the time to keep itself busy.

But we don't live in libertopia anyway. I was addressing this from a real-world we live in now position. There just isn't any need, right now, here in the real statist world, for the government to get involved in this situation. It'll just complicate matters when, if this is left alone, the ISPs will just screw themselves if they try it.

They are thinking in terms of "cable TV", and so are too many of their opponents. The internet isn't a few-to-many broadcasting system- the "cloud" meme makes this mistake too- and the same model can't be made to apply.

Besides all my other points, it's international. You think the BBC are going to pay American ISPs? Dream on. Businessmen frequently dream up grand plans for making more money. They often don't work, because they're just stupid ideas. This is one of them.

foobar said @ 12:19am GMT on 19th Mar
I think you'll find that most proponents of net neutrality rather agree with you in principle. We'd be quite happy to let market forces sort things out along the British model.

The problem is that in North America the ISP market is decidedly not free, and the one in Britain is only free because the government stepped in to make it so.

Government is not the only entity that can distort the market.

Krutz said @ 4:44pm GMT on 18th Mar [Score:1 Informative]
I think you're overcomplicating how it would work. Basically, an ISP would have everything run at "I'm not getting paid by X website speed."

If someone paid, then their site would get "Warp Factor payola" speed. This list of paid-for sites would be far smaller than the totality of the internet.

To put it another way, you have a hosts file you can edit to block certain sites. You propose having the file list every site you'd want to allow your computer to see, rather than to stop sites you don't want to hear from.

jaxtraw said @ 8:01pm GMT on 18th Mar
Firstly, the scare graphic implied that there would only be access to websites who they've done a deal with- including the crazy assertion of only getting access to blogger at the premium rate.

But what of your suggestion of a two tier speed system? Well, what speeds are we talking here? Access speeds already vary widely; I pay for "up to 8Megs" but my phone lines only support little more than 2. Website operators already have to take into account that most customers aren't running at top speeds. I still make a point of keeping my pages reasonable on dialup, because I know there are people in the woods of West Virginia who can't get anything better.

So the problem our Dark Empire Of ISPs has, is that to make the speed difference "bite", they're going to have to throttle most of the web down to crippling speeds. Blogs are mostly text. Newspaper sites are mostly text. Sure, at the moment there's a lot of bloat, but many sites would choose to control their page size than start paying ransom money.

So the ISPs are down to high bandwith sites to hold to ransom. All of which are already paying bandwidth for connection onto the net and have no desire to pay any more; and, since the net already has the bandwidth on every point on the network already paid for by somebody, there is no justification for additional charges.

And, we're back to the straightforward problem that the ISPs have no leverage. If they try to hold Google to ransom over, say, Youtube, Google can just give them the finger, tell them to try crippling it, and watch the ISPs get shafted by the hysterical outbreak of fury from customers. Lawsuits would fly. Google aren't some little company at anybody's mercy; they're one of the largest, best connected, most popular corporations on the planet, and with their "do no evil" motto, can do nothing but gain immensely by riding into court on a white charger in defence of the little guys- the customers the ISPs would be trying to harm.

This just isn't going to happen. Not one big corporation has a self-interest in bowing to the threat of a cutoff. They know damned well that the ISPs would be sawing through the branch they're sitting on.

foobar said @ 8:54pm GMT on 18th Mar
Bandwidth isn't the only thing they can throttle. Push latency up to 30 seconds and it doesn't matter how small your text based site is.

Ebichuman said @ 8:58pm GMT on 18th Mar
Two points:

1. You're not giving ISPs enough credit for creative marketing. They could offer YouTube/Google at "regular" (lower than today) speeds if Google did not pay extra, and "super fast" (normal today) speeds if Google did pay. This has two notable characteristics that I believe your earlier posts didn't address: (1) By simply rephrasing it this way, they are now "creating value" and could successfully sell it to consumers as "Google's fault," not their own, and (2) it demonstrates that the ISP might not totally block the service, just cripple it. ISPs already successfully applied this strategy with tiered bandwidth pricing to consumers (e.g., one-tier "normal" 10Mbps connection at $45 becomes two-tiers: 5Mbps "normal" at $45, or a "new" 10Mbps "speedy" connection at $60.).

2. "Google aren't some little company at anybody's mercy"

Again, this is my main point. This is exactly what Google is trying to ensure by becoming an ISP, for the reasons we've been discussing. Yes, it would be commercially risky for an ISP to downgrade connections to Google/YouTube, but an ISP could do it. And that possibility is enough. ISP competition is nice in theory, but would likely not work because (1) few US markets, even large ones, have significant ISP competition (Seen it first hand: my NYC apartment? One provider choice. NYC-- who would have expected.); and (2) if a large swatch of ISPs uniformly moved to such a system (as many countries have done with metered-bandwidth pricing), there would be no alternative.

Indeed, we could debate about what ISPs are likely to do. But that's really a waste of time. If you agree that ISPs could do it, then you should also agree that it's rational (if feasible) for Google to vertically integrate, cutting the ISP out of the loop, and making sure they don't have the power to do it.

jaxtraw said @ 9:34pm GMT on 18th Mar
By simply rephrasing it this way, they are now "creating value" and could successfully sell it to consumers as "Google's fault," not their own,

The problem I have here is that the tubes owners aren't creating any value, and everyone knows it. They certainly can't sell this as "google's fault", because they're imposing a new payment model. The ISP only has a market because Google et al supply content. They are carriers. The value is getting exchanged between content creators and consumers, and so any attempt to increase the value to the carrier is getting taken out of the pockets of the creator/consumer pairing, which is going to just push prices up somewhere else, to the instant ire of everybody. The ISPs are piggies in the middle who everyone will think- quite reasonably- should be grateful that the other corporations and the customers are providing an industry for them to be in. It's an instant public relations FAIL.

it demonstrates that the ISP might not totally block the service, just cripple it. ISPs already successfully applied this strategy with tiered bandwidth pricing to consumers (e.g., one-tier "normal" 10Mbps connection at $45 becomes two-tiers: 5Mbps "normal" at $45, or a "new" 10Mbps "speedy" connection at $60.)

They're not onto much of a WIN here either. As I said above, to create a meaningful distinction between the two tiers, they're going to have to seriously cripple the lower speed- far, far below half. Speeds are rising so rapidly in this emerging technology that last year's top speed will be next year's lower speed. It's not so long ago I was thrilled with 512k. Teh future had arrived! I can still happily watch Youtube on 2Mb, while elsewhere in the world people are getting 10 or 50 times that. The content providers aren't scaling to the highest possible speeds amyway because they need to maximise their customer base.

The majority of customers desperately hungry for speed right now are, I suspect, a fairly small group of serious downloaders, most of whom are "pirating" anyway. Mainstream content providers are serving lower speed connections. The market for the premium warp speed is likely more interested in The Pirate Bay than Disney.com, and their bandwidth is peer to peer, not cloud to client. If you have 10Mb and 5Mb, the corporations will just serve the 5Mb, and not pay the premium the ISPs are trying to demand. If the low speed is seriously crippled to wreck that, the market simply won't let them get away with it- let alone the US courts who will have them in on anti-trust charges fast enough to make their heads spin.

azazel said @ 9:59pm GMT on 18th Mar
The problem I have here is that the tubes owners aren't creating any value, and everyone knows it. They certainly can't sell this as "google's fault", because they're imposing a new payment model.
Oh please. The majority of customers are too ignorant to figure that out - and as if that wasn't enough, too few are tech savvy enough to know how that shit works.

I'd give an analogy, but I'm pressed for time. It's got to do with ISPs, my parents, and the local community where my parents live.

mrcucumber said @ 4:46pm GMT on 18th Mar [Score:1 Underrated]
*sigh*

You might not be aware of the business model in the us for cable tv. You buy packages, and they throw in other stupidities as part of the deal. The model is to create a tier system based on the most popular sites simply for the different "packages." Any other sites will just be thrown in for "free."

jaxtraw said @ 6:15pm GMT on 18th Mar
The web isn't TV. Believe it or not, we even have TV in Notamerica. They're entirely different.

maryyugo said @ 6:43pm GMT on 18th Mar
Maybe. But I keep wondering how long Google can make money on annoying ads almost nobody clicks through except by accident. Most people I know work hard at making Google, Youtube and so on do what they want it to, find what they are looking for and not what the programmers want them to click on.

Barnabas_Truman said @ 10:56pm GMT on 18th Mar
Sometimes I wonder how viable an advertising-based internet economy is in the long term. What are the demographics here? Somebody must be clicking on ads; who is it? Does the Next Generation of internet users even pay attention to ads? Will enough people eventually install AdBlock that the advertisers realize that ads aren't even worth the effort anymore?

Silent said @ 11:05pm GMT on 18th Mar
I would presume it's about as effective as adverts on tv, you see them, but nothing stops you stepping out of the room when the program stops.

jaxtraw said @ 11:20pm GMT on 18th Mar
I'm suspicious of it as well. But probably people who install adblock aren't the demographics advertisers want anyway.

I advertised on google for a while, but for me the PPC model sucked. I got quite a lot of clickthrus, but hardly any converted. It probably works best for people who are looking for a physical product they're expecting to pay for, like a fishing rod or an angle grinder or something.

I must admit I never even notice the paid ads column on google, myself.

foobar said @ 12:13am GMT on 19th Mar [Score:1 Interesting]
I just took a quick look at your model, and I'd expect it to have a very low conversion rate. J. Random Surfer who happens upon your site would have to put out $30 to even find out if they like your stuff. All your samples page tells a prospective customer is that the art doesn't suck.

That may be enough for someone who really likes dickgirl comics, but most anyone else will just wander off.

wieder said @ 8:59pm GMT on 18th Mar [Score:2]
You don't have to charge everyone.

You simply create the packages with deals with the pages that generate 90% of the traffic on the web. If a user doesn't have the subscription, access to those sites are blocked. You can access any sites that aren't in the packages (but how many people *individually* host their own blogs anymore).

Then you make it so the interface to access the web streamlines their users to the built in sites (ala Microsoft streamlining you to IE) that they have deals with.

Smaller sites will then have a more difficult time of gaining visibility due to most customers just taking the path of least resistance for the product that is "good enough" for their needs.

So smaller sites will sign up with hosting services which then as a part of their hosting service add your site to a collective of sites that then as one collective go and work out the deals with the "packages".

Eventually everyone is signed up under these umbrellas to ensure they are able to be seen and away we go. It doesn't have to turn on all at once, you just go bit by bit until what people's expectation of "the web" is and how they are going to get the information they want have shifted and it no longer even seems strange.

jaxtraw said @ 9:37pm GMT on 18th Mar
This is sort of verging on conspiracy theory. Why would Google conspire with the ISPs to block access to websites they need to sell advertising on and links to? Google and other content providers are inherently on the same side as the customers.

Naruki said @ 10:57pm GMT on 18th Mar
This is sort of verging on conspiracy theory.

Don't be an idiot.

jaxtraw said @ 11:21pm GMT on 18th Mar [Score:2 Funny]
Why should I change the habit of a lifetime?

wieder said @ 3:36am GMT on 19th Mar
My commentary wasn't about Google at all or trying to suggest that's what they want to do.

It was about how using normal business practices could allow the scenario to unfold a step at a time in a more blocked and distributed manner rather than your assertion that they would need to have every ISP charge every webpage, etc. thus supposedly making it logistically impossible.

f00m@nB@r said @ 9:49pm GMT on 18th Mar
My web is TV.

Krutz said @ 5:07pm GMT on 18th Mar
If they actually cut of the content, they're cutting off their own reason for existence.

Uh-huh. You really don't know how American cable companies work, do you? But then again, you probably wouldn't see them as a monopoly in many of their markets, either.

Right now, they're suing to keep smaller communities from getting high-speed broadband, and they've sued to keep cities/communities from setting up their own public internet services (and yes, these were voted in by a majority of taxpayers in the area).

jaxtraw said @ 6:18pm GMT on 18th Mar
I can see why they'd seek to prevent state competition. The State can throw as much money as it likes at its services- even offering them for "free"- thus destroying the commercial market.

On what groudns, and who, are they suing to prevent broadband? Other private companies? On what basis? Or state provision?

Anyway this doesn't bear on the matter under discussion, which is whether a model of charging websites would work as a business model, which it won't for reasons I've already described.

foobar said @ 6:27pm GMT on 18th Mar [Score:1 Informative]
You don't have net neutrality arguments in Britain because the government forces the telcos to sell access to their infrastructure to competitors at the same price they sell it to themselves.

Menchi said @ 8:33pm GMT on 18th Mar
Damn the State and its stranglehold on the free market!

/sarcasm

cb361 said @ 1:34pm GMT on 18th Mar
I welcome our ~~new~~ current Google overlords.

Naruki said @ 2:03pm GMT on 18th Mar
They are already my DNS server. Hey, it's the only one I can remember!

cskrat said @ 2:51pm GMT on 18th Mar
4.2.2.2 is also easy to remember

f00m@nB@r said @ 2:40pm GMT on 18th Mar
http://gizmodo.com/5495856/a-google-tv-set+top-box-is-coming

Google TV set top box. C.f. AppleTV.

They already have an OS. Wonder when Google will get into media sales, like the iTunes Store.

It's no wonder Google and Apple are having a big fight, now.

maryyugo said @ 8:00pm GMT on 18th Mar
If I understood correctly, Google's OS only runs a browser and any apps have to be "cloud based". If that's true (and I only glanced at the article so it might not), a lot of people won't like it or want it.

v21 said @ 8:29pm GMT on 18th Mar
So, pretty much exactly the same as the iPhone, on launch?

maryyugo said @ 1:02am GMT on 19th Mar
Not familiar with iPhone (yet) however one makes a lot of compromises for the small package size and portability. Not so with a desktop or ordinary laptop. Sort of inbetween maybe with one of those rather weak "netbooks". Don't know.

jackbnimbler said @ 1:40am GMT on 19th Mar
I worked at an ISP up until 2006, when I left the idea of running fibre optic to even a relatively small user base was incredibly expensive. In order to reach a broad market I would expect costs in the trillions of dollars if not higher. I frankly don't know how google plans on handling this. Your average customer won't be interested in eating possibly tens of thousands of dollars in costs just on their installation. Not only that but I'm not sure the current network infrastructure could handle a significant number of 1+ GB connections.

See this article

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527445.700-internet-backbone-breaks-the-100gigabit-barrier.html

Basically, I don't see google delivering 1gb connections to people in the near future, but I could be wrong.

Krutz said @ 2:34am GMT on 19th Mar
The goal isn't the fiber itself. The goal is what the fiber can provide in the area of helping to generate revenue via increasing the earning/innovation power of users with access to the net as well as goods and services offered to said communities over the network (Netflix, Steam, some pr0n, etc.).

A lot of people are advocating getting high-speed trunks to small communities in the same way electricity, roads, and phone lines were government funded.

jackbnimbler said @ 5:02am GMT on 19th Mar
I don't really see that as changing my point, mind you I love broadband and the more people who have it the better. However I don't really see anything that would point to this realistically happening, I don't see the government forking forward the huge cost, I doubt google can afford it, and the user base can't really manage it either. MAYBE a combination of all 3 working together could manage it, but it would still be a huge amount of cash.

FYI the current cost on a single fiber line is in the order of 10-30 bucks a meter if I recall correctly. That is just raw material cost btw, that doesn't include installation.

On a side note I suppose the job creation would be very nice though.

foobar said @ 5:30am GMT on 19th Mar
My bet is that google intends to demonstrate to cities how to do it themselves at break even or better.

You're right about the sticks, though.

Naruki said @ 1:18pm GMT on 19th Mar
I've had fiber optic for about 3 years now here in Tokyo. The speed is not what I expected, but it's still pretty good, and the price is fairly normal, too.