13 ms·

Protesters Gather At Google; 600 Employees Sign Petition, Organizers Claim

141 points by mcantelon 16y ago

chengas123 16y ago
This article is absolutely awful. I've never read anything more factually incorrect. "Free Press is concerned that Google's deal with Verizon to secure special internet privileges on its broadband will lead to other internet providers brokering deals with major companies. First Verizon and Google strike a deal, then AT&T and Microsoft have a deal ... here comes Comcast who cuts a deal with Yahoo" There was no "deal". It is only proposal. And it would grant no special privileges to either party. That being said, it is good people are beginning to reorganize in favor of net neutrality and hopefully will make their views known to their Congresspeople.
- paul9290 16y ago
  In-factual to hacker news crowd yes. To the average person does it matter? They need to be told in a dumbed down fashion. Like, "If you disliked iPhone on AT&T only, this Google/Verizon pact is going to making using the Internet suck; make your Internet feel as its Cable TV!" Something like that, but either way it needs to be sold to the average joe so they can understand and take action.
  - aristus 16y ago
    That's pretty disrespectful. Sloganeering has its place. The very term "net neutrality" was a brilliant capture of the semantic high-ground. But it can turn on you in an instant, as we're seeing with Google's "Don't be evil" slogan. As far as I can tell Google are trying something nuanced, to impose some rules, where before we had an uneasy Mexican standoff. And they are getting crucified for it.
    - paul9290 16y ago
      Ask the average joe (the majority of Internet users) if they know what a web browser is, also ask them what Net Neutrality is. Do you think 15% would know and explain what either is? If all of us care about the Internet and are appalled at this proposal then for this type of protesting/campaigning to be effective it needs to be better sold(marketed) to the majority. More so then 50 to 100 people standing outside Google protesting.
      - grandalf 16y ago
        This is the key point. Users don't care. Back in the days of Alta Vista, Google offered better search. Today, search is a solved problem and easy for many companies to clone. I'd estimate that 80% of internet users would fail to distinguish between the search quality of Google search and a pagerank-based index of the top 20 websites (which could be hosted on a laptop). This is why Google attempted to innovate via legislation by trying to get net neutrality passed to prevent its competitors from taking market share via deals that shared profits with ISPs. Google has failed to stop it, so it must now engage in its own dealmaking to block its competitors from "taking" search traffic (and ad revenue) via non-neutrality ISP deals. The biggest threat to Google would be a deal between Apple or Microsoft and Comcast or Verizon. Google's deal with Verizon is an attempt to scuttle any such deal. I'm surprised Verizon found a win in it, but who knows. We will soon see what sort of QoS Verizon gives FaceTime on iPhone 4.
        rue 16y ago
        > This is the key point. Users don't care. That is no point at all. Users are not familiar enough with the problem space to be able to care (or not).
        grandalf 16y ago
        Hence it's not a problem for them. Problems are what create business opportunities. In the Alta Vista days, I had a search problem (search sucked) but today I do not. If Google went away I would still not have a search problem. Obviously, if something arcane like QoS became a problem for users, then an ISP would have a more difficult cost/benefit decision to make about how neutral it wished to be.
    - natep 16y ago
      > The very term "net neutrality" was a brilliant capture of the semantic high-ground. I suppose it does, but for the longest time I understood the two sides of the issue, but I didn't know which was pro-net neutrality, and which was anti-net neutrality. Internet freedom is my idea of a better term (although ISPs wouldn't have the freedom to filter/prioritize their traffic, so my term has problems, too)
  - makmanalp 16y ago
    As much as I disagree with false reporting, paul9290 might have a point here. The same issue exists with software patents, mainly the sad fact that no one other than us really cares. I'd vote for a proper explanation but no one really sits through and listens to those before being nagged for 30-some years, movies being made, books being written (example: the environmentalist movement).
- pyman 16y ago
  "It is only proposal". You make it sound like a proposal, in this case, is much better than a deal. Believe me, it's not. What Google is proposing is ridiculous and goes against everything we worked for in the last 20 years.
  - gojomo 16y ago
    Who is the 'we' in your statement?
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
  - jemfinch 16y ago
    Except it doesn't substantially differ from the FCC's NPRM from back in 2009, the one everyone was so happy about. It's the NPRM for wired networks, and a "wait and see" approach for wireless networks.
- dieterrams 16y ago
  I'm 100% certain you've read things that are more factually incorrect. Also, you're quoting a quote from the article, whose alleged factual incorrectness doesn't make the article itself incorrect. Granted, the article's author also refers to the Google-Verizon proposal as a "deal" just above to the quote, but here's the thing: I actually don't think it's unfair to call the proposal a deal, since Google themselves describe it as a compromise. This is very much a deal between Google and Verizon over what position they could jointly support. The tricky thing is that this is a political deal, not a formal business deal, which is what you typically expect a "deal" between two companies to mean. The person you've quoted, Craig Aaron, may actually recognize the distinction (e.g., the first sentence is about the political deal, the second about subsequent business deals), but using the same word for two distinct meanings can easily give the opposite impression.
  - mkramlich 16y ago
    Agreed. And the lines between a business deal and a political deal are blurry at best.
    - moultano 16y ago
      >"deal with Verizon to secure special internet privileges on its broadband" Regardless, this sentence is entirely false.
- mkramlich 16y ago
  Well they had to come to some sort of deal in order to both agree to this proposal. Money does not have to change hands, for example, in order for a deal to have occured. Simply a multi-party agreement. "If I back this will you back it too? You will? Great. We have a deal. Let's shake."
- jsz0 16y ago
  No special privileges... yet. Some people might be jumping the gun but this proposal certainly lays the groundwork for it -- at least on wireless. So often these days we're aware that the other shoe drops eventually. I think people are wising up to these old manipulations that used to work so well. We just assume the worst.
tlrobinson 16y ago
It would be amusing if this was one big Machiavellian plan by Google to rile up internet users to put more pressure on for net neutrality...
- jonursenbach 16y ago
  Oh if only that were the case.
- MisterWebz 16y ago
  By damaging their own reputation? Yeah, right.
- chrismsnz 16y ago
  "Because Google is the hero the Internet deserves, but not the one it needs right now. So we'll flame them because they can take it. Because they're not our hero. They're a silent guardian, a watchful protector. Dark knights."
pg 16y ago
http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
  - blasdel 16y ago
    It was downmodded because it's been spammed so repeatedly on HN for ages. As a means for karma whoring, it's at the bottom below linking to xkcd comics or pg essays as the full content of a comment. I had been hoping that pg would blacklist comments containing the URL, but I guess that's out the window now.
    - gcb 16y ago
      There's probably a xkcd for that.
- mlinsey 16y ago
  First PG post to ever reach -2?
  - pavs 16y ago
    I did it so that I can tell everyone that I have been living on the edge. /s
  - blasdel 16y ago
    http://searchyc.com/user/pg?only=comments&sort=by_points_r http://searchyc.com/user/pg?only=comments&sort=by_points...
    - pg 16y ago
      Looks like they have some kind of bug. There are comments there with 0 points that could never have had 0 points.
grandalf 16y ago
Predictions for 2011: - Apple releases iWeb, a google search clone, signs deal with Verizon to make iWeb the mandatory search engine for all Verizon ISP users. - Apple sells 25M Verizon 4G iPads for $99 each with 2 year service contract ($20 per month) - Apple announces record profits from search advertising. * Google's core search business is easily cloned in 2 years. How to get market share? A deal with large ISPs. Most of Google's profits come from search advertising, and Apple now has a cutting edge mobile ad platform which is stronger than Google's. It's time to act. Search is not hard anymore. Suppose Apple did this deal with Verizon and possibly Comcast. Google's share of search advertising would fall significantly. Google's floundering with Android (try a device before you dispute this) has emboldened Apple to act fast to hit Google where it hurts, right in the core search business. As Apple moves to the cloud and Google builds devices, Apple and Google are converging rapidly into competitors.
- euroclydon 16y ago
  What does it mean to be the default search engine for an ISP? Google transcends deals like that now.
  - grandalf 16y ago
    If an ISP had a deal with Bing, it could simply map all search traffic intended for Google to Bing... google.com?q=snookie => bing.com?q=snookie Bing could offer the ISP a percentage of ad revenue, and if users didn't complain then (without net neutrality) there'd be nothing to stop it. (I'd guess that most HN users wouldn't be able to tell the difference between Google and Bing results if the styling were identical and they didn't notice the domain name)
    - gojomo 16y ago
      You don't need new net-neutrality rules to prevent such shenanigans; existing laws against fraud, trading on another's trademark, and monopolistic tying are plenty. And even the hoi polloi loves themselves their 'Google'; it wouldn't take much to generate a consumer backlash against such a practice. To the extent an ISP's heavy promotion or nudging might encourage people to try another search engine they might like as much or more than Google, that's a good thing. We need more search competition; a new entrant ought to be able to buy enough attention to get a fair look.
nickpinkston 16y ago
I wonder if Google's protest-base is similar to the WalMart's ones in still using their products? I'd wager so.
- davidmurphy 16y ago
  I boycott Wal-Mart. But I still use Google. Not yet comparable. That said I'd be slightly tempted to go protest outside Google's Santa Monica office (the one near me).
  - nickpinkston 16y ago
    I'm saying I bet that the percent of WalMart protestors who still shop there is probably pretty similar to the percent of Google protestors who still use gApps.
gojomo 16y ago
The internet does not need 'saving' by a bunch of people chanting outside Google with picket signs and petitions. If the internet were as fragile as the neutrality-activists thought, it would have never gotten where it is today. Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL would have won. And the neut-advocates very worst nightmare scenarios -- rampant blocking and throttling by the last-mile incumbents -- would quickly provoke a necessary next-step emergence of new competitors and route-around technologies. That is, if the nightmare scenarios ever happened. Which they won't, because even in a local duopoly, being known as the option which gives you less of the internet will be profit-destroying. The alternative neut-advocates offer -- the FCC riding in as a white knight with new rules to save us -- is a dangerous child's fantasy. Any rulemaking by the feds will involve backroom deals between companies large enough to send lawyers to DC -- just like the Google-Verizon talks, hosted by the FCC! Any rulemaking by the feds will generate stacks of hard-to-interpret regulations that inconvenience everyone -- but hinder novel services and upstarts that are hard-to-classify the most, so the giant incumbents won't mind them so much. That is, neutrality rules would freeze into slow-changing, confusingly-enforced law a currently-fashionable, romanticized notion of the internet that manages to make big companies and the political establishment comfortable. It only 'saves' the internet in the same way you could 'save' a wild animal by putting it in a cage. Don't let the FCC neuter my internet!
- norswap 16y ago
  Nonsense. If they are few actor, they can always make more re less implicit arrangements. The internet providers fucked up the internet already, you just don't realize it. Neither does a lot of people here, cheering about "the cloud". Instead we could live in a p2p wonderland, where each node would be responsible for it's own data. It would be much more efficient money and energy-wise, and it would totally brush the privacy concerns away. What makes it impossible ? Asymmetric bandwidth rates which are 10 times greater for download than for upload. Moreover, as someone stated elsewhere, it is preferable to have no rules but internet providers that fear sanctions would they discriminate traffic, than to have rules that explicitly allow discrimination.
  - tkahn6 16y ago
alecco 16y ago
I would prefer a ribbon campaign across the web. Too many startups and small businesses are in jeopardy. I don't understand why all VCs are so quiet about this. Perhaps they are scared of future black lists from the telcos?
- patrickaljord 16y ago
  > Too many startups and small businesses are in jeopardy. No they're not.
  - alecco 16y ago
    If Google/Verizon get their way any new (or existing but not participating) major competitor can be throttled to oblivion.
    - patrickaljord 16y ago
      > any new (or existing but not participating) major competitor can be throttled to oblivion No they can't.
      - alecco 16y ago
        How do you know? Google and Verizon didn't pass a law, they made a mutually beneficial agreement. And the telcos have been saying they want to tax successful business running on their pipes for years. Note I wrote "can be", not "will be." This looks like a slippery slope for fair use and content independence.Perhaps the EU and/or other big groups outside Washington/USA can stop the telcos/ISPs. You assert your opinion without giving an explanation and without taking into account things will change (for good or bad.)
        patrickaljord 16y ago
        > they made a mutually beneficial agreement No they didn't make any agreement. They made a proposal. Google has been advocating pure net neutrality on landline and wireless for the last 10 years. They've been rejected by the FCC, the telcos and the governement. After 10 years of getting nowhere, they are trying to get net neutrality on landline at least because right now there are no laws at all protecting net neutrality, wireless or not. No one has pushed as hard as Google for pure net neutrality, but after 10 years, Google needed to get real and face reality, no laws are going to get passed on pure/absolute net neutraliy, so they went for this proposal instead. Call them evil if you want... > You assert your opinion without giving an explanation So do you.
moultano 16y ago
If there was half as much outcry over the Obama administration and Congress doing nothing on net neutrality, Google would never have needed to compromise in the first place.
- thesethings 16y ago
  This is a worthwhile point to chew on. While I'm not sure how comfortable I am with the new Google developments, they said something I sympathized with in their blog post this week: "...we urge you to take your views directly to your Senators and Representatives in Washington." (http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/08/facts-about-our-network-neutrality.html http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/08/facts-about-o...) I felt like they were saying, "Help us out here folks. It was hard enough to get to this watered down policy." Again, I'm not defending their end proposal, but we do need to spend equal energy presenting our case our representatives as we to Google (when it comes to policy).
- jsz0 16y ago
  Since the telecoms own congress we're probably better off without any new legislation. Companies like Google standing up and fighting on our behalf would have been the best possible solution but that didn't work out. I think the FCC is the last best hope. Reclassify broadband so the FCC can regulate properly. I'm sure the FCC is partly owned by the telecoms too but at least it's an appointed position and there's an effective term limit on FCC leadership due to Presidential elections. It's probably the only hope.
  - nostrademons 16y ago
    The telecoms own Congress because most ordinary citizens never call or e-mail their reps and make their voices heard. A politician's goal is votes; they'll listen to telecom lobbyists because that gets them money which they can use to buy votes. But that's an indirect, inefficient process: they'd much rather have some idea of what it'd take to get your vote directly. When the bailout was up for a vote, there was a massive letter-writing campaign, and it was defeated. The first time. Then we got distracted, it came up for a vote again, and it passed. Imagine what we could accomplish if all of the American populace was able to divert as much attention to influencing Washington as a professional lobbyist is. In other words, what if we all wrote our senators all day long instead of playing Farmville all day long? Come to think of it, that might be an interesting hack. "Congressville". Instead of managing a virtual farm, you manage a virtual legislature by planting, growing and harvesting legislature. And you "play" with real letters to your real representatives.
drivebyacct2 16y ago
I'm horrified that the anti-regulation for anti-regulation's sake view point is the top thread currently.
yoyar 16y ago
Don't successful companies with lots of resources already have the ability to purchase faster servers, and more of them? Should there be some law that requires all companies use the same hardware to deliver their content?
SudarshanP 16y ago
A few questions. What gets classified as Wired and wireless? Suppose I use fiber to my wifi router is the wording twisted enough to count it as wireless? If that can be treated as wired, then don't you think even 10 years down the line most of our data will flow through fiber? Coz at Office, Home, Hotels, Airports etc. we would be using fiber till the wifi router... Is the rate of growth of wireless bandwidth so much higher than the rate of growth of fiber bandwidth that we will switch to a very wireless centric internet?? Or will we use fiber till the wifi router in the future?
bbuffone 16y ago
One good thing about this - its nice to see that this generation can put down their tweeters and actually try to make something happen!

141 points by mcantelon 16y ago

This article is absolutely awful. I've never read anything more factually incorrect. "Free Press is concerned that Google's deal with Verizon to secure special internet privileges on its broadband will lead to other internet providers brokering deals with major companies. First Verizon and Google strike a deal, then AT&T and Microsoft have a deal ... here comes Comcast who cuts a deal with Yahoo" There was no "deal". It is only proposal. And it would grant no special privileges to either party. That being said, it is good people are beginning to reorganize in favor of net neutrality and hopefully will make their views known to their Congresspeople.

paul9290 16y ago
In-factual to hacker news crowd yes. To the average person does it matter? They need to be told in a dumbed down fashion. Like, "If you disliked iPhone on AT&T only, this Google/Verizon pact is going to making using the Internet suck; make your Internet feel as its Cable TV!" Something like that, but either way it needs to be sold to the average joe so they can understand and take action.
- aristus 16y ago
  That's pretty disrespectful. Sloganeering has its place. The very term "net neutrality" was a brilliant capture of the semantic high-ground. But it can turn on you in an instant, as we're seeing with Google's "Don't be evil" slogan. As far as I can tell Google are trying something nuanced, to impose some rules, where before we had an uneasy Mexican standoff. And they are getting crucified for it.
  - paul9290 16y ago
    Ask the average joe (the majority of Internet users) if they know what a web browser is, also ask them what Net Neutrality is. Do you think 15% would know and explain what either is? If all of us care about the Internet and are appalled at this proposal then for this type of protesting/campaigning to be effective it needs to be better sold(marketed) to the majority. More so then 50 to 100 people standing outside Google protesting.
    - grandalf 16y ago
      This is the key point. Users don't care. Back in the days of Alta Vista, Google offered better search. Today, search is a solved problem and easy for many companies to clone. I'd estimate that 80% of internet users would fail to distinguish between the search quality of Google search and a pagerank-based index of the top 20 websites (which could be hosted on a laptop). This is why Google attempted to innovate via legislation by trying to get net neutrality passed to prevent its competitors from taking market share via deals that shared profits with ISPs. Google has failed to stop it, so it must now engage in its own dealmaking to block its competitors from "taking" search traffic (and ad revenue) via non-neutrality ISP deals. The biggest threat to Google would be a deal between Apple or Microsoft and Comcast or Verizon. Google's deal with Verizon is an attempt to scuttle any such deal. I'm surprised Verizon found a win in it, but who knows. We will soon see what sort of QoS Verizon gives FaceTime on iPhone 4.
      - rue 16y ago
        > This is the key point. Users don't care. That is no point at all. Users are not familiar enough with the problem space to be able to care (or not).
        grandalf 16y ago
        Hence it's not a problem for them. Problems are what create business opportunities. In the Alta Vista days, I had a search problem (search sucked) but today I do not. If Google went away I would still not have a search problem. Obviously, if something arcane like QoS became a problem for users, then an ISP would have a more difficult cost/benefit decision to make about how neutral it wished to be.
  - natep 16y ago
    > The very term "net neutrality" was a brilliant capture of the semantic high-ground. I suppose it does, but for the longest time I understood the two sides of the issue, but I didn't know which was pro-net neutrality, and which was anti-net neutrality. Internet freedom is my idea of a better term (although ISPs wouldn't have the freedom to filter/prioritize their traffic, so my term has problems, too)
- makmanalp 16y ago
  As much as I disagree with false reporting, paul9290 might have a point here. The same issue exists with software patents, mainly the sad fact that no one other than us really cares. I'd vote for a proper explanation but no one really sits through and listens to those before being nagged for 30-some years, movies being made, books being written (example: the environmentalist movement).
pyman 16y ago
"It is only proposal". You make it sound like a proposal, in this case, is much better than a deal. Believe me, it's not. What Google is proposing is ridiculous and goes against everything we worked for in the last 20 years.
- gojomo 16y ago
  Who is the 'we' in your statement?
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- jemfinch 16y ago
  Except it doesn't substantially differ from the FCC's NPRM from back in 2009, the one everyone was so happy about. It's the NPRM for wired networks, and a "wait and see" approach for wireless networks.
dieterrams 16y ago
I'm 100% certain you've read things that are more factually incorrect. Also, you're quoting a quote from the article, whose alleged factual incorrectness doesn't make the article itself incorrect. Granted, the article's author also refers to the Google-Verizon proposal as a "deal" just above to the quote, but here's the thing: I actually don't think it's unfair to call the proposal a deal, since Google themselves describe it as a compromise. This is very much a deal between Google and Verizon over what position they could jointly support. The tricky thing is that this is a political deal, not a formal business deal, which is what you typically expect a "deal" between two companies to mean. The person you've quoted, Craig Aaron, may actually recognize the distinction (e.g., the first sentence is about the political deal, the second about subsequent business deals), but using the same word for two distinct meanings can easily give the opposite impression.
- mkramlich 16y ago
  Agreed. And the lines between a business deal and a political deal are blurry at best.
  - moultano 16y ago
    >"deal with Verizon to secure special internet privileges on its broadband" Regardless, this sentence is entirely false.
mkramlich 16y ago
Well they had to come to some sort of deal in order to both agree to this proposal. Money does not have to change hands, for example, in order for a deal to have occured. Simply a multi-party agreement. "If I back this will you back it too? You will? Great. We have a deal. Let's shake."
jsz0 16y ago
No special privileges... yet. Some people might be jumping the gun but this proposal certainly lays the groundwork for it -- at least on wireless. So often these days we're aware that the other shoe drops eventually. I think people are wising up to these old manipulations that used to work so well. We just assume the worst.

tlrobinson 16y ago

It would be amusing if this was one big Machiavellian plan by Google to rile up internet users to put more pressure on for net neutrality...

jonursenbach 16y ago
Oh if only that were the case.
MisterWebz 16y ago
By damaging their own reputation? Yeah, right.
chrismsnz 16y ago
"Because Google is the hero the Internet deserves, but not the one it needs right now. So we'll flame them because they can take it. Because they're not our hero. They're a silent guardian, a watchful protector. Dark knights."

pg 16y ago

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
- blasdel 16y ago
  It was downmodded because it's been spammed so repeatedly on HN for ages. As a means for karma whoring, it's at the bottom below linking to xkcd comics or pg essays as the full content of a comment. I had been hoping that pg would blacklist comments containing the URL, but I guess that's out the window now.
  - gcb 16y ago
    There's probably a xkcd for that.
mlinsey 16y ago
First PG post to ever reach -2?
- pavs 16y ago
  I did it so that I can tell everyone that I have been living on the edge. /s
- blasdel 16y ago
  http://searchyc.com/user/pg?only=comments&sort=by_points_r http://searchyc.com/user/pg?only=comments&sort=by_points...
  - pg 16y ago
    Looks like they have some kind of bug. There are comments there with 0 points that could never have had 0 points.

grandalf 16y ago

Predictions for 2011: - Apple releases iWeb, a google search clone, signs deal with Verizon to make iWeb the mandatory search engine for all Verizon ISP users. - Apple sells 25M Verizon 4G iPads for $99 each with 2 year service contract ($20 per month) - Apple announces record profits from search advertising. * Google's core search business is easily cloned in 2 years. How to get market share? A deal with large ISPs. Most of Google's profits come from search advertising, and Apple now has a cutting edge mobile ad platform which is stronger than Google's. It's time to act. Search is not hard anymore. Suppose Apple did this deal with Verizon and possibly Comcast. Google's share of search advertising would fall significantly. Google's floundering with Android (try a device before you dispute this) has emboldened Apple to act fast to hit Google where it hurts, right in the core search business. As Apple moves to the cloud and Google builds devices, Apple and Google are converging rapidly into competitors.

euroclydon 16y ago
What does it mean to be the default search engine for an ISP? Google transcends deals like that now.
- grandalf 16y ago
  If an ISP had a deal with Bing, it could simply map all search traffic intended for Google to Bing... google.com?q=snookie => bing.com?q=snookie Bing could offer the ISP a percentage of ad revenue, and if users didn't complain then (without net neutrality) there'd be nothing to stop it. (I'd guess that most HN users wouldn't be able to tell the difference between Google and Bing results if the styling were identical and they didn't notice the domain name)
  - gojomo 16y ago
    You don't need new net-neutrality rules to prevent such shenanigans; existing laws against fraud, trading on another's trademark, and monopolistic tying are plenty. And even the hoi polloi loves themselves their 'Google'; it wouldn't take much to generate a consumer backlash against such a practice. To the extent an ISP's heavy promotion or nudging might encourage people to try another search engine they might like as much or more than Google, that's a good thing. We need more search competition; a new entrant ought to be able to buy enough attention to get a fair look.

nickpinkston 16y ago

I wonder if Google's protest-base is similar to the WalMart's ones in still using their products? I'd wager so.

davidmurphy 16y ago
I boycott Wal-Mart. But I still use Google. Not yet comparable. That said I'd be slightly tempted to go protest outside Google's Santa Monica office (the one near me).
- nickpinkston 16y ago
  I'm saying I bet that the percent of WalMart protestors who still shop there is probably pretty similar to the percent of Google protestors who still use gApps.

gojomo 16y ago

The internet does not need 'saving' by a bunch of people chanting outside Google with picket signs and petitions. If the internet were as fragile as the neutrality-activists thought, it would have never gotten where it is today. Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL would have won. And the neut-advocates very worst nightmare scenarios -- rampant blocking and throttling by the last-mile incumbents -- would quickly provoke a necessary next-step emergence of new competitors and route-around technologies. That is, if the nightmare scenarios ever happened. Which they won't, because even in a local duopoly, being known as the option which gives you less of the internet will be profit-destroying. The alternative neut-advocates offer -- the FCC riding in as a white knight with new rules to save us -- is a dangerous child's fantasy. Any rulemaking by the feds will involve backroom deals between companies large enough to send lawyers to DC -- just like the Google-Verizon talks, hosted by the FCC! Any rulemaking by the feds will generate stacks of hard-to-interpret regulations that inconvenience everyone -- but hinder novel services and upstarts that are hard-to-classify the most, so the giant incumbents won't mind them so much. That is, neutrality rules would freeze into slow-changing, confusingly-enforced law a currently-fashionable, romanticized notion of the internet that manages to make big companies and the political establishment comfortable. It only 'saves' the internet in the same way you could 'save' a wild animal by putting it in a cage. Don't let the FCC neuter my internet!

norswap 16y ago
Nonsense. If they are few actor, they can always make more re less implicit arrangements. The internet providers fucked up the internet already, you just don't realize it. Neither does a lot of people here, cheering about "the cloud". Instead we could live in a p2p wonderland, where each node would be responsible for it's own data. It would be much more efficient money and energy-wise, and it would totally brush the privacy concerns away. What makes it impossible ? Asymmetric bandwidth rates which are 10 times greater for download than for upload. Moreover, as someone stated elsewhere, it is preferable to have no rules but internet providers that fear sanctions would they discriminate traffic, than to have rules that explicitly allow discrimination.
- tkahn6 16y ago

alecco 16y ago

I would prefer a ribbon campaign across the web. Too many startups and small businesses are in jeopardy. I don't understand why all VCs are so quiet about this. Perhaps they are scared of future black lists from the telcos?

patrickaljord 16y ago
> Too many startups and small businesses are in jeopardy. No they're not.
- alecco 16y ago
  If Google/Verizon get their way any new (or existing but not participating) major competitor can be throttled to oblivion.
  - patrickaljord 16y ago
    > any new (or existing but not participating) major competitor can be throttled to oblivion No they can't.
    - alecco 16y ago
      How do you know? Google and Verizon didn't pass a law, they made a mutually beneficial agreement. And the telcos have been saying they want to tax successful business running on their pipes for years. Note I wrote "can be", not "will be." This looks like a slippery slope for fair use and content independence.Perhaps the EU and/or other big groups outside Washington/USA can stop the telcos/ISPs. You assert your opinion without giving an explanation and without taking into account things will change (for good or bad.)
      - patrickaljord 16y ago
        > they made a mutually beneficial agreement No they didn't make any agreement. They made a proposal. Google has been advocating pure net neutrality on landline and wireless for the last 10 years. They've been rejected by the FCC, the telcos and the governement. After 10 years of getting nowhere, they are trying to get net neutrality on landline at least because right now there are no laws at all protecting net neutrality, wireless or not. No one has pushed as hard as Google for pure net neutrality, but after 10 years, Google needed to get real and face reality, no laws are going to get passed on pure/absolute net neutraliy, so they went for this proposal instead. Call them evil if you want... > You assert your opinion without giving an explanation So do you.

moultano 16y ago

If there was half as much outcry over the Obama administration and Congress doing nothing on net neutrality, Google would never have needed to compromise in the first place.

thesethings 16y ago
This is a worthwhile point to chew on. While I'm not sure how comfortable I am with the new Google developments, they said something I sympathized with in their blog post this week: "...we urge you to take your views directly to your Senators and Representatives in Washington." (http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/08/facts-about-our-network-neutrality.html http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/08/facts-about-o...) I felt like they were saying, "Help us out here folks. It was hard enough to get to this watered down policy." Again, I'm not defending their end proposal, but we do need to spend equal energy presenting our case our representatives as we to Google (when it comes to policy).
jsz0 16y ago
Since the telecoms own congress we're probably better off without any new legislation. Companies like Google standing up and fighting on our behalf would have been the best possible solution but that didn't work out. I think the FCC is the last best hope. Reclassify broadband so the FCC can regulate properly. I'm sure the FCC is partly owned by the telecoms too but at least it's an appointed position and there's an effective term limit on FCC leadership due to Presidential elections. It's probably the only hope.
- nostrademons 16y ago
  The telecoms own Congress because most ordinary citizens never call or e-mail their reps and make their voices heard. A politician's goal is votes; they'll listen to telecom lobbyists because that gets them money which they can use to buy votes. But that's an indirect, inefficient process: they'd much rather have some idea of what it'd take to get your vote directly. When the bailout was up for a vote, there was a massive letter-writing campaign, and it was defeated. The first time. Then we got distracted, it came up for a vote again, and it passed. Imagine what we could accomplish if all of the American populace was able to divert as much attention to influencing Washington as a professional lobbyist is. In other words, what if we all wrote our senators all day long instead of playing Farmville all day long? Come to think of it, that might be an interesting hack. "Congressville". Instead of managing a virtual farm, you manage a virtual legislature by planting, growing and harvesting legislature. And you "play" with real letters to your real representatives.

drivebyacct2 16y ago

I'm horrified that the anti-regulation for anti-regulation's sake view point is the top thread currently.

yoyar 16y ago

Don't successful companies with lots of resources already have the ability to purchase faster servers, and more of them? Should there be some law that requires all companies use the same hardware to deliver their content?

SudarshanP 16y ago

A few questions. What gets classified as Wired and wireless? Suppose I use fiber to my wifi router is the wording twisted enough to count it as wireless? If that can be treated as wired, then don't you think even 10 years down the line most of our data will flow through fiber? Coz at Office, Home, Hotels, Airports etc. we would be using fiber till the wifi router... Is the rate of growth of wireless bandwidth so much higher than the rate of growth of fiber bandwidth that we will switch to a very wireless centric internet?? Or will we use fiber till the wifi router in the future?

bbuffone 16y ago

One good thing about this - its nice to see that this generation can put down their tweeters and actually try to make something happen!