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Why Orange's dominance in Africa forced Google to pay for traffic

• mtgx 14y ago
  In Africa? Well that explains it. Many African countries actually voted for those proposals at WCIT. I think most of the media missed this, and only focused on the US and Europe rejecting the proposals and "winning", but actually almost half the countries there took the deal. That means the Internet is about to get less free very soon there, once their governments put the UN proposals into law. And part of those proposals was the "sender pays" thing. Now let's just hope the countries who rejected it this time around won't use these countries as a role model next time. It's very likely Orange was one of the European ISP's lobbying for sender pays at ITU, as well. I don't know why Google would offer to pay them, considering Africa is going to be dominated by Android either way. Nokia's Lumias or RIM's phones are nowhere near the $50 mark Android phones have reached there, and they are going to dominate just like in India and China, where they've also almost killed Nokia and RIM from their leading positions in the past. So if Google really did this voluntarily then they weren't very smart. But I still think they had to do it after the WCIT.