> Clearly Orange has no idea how the internet works and what’s their involvement in it. The ISP is just a dumb pipe to connect the user to a server, nothing more.
Clearly Nathan Campos has no idea how the internet works.
Negotiations about charging for traffic is normal business, and has always been.
> The user fees should be equivalent to their connection speed, not their usage, which apparently is something that ISPs can’t understand too.
This is practiced for some land networks (in France, most of them) because the traffic is still good enough and most people are not generating so much traffic, but this can not happen on mobile network because of the much limited capacity. Limiting the rate is the way to guarantee that the mean traffic does not explode, saturating the whole thing.
> French President Francois Hollande warned Google on Wednesday that his government would legislate a so-called Google tax if the company doesn’t reach a deal with French media companies.
Orange is not a media company, and the rest of the post recognize that and talks about ISP.
There is something nonsensical about this whole matter (as reported by the blogs) that triggers a flag for me.
More info -
(tl;dr; the peering traffic between Cogent and Orange are too imbalanced; Cogent handles Google's traffic)
In this case, the US telecommunications operator Cogent claimed, among other things, that France Télécom was compromising the peering system (enabling exchange of traffic flows between networks, free of charge) used by transit operators, by requesting payment for opening up additional technical capacity for access to Orange subscribers. Regarding this claim, the Autorité considered that in view of the highly asymmetric nature of the traffic exchanged between France Télécom and Cogent, such a payment request does not in itself constitute an anti-competitive practice inasmuch as this type of remuneration is not uncommon in the Internet industry in cases where a significant imbalance exists between the incoming and outgoing flows exchanged between two networks, and is consistent with the overall peering policy adopted by France Télécom, with which Cogent is familiar.
However, the Autorité also noted a certain lack of transparency in the relationship between the domestic network of France Télécom (Orange) and its transit operator business (Open Transit), creating a potential for margin squeezes. France Télécom agreed to make commitments to prevent such situations and enable appropriate monitoring.
"Google has also been faced with demands for compensation from content providers such as newspapers, who charge the search giant makes lots of advertising revenue from referencing their material."
"Hollande said “Those who make a profit from the information” produced by media companies should participate in their financing."
It's depressing to see so many examples of the abysmal understanding of the internet that so many politicians seem to have. Ignorance can be forgiven to a certain extent, but not even making an attempt to try to understand the situation - just spending five minutes on google or wikipedia researching the Googlebot will tell you about robots.txt - is inexcusable.
Public and state ignorance of computers and the internet are leading us down a very dark path; there needs to be an effort to try to educate our political representatives, or we risk a future where legislation like SOPA is passed purely out of ignorance of what it means.
Google is not responsible for this traffic, it is the user requesting it. I consume YouTube, search, etc. content because I request it, not because Google tells me to.
I just hope the EU slaps French politicians for this one.
Orange has a very strong presence in Africa.
It leveraged this presence to have Google pay for their Internet trafic in France and Europe: Orange is pivotal to Google's success in Africa.
According to Orange's CEO, Google just can't do without Orange in Africa - and that's likely to be true.
I really do not understand why Google accepted this. Orange needs them far more than Google needs Orange.
They could have let Orange stew or force the French government's hands by proposing legislation that would have created a huge popular and technical uproar.
It seems to serve no purpose, other than some unknown short term motivation - which has never been a characteristic of Google - to accede.
There is no way French media companies or French government will back down now they have forced Google to draw first blood on itself. It also sets a global precedent against them and other Internet companies.
A plausible case can be made for charging Google based on the amount of traffic generated by their products which is initialized outside of the subscriber's control.
The ISP is delivering advertising from which Google benefits and which its users are not explicitly requesting. Charging Google is analogous to a cable provider charging an advertising agency when that agency wants to place ads on behalf of their clients.
Other Google services such as Analytics, tracking cookies, and JavaScript libraries also use capacity without considering the effect on the provider's bandwidth.
Again, this is a plausible position. It is plausible because Google is generating revenue regardless of the ISP's customers' interest and the source of the data is outside the ISP's network.
Charging Google is a reasonable alternative to charging their customers for something which may be of little value to them.
I disagree. A user requesting http://example.com is that user requesting everything that the webmaster of example.com wanted example.com to include. This includes ads.
The webmaster has decided that the content hosted on http://example.com includes some HTML, some off-site resources (maybe images hosted on a CDN, maybe some ads, maybe some Javascript hosted elsewhere).
Are you going to charge CDN owners too given the user doesn't 'know' that websites often use a CDN to host their content? What about jquery.com for hosting the version of jquery the site uses (if they don't host it themselves)?
Why are ads special? Simply because the webmaster is being paid by the ad network? In the CDN case, money flows in the opposite direction -- the webmaster pays the CDN. Why shouldn't the ISP take a cut of that transaction too?
If a website has ads the implied contract is that you get access to this content in exchange for having these ads on the screen. Why does an ISP get to take a cut out of that agreement between the webmaster, the ad network, and the user? They are already compensated by the user to deliver all the bytes the user's computer requested to them.
If an ISP is unhappy with how many bytes the user is requesting, and how many of those bytes come from a particular source (e.g. Google) then they need to renegotiate their contract with the user.
Orange knows exactly how the internet works. They’re just trying to change it for the worse.
This is the logical consequence of people moving their activities from decentralized, open services (email, IRC, and usenet) where revenues are generated (and cost incurred) at the ISP, to centralized, closed services (Facebook and twitter) where cost, revenue, and control is centralized by the platform owner.
The natural response will be for Google and Facebook to compete (or simply threaten to compete) with residential ISPs, forcing some sort of accommodation by the ISPs, and binding ISPs to the media platforms (Facebook, Google, et. al.) in ways never before seen.
I'm sorry, but "Google apparently accepted to pay the fees (even worst since the government is also forcing a decision favorable to the ISPs)" is pure nonsense. You misread your source. The French government doesn't give a damn about peering negociations.
The French government supported _media companies_ (which is a nice way to say "old-school newspapers"), or at least tried to pressure Google into reaching an agreement with them. That's a whole different issue, which just happens to be mentioned in the same article.
what a French company gets preferential treatment in France - to quote Captain Renault: I’m shocked, shocked to find that favoring of national champions is going on in here.
Hint Which companies got raided over the 35 hour week a few years back not French owned ones.
a question ..maybe it is obvious.. in the past Mobile OEMS at times have paid a bandwidth fee to telecomms to balance end users having to update an OS on the device..
Are we sure that the event of Google paying Orange referenced in the article is not simply Google paying a small fee due to the bandwidth consumed by the end user when the Android OS is updated on the Orange networks?
side note, usually that download is nto counted towards user limits as usually its also sometimes a security update.
That is really weird... Especially the warning about president Hollande about the Google tax.
Why is it weird? Because since free.fr badly messed up and decided to give the finger to net neutrality, a french minister did ask free.fr's CEO to come explain himself and to fix the situation as soon as possible with Google.
Basically free.fr was planning to remove Google ads by modifying the HTML served to users and even the socialist running France at the moment thought that violating net neutrality like that was not acceptable (in their own words it was a violation of net-neutrality and france is very much pro-net-neutrality).
And Orange is an ISP, just like free.fr. Not a media company.
So I wonder if the author of TFA isn't confusing two different things: the right to archive / link to french magazines / publications (like Lemonde.fr) and the net-neutrality issue.
IMHO users are paying for a service and companies unable to cope with the bandwith their users are demanding shouldn't use fake adverts to advertize bandwith they cannot provide.
In addition to that: go Google, wire the entire europe with fiber and let's be done with these lame ISPs ; )
>> If their users are using too much bandwidth and the costs are higher than the profits they should start to rethink the price of their service, not go after Google saying that they are evil for transferring all that data.
That's one option, the other is to approach Netflix, Google or whatever and negotiate. NEGOTIATE is the keyword and you need to keep in mind that different countries have different laws.
Raising prices on everyone because xx% makes Youtube Orange's largest bandwidth hog could make the rest of your customers mad.
>That's one option, the other is to approach Netflix, Google or whatever and negotiate.
Negotiate implies a free market. There is no free market for access to an ISP's residential customers. They have a complete monopoly over the ability to send packets to those people, resulting in a market failure that requires government regulation to avoid monopoly abuse.
>Raising prices on everyone because xx% makes Youtube Orange's largest bandwidth hog could make the rest of your customers mad.
Do you have some evidence that xx% is actually simultaneously some small percentage of users and still use enough bandwidth as a small minority to require a nontrivial price increase for all customers? Raising prices on all users in order to pay for expansion to meet demand created by a substantial majority of users is not exactly unreasonable. Especially if the remaining minority is offered the chance to buy a less expensive connection with insufficient capacity to stream video, since they by definition don't want to do that anyway.
[+] [-] temac|13 years ago|reply
Clearly Nathan Campos has no idea how the internet works. Negotiations about charging for traffic is normal business, and has always been.
> The user fees should be equivalent to their connection speed, not their usage, which apparently is something that ISPs can’t understand too.
This is practiced for some land networks (in France, most of them) because the traffic is still good enough and most people are not generating so much traffic, but this can not happen on mobile network because of the much limited capacity. Limiting the rate is the way to guarantee that the mean traffic does not explode, saturating the whole thing.
> French President Francois Hollande warned Google on Wednesday that his government would legislate a so-called Google tax if the company doesn’t reach a deal with French media companies.
Orange is not a media company, and the rest of the post recognize that and talks about ISP.
[+] [-] arkem|13 years ago|reply
I have no idea how Google's peering arrangements are set up but I doubt that this is the only transit arrangement Google has ever ended up in.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering
[+] [-] powertower|13 years ago|reply
There is something nonsensical about this whole matter (as reported by the blogs) that triggers a flag for me.
More info -
(tl;dr; the peering traffic between Cogent and Orange are too imbalanced; Cogent handles Google's traffic)
In this case, the US telecommunications operator Cogent claimed, among other things, that France Télécom was compromising the peering system (enabling exchange of traffic flows between networks, free of charge) used by transit operators, by requesting payment for opening up additional technical capacity for access to Orange subscribers. Regarding this claim, the Autorité considered that in view of the highly asymmetric nature of the traffic exchanged between France Télécom and Cogent, such a payment request does not in itself constitute an anti-competitive practice inasmuch as this type of remuneration is not uncommon in the Internet industry in cases where a significant imbalance exists between the incoming and outgoing flows exchanged between two networks, and is consistent with the overall peering policy adopted by France Télécom, with which Cogent is familiar.
However, the Autorité also noted a certain lack of transparency in the relationship between the domestic network of France Télécom (Orange) and its transit operator business (Open Transit), creating a potential for margin squeezes. France Télécom agreed to make commitments to prevent such situations and enable appropriate monitoring.
http://fastnetnews.com/dslprime/42-d/4881-france-telecom-fre...
[+] [-] hazz|13 years ago|reply
"Hollande said “Those who make a profit from the information” produced by media companies should participate in their financing."
It's depressing to see so many examples of the abysmal understanding of the internet that so many politicians seem to have. Ignorance can be forgiven to a certain extent, but not even making an attempt to try to understand the situation - just spending five minutes on google or wikipedia researching the Googlebot will tell you about robots.txt - is inexcusable.
Public and state ignorance of computers and the internet are leading us down a very dark path; there needs to be an effort to try to educate our political representatives, or we risk a future where legislation like SOPA is passed purely out of ignorance of what it means.
[+] [-] taligent|13 years ago|reply
So basically your position is binary: Either don't allow your site to be indexed by Google or accept that they are going to profit from your content.
If you don't see why companies and governments see more shades of grey in this situation then the only person who is ignorant is you.
[+] [-] antr|13 years ago|reply
Google is not responsible for this traffic, it is the user requesting it. I consume YouTube, search, etc. content because I request it, not because Google tells me to.
I just hope the EU slaps French politicians for this one.
[+] [-] evv|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krallin|13 years ago|reply
According to Orange's CEO, Google just can't do without Orange in Africa - and that's likely to be true.
Sources (in French, sorry!):
http://frenchweb.fr/trafic-france-telecom-se-fait-remunerer-...
http://pro.clubic.com/entreprises/orange-france-telecom/actu...
[+] [-] drucken|13 years ago|reply
They could have let Orange stew or force the French government's hands by proposing legislation that would have created a huge popular and technical uproar.
It seems to serve no purpose, other than some unknown short term motivation - which has never been a characteristic of Google - to accede.
There is no way French media companies or French government will back down now they have forced Google to draw first blood on itself. It also sets a global precedent against them and other Internet companies.
[+] [-] nathanpc|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brudgers|13 years ago|reply
The ISP is delivering advertising from which Google benefits and which its users are not explicitly requesting. Charging Google is analogous to a cable provider charging an advertising agency when that agency wants to place ads on behalf of their clients.
Other Google services such as Analytics, tracking cookies, and JavaScript libraries also use capacity without considering the effect on the provider's bandwidth.
Again, this is a plausible position. It is plausible because Google is generating revenue regardless of the ISP's customers' interest and the source of the data is outside the ISP's network.
Charging Google is a reasonable alternative to charging their customers for something which may be of little value to them.
[+] [-] rryan|13 years ago|reply
The webmaster has decided that the content hosted on http://example.com includes some HTML, some off-site resources (maybe images hosted on a CDN, maybe some ads, maybe some Javascript hosted elsewhere).
Are you going to charge CDN owners too given the user doesn't 'know' that websites often use a CDN to host their content? What about jquery.com for hosting the version of jquery the site uses (if they don't host it themselves)?
Why are ads special? Simply because the webmaster is being paid by the ad network? In the CDN case, money flows in the opposite direction -- the webmaster pays the CDN. Why shouldn't the ISP take a cut of that transaction too?
If a website has ads the implied contract is that you get access to this content in exchange for having these ads on the screen. Why does an ISP get to take a cut out of that agreement between the webmaster, the ad network, and the user? They are already compensated by the user to deliver all the bytes the user's computer requested to them.
If an ISP is unhappy with how many bytes the user is requesting, and how many of those bytes come from a particular source (e.g. Google) then they need to renegotiate their contract with the user.
[+] [-] josephby|13 years ago|reply
This is the logical consequence of people moving their activities from decentralized, open services (email, IRC, and usenet) where revenues are generated (and cost incurred) at the ISP, to centralized, closed services (Facebook and twitter) where cost, revenue, and control is centralized by the platform owner.
The natural response will be for Google and Facebook to compete (or simply threaten to compete) with residential ISPs, forcing some sort of accommodation by the ISPs, and binding ISPs to the media platforms (Facebook, Google, et. al.) in ways never before seen.
[+] [-] Wilya|13 years ago|reply
The French government supported _media companies_ (which is a nice way to say "old-school newspapers"), or at least tried to pressure Google into reaching an agreement with them. That's a whole different issue, which just happens to be mentioned in the same article.
[+] [-] polemic|13 years ago|reply
> "The ISP is just a dumb pipe to connect the user to a server, nothing more."
What OP means is:
> "Ideally, I would like the ISP to act as a dumb pipe..."
The reality is that ISP's can do whatever the heck they want, subject to the regulatory environment and the level of ignorance of their customers.
ISP's are a lot of things, "dumb" they are not.
[+] [-] guard-of-terra|13 years ago|reply
Everything they bring is either crap that degrades your experience and is hard to out out or costs you additional money. Non-exclusive if.
[+] [-] walshemj|13 years ago|reply
Hint Which companies got raided over the 35 hour week a few years back not French owned ones.
[+] [-] fredgrott|13 years ago|reply
Are we sure that the event of Google paying Orange referenced in the article is not simply Google paying a small fee due to the bandwidth consumed by the end user when the Android OS is updated on the Orange networks? side note, usually that download is nto counted towards user limits as usually its also sometimes a security update.
[+] [-] nathanpc|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] martinced|13 years ago|reply
Why is it weird? Because since free.fr badly messed up and decided to give the finger to net neutrality, a french minister did ask free.fr's CEO to come explain himself and to fix the situation as soon as possible with Google.
Basically free.fr was planning to remove Google ads by modifying the HTML served to users and even the socialist running France at the moment thought that violating net neutrality like that was not acceptable (in their own words it was a violation of net-neutrality and france is very much pro-net-neutrality).
And Orange is an ISP, just like free.fr. Not a media company.
So I wonder if the author of TFA isn't confusing two different things: the right to archive / link to french magazines / publications (like Lemonde.fr) and the net-neutrality issue.
IMHO users are paying for a service and companies unable to cope with the bandwith their users are demanding shouldn't use fake adverts to advertize bandwith they cannot provide.
In addition to that: go Google, wire the entire europe with fiber and let's be done with these lame ISPs ; )
[+] [-] jre|13 years ago|reply
On one hand, there is a peering problems between some French ISP and Google and they don't agree on who should pay for the interconnection costs.
On the other hand, some French newspapers are complaining about Google News.
[+] [-] tonfa|13 years ago|reply
This was DNS based, not DPI/proxy.
> And Orange is an ISP, just like free.fr. Not a media company.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_(telecommunications)#Sub... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_(telecommunications)#Con...
[+] [-] OGinparadise|13 years ago|reply
Yay! you go and tell them what the internet is and how to run their business since they have no idea http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_%28telecommunications%29
>> If their users are using too much bandwidth and the costs are higher than the profits they should start to rethink the price of their service, not go after Google saying that they are evil for transferring all that data.
That's one option, the other is to approach Netflix, Google or whatever and negotiate. NEGOTIATE is the keyword and you need to keep in mind that different countries have different laws.
Raising prices on everyone because xx% makes Youtube Orange's largest bandwidth hog could make the rest of your customers mad.
[+] [-] AnthonyMouse|13 years ago|reply
Negotiate implies a free market. There is no free market for access to an ISP's residential customers. They have a complete monopoly over the ability to send packets to those people, resulting in a market failure that requires government regulation to avoid monopoly abuse.
>Raising prices on everyone because xx% makes Youtube Orange's largest bandwidth hog could make the rest of your customers mad.
Do you have some evidence that xx% is actually simultaneously some small percentage of users and still use enough bandwidth as a small minority to require a nontrivial price increase for all customers? Raising prices on all users in order to pay for expansion to meet demand created by a substantial majority of users is not exactly unreasonable. Especially if the remaining minority is offered the chance to buy a less expensive connection with insufficient capacity to stream video, since they by definition don't want to do that anyway.
[+] [-] guard-of-terra|13 years ago|reply
They can raise price on xx% of their customers who use youtube that much.