What if Google turned round to SBCat&t and said “Screw your charging us to access your customers and network!”
How many DSL connections do you think Ed would sell to a Google-less Internet? I suspect Comcast and Time Warner would have a very, very merry Christmas.
Market power at the app layer, doncha just love it!
Posted by Martin Geddes at 12:03 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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Martin,
I was thinking the exact same thing. It would be next to trivial for Google to enforce its own "network neutrality" requirement, simply by blocking incoming http requests from any IP address of an ISP which in any way inhibits the ability of its customers to access Google.
Or Google could really hit the ISPs in their pocketbooks by either not crawling websites which are served by these ISPs, or modifying its ranking engine to lower the placement of websites served by these ISPs.
So sure, Mr. LEC ISP, go ahead and charge your customers a premium to get to Google. But your enterprise customers will all of a sudden find a lot less business being directed their way. Is that a tradeoff you want to make? Is that a war you want to fight?
Posted by: at December 2, 2005 04:13 PMAbsolutely. The penny hasn't dropped yet. In tandem, Yahoo and Google can DESTROY any access or e-commerce business at their whim. Keep talking, Ed -- it makes for great quotable stuff for my consulting gigs! Even MSFT can't touch the power they have; when people talk about Internet duopolies in the US, they're looking at the wrong layer!
Posted by: at December 2, 2005 04:26 PMSame would work in at least parts of Europe. In the Netherlands last month Google.nl became the most used site.
However, in having that penny dropped, the public might well think Google's then veil of 'do no evil' would have come off as well.
So at what image cost would Google beat SBC? King Pyrrhus comes to mind...
Posted by: at December 3, 2005 10:15 AMTelco rants against Google make no sense. Not only does Google have more juice than the telcos, but Google adds value to broadband. As I recall, it's good for producers when the demand curve shifts to the right. And that's what happens every time Google or anyone else makes broadband a more compelling service.
The telcos' real problem is continuing per-subscriber usage increases (file sharing, video, gaming, etc.) in a market where usage is not tied very closely to prices. The U.S. pricing model (unlimited usage for a fixed monthly rate) will come under pressure as broadband matures from an add-on to legacy cash-cow services (telephony and video), to a product that has to be profitable on a standalone basis.
Posted by: at December 5, 2005 03:42 PMMartin: Is this guy kidding? Isn't email the same as google or vonage, skype etc........."my pipes" I just can't believe how clueless the ILEC's are. The cable companies have one hell of an opp. to run them aground. He says free is nuts, well dont dsl subs already pay? JMHO
"How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google (GOOG ), MSN, Vonage, and others?
How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?
The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! (YHOO ) or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!"