The phone companies have a mantra when it comes to net neutrality. They insist they will never “block, impair or degrade” any user’s Internet access. Maybe that’s true for their wireline divisions, but it’s not necessarily clear that this rule applies to their wireless companies.
The Wall Street Journal’s Amol Sharma and Dionne Searcey have this delicious (and a bit distorted) piece about how Verizon Wireless (owned in part by Verizon) and Cingular (owned by BellSouth and AT&T) are cutting off users’ Internet activity for their broadband wireless services if those users take up too much bandwidth. The piece argues that bandwidth limitations in wireless telco contracts put off-limits such popular activities as “Internet calling, video streaming and using routers that let multiple users share a single Internet connection.”
Verizon Wireless has sent service-cancellation notices to customers it says are using excessive network capacity. Sprint and Cingular Wireless, meanwhile, have moved to charge people for the amount of data bits they wirelessly transfer to their computers each month. “They market it in such a way that you would think it’s Internet-on-the-go, then they start piling on restrictions,” says Bill Roland, an information-technology administrator in Ocala, Fla., who uses a Sprint high-speed connection. “What they want you to do is just basically surf the Internet and nothing else.”
To be fair, Verizon Wireless claims that it has sent fewer than 100 letter threatening to cut-off users since it first launched its EV-DO service in 2004. And Verizon Wireless’ CTO claims those letters only go to users that use more than 1,000 times the typical bandwidth. Moreover, the wireless telcos offer higher-priced “unlimited” download packages, which is fine.
After all, if a user is a bandwidth hog, higher prices should apply. But VoIP doesn’t really take a bandwidth toll, and I’d be interested to know if any of the wireless broadband contracts prohibit that?
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 3:23 PM | Print | Comments (2)
Well, if anyone isn’t convinced a la carte delivery of cable programming is a bad idea, Rush Limbaugh is here to set them straight. That’s right, the right-wing pundit devoted a segment of his show yesterday to panning the legislation planned by Senator John McCain (R-AZ) that would mandate cable delivery of individual channels, as opposed to packaged tiers of programming.
As usual, Limbaugh focuses his fine analytical eye on the issue:
Now, it sounds good, and some people are all for this because they don’t like the smut and the perverted garbage that’s coming into their home on channels that they don’t watch. So they say, “Yeah, give me this à la cart, and I won’t have to buy that rotgut stuff, and I will save money.” You won’t. That’s the come-on.
Somehow, Limbaugh believes that a la carte is a European idea or practice, and therefore it’s no good.
You want to emulate Europe? Go ahead and emulate Europe. Let’s get Europe’s gasoline prices over here tomorrow, too. Go ahead, you want to emulate Europe, and let’s get their yellow-bellied spines, let’s import some. Well, we have half a country with that already. See? We don’t want any more what Europe has to offer. Besides, cable in Europe, give me a break.
My favorite part, though, is Limbaugh’s expert insight into and razor-sharp explication of advertising and audience aggregation economics.
I mean, there’s so much oddball stuff out there now, but all of it has some kind of an audience. The one area that it could really shake things up if this were to happen, let’s take a look at just the cable news channels. CNN, their ratings and so forth, I forget how many people, but they also go out and sell advertising on the basis that they are available in 90 million homes because that’s cable’s penetration in the country right now, 90 million homes using television and cable, rough figure. Now, they may only get 300,000 of them at a time watching, but they can say we are available, and if we do promotion and marketing we can expand our audience.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:13 PM | Print | Comments (2)
I was swamped yesterday afternoon and didn’t get a chance to dig into or monitor the string of announcements or blog postings flowing from Google’s Press Day. Maybe that’s why reading Google’s news cold and checking out some of the new features unveiled during the event are taxing my mental abilities.
Or maybe it’s because some of the enhancements, (which, to Google’s credit center on the company’s core strength, search) are, um, really complex. Maybe too complex for the average user.
Take this one, called Google Co-Op. Here’s the description:
Google Co-op is about sharing expertise. You can contribute your expertise and benefit when others do the same. Help other users find information more easily by creating “subscribed links” for your services and labeling webpages around the topics you know best.
As best I can figure, this is about “tagging” Google searches so that a user’s favorite sources, or “subscribed links,” show up first in the results pages. Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Watch has as good a description of this new tool as anybody and even he is slightly confused.For one thing, it doesn’t seem to be working well yet. For another, only someone with an M.S. in computer science can make it work, or so it seems.
Here’s the guide that allows anyone to get started. I had to laugh at the intro:
The API was designed to be as easy to use as possible, and requires only basic XML skills. This guide will show you how to create subscribed links, with plenty of examples along the way.
I laughed because in short order, I was lost! Barry Schwartz, who is a programmer, still felt lost himself and said he’d through it at “one of his XML guys” tomorrow. In contrast, making a Google Toolbar Button is a heck of a lot easier. I sure wish making subscribed links were, because they are potentially going to be an important new way for people to ensure they are getting traffic from Google.
On the simpler side, Google did announce something that’s kind of cool and seemingly easy to use: Google Trends. Google Trends allows users to compute how many searches have been done for certain terms relative to a total. It even has a news volume graph (not including blogs!) that allows a user to find out how many times a certain term has appeared in news articles. As Steve Rubel points out, it’s a must for PR folks.
Beyond that, however, the Google enhancements, while leveraging the company’s great expertise in search, are not simple. And Google has made a fortune off its very plain and simple search functionality. Although I’m sure that Google’s new features will take off in time, I wish the company had remembered the KISS principle: Keep It Simple Stupid.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:03 AM | Print | Comments (0)
CNET’s Declan McCullough has this item about proposed legislation that would in essence ban access to social networking sites in public schools. Representative Mike Fitzpatrick (R-PA) and fellow Republicans have introduced a bill that would block access in public schools and public school libraries to Web sites that let users create public “Web pages or profiles” and that also offer a discussion board, chat room, or e-mail service.
In effect the bill would block minors’ access to MySpace, Facebook and a crew of social networking sites. The motivation is the growing fear that these sites are hunting grounds for child predators.
As Declan points out, the bill’s language might end up sweeping into the prohibition far more than just social networking sites.
That’s a broad category that covers far more than social-networking sites such as Friendster and Google’s Orkut.com. It would also sweep in a wide range of interactive Web sites and services, including Blogger.com, AOL and Yahoo’s instant-messaging features, and Microsoft’s Xbox 360, which permits in-game chat.
The bill’s backers are trying to peg the prohibition to a law passed in 2000 and subsequently upheld by the Supreme Court, The Children’s Internet Protection Act, that requires schools that receive federal funding to block access to adult content. Whether this law would pass constitutional muster is dependent on just how broadly its terms are defined (and they sound broad indeed).
The article quotes First Amendment attorney (and friend) Bob Corn-Revere:
Even so, Corn-Revere said, “treating MySpace sites like poison seems like an extreme overreaction.”Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:31 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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