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

http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2010/08/google_protest_net_neutrality.php

by mcantelon • 16 years ago

141 100 16 years ago

blogs.sfweekly.com

chengas123• 16 years 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.

paul92902• 16 years 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.

aristus2• 16 years 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.

makmanalp• 16 years 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• 16 years 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.

gojomo6• 16 years ago

Who is the 'we' in your statement?

jemfinch• 16 years 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• 16 years 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.

mkramlich2• 16 years ago

Agreed. And the lines between a business deal and a political deal are blurry at best.

mkramlich2• 16 years 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."

jsz02• 16 years 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• 16 years 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• 16 years ago

Oh if only that were the case.

MisterWebz• 16 years ago

By damaging their own reputation? Yeah, right.

chrismsnz• 16 years 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."

pg2• 16 years ago

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

mlinsey• 16 years ago

First PG post to ever reach -2?

pavs• 16 years ago

I did it so that I can tell everyone that I have been living on the edge. /s

blasdel• 16 years ago

http://searchyc.com/user/pg?only=comments&sort=by_points...

ronnier• 16 years ago

To make it even easier: http://viewtext.org/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fblogs.sfweekly.com%2Ft...

grandalf10• 16 years 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• 16 years ago

What does it mean to be the default search engine for an ISP? Google transcends deals like that now.

grandalf10• 16 years 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)

houseabsolute• 16 years ago

I'll put fifty dollars against that.

grandalf10• 16 years ago

I'm not saying it's likely, but it (or something similar) is behind Google's recent reversal.

Most of GOOG's profits come from simple search ads, and search is not protected by any secret sauce or insurmountable barriers to entry, which is why Google tried to innovate via legislation with its net neutrality push.

nickpinkston2• 16 years 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• 16 years 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).

nickpinkston2• 16 years 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.

gojomo6• 16 years 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!

norswap2• 16 years 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• 16 years ago

Instead we could live in a p2p wonderland, where each node would be responsible for it's own data.

What does this mean? How would I, for instance, retrieve a Wikipedia page?

Ardit204• 16 years ago

Why would the law be complex? You only need one simple line of law stating:

We find this principle to be self evident, that all internet traffic is to be treated as equal.

That is it. No complex case law, no little print, no arcane law language.

"Any rulemaking by the feds will involve backroom deals between companies large enough to send lawyers to DC "

Are you saying that you are scared of big companies, therefore what we should do is surrender and let, possibly one of the most defining aspect of the internet, be done with by the big guys, who have suitcases and suits?

You might say you are being pragmatic and that is the reality, but only if the "bunch of people" keep silent and let the big guys get on without noise, you know, a bit like the "bunch of people" did with the War in Iraq. The corporations might have the money, but the "bunch of people" still have the political system and the power to set the debate. No politician would like to loose his job, and if some do then they will think twice in face of vocal public pressure.

As for your other points they are a matter of speculation. I would need to employ my imagination. I am sure there are many smart people on here who might be able to get around the internet prioritization with some code, who have all sort of programming abilities to overcome any technology obstacle. Maybe even if such tiered system would come to pass, some clever guy would come with some code which would make the ISP think that a certain site should be prioritized. The vast majority of people however might perhaps have to live with the reality of the way things are. In China for example, some people might use route-around technologies, but, the vast majority live with a censored internet.

As for AOL and all the rest, the internet, at least in popularity, is hardly even 20 years old, if we take the year that it took off to be 1995 when people started hearing about it in vast numbers. So AOL is really a baby learning how to crawl in the grand scheme of things. Only very recently, if not only now, has the internet become a serious medium with vast power of empowerment and, we must assume, vast powers of control.

So you can hardly compare the past to the future. You hardly can say well even if we live in a dictatorship someone will still write a pamphlet although he might be imprisoned for it.

You can argue about the substance of the matter. Dismissing the entire debate as something childish however and entirely misguided without providing any reasons but rhetoric is hardly reasonable.

I might be wrong, I might be very wrong, but personally I think we should fight and if in the end we lose, then we do so with dignity, not in 40 years or so tell our children of that thing called the internet and then feel sad of how all the baddies turned it into a one way communication platform.

moultano8• 16 years ago

>We find this principle to be self evident, that all internet traffic is to be treated as equal. That is it. No complex case law, no little print, no arcane law language.

What about botnets? worms? DOS attacks?

gojomo6• 16 years ago

Your proposed 1-line law is a good example of the romantic, childlike, wishcraft-dominated thinking about this issue that I'm criticizing.

That wording is neither enactable by any federal body, nor enforceable by federal prosecutors, without a ton more detail.

And, its simpleminded application would prohibit services I'd actually like to buy. I would prefer an ISP which privileged web browsing and VOIP over BitTorrent and bulk email/video/software downloads. I would like it if traffic that attempts to compromise my privacy or exploit unpatched software on my home network was blocked by default.

In fact, I run a traffic-shaping router/firewall for these and other purposes, including preferencing my own traffic over that of neighbors and visitors who use my guest wifi node. Would that make me a net-neutrality-scofflaw? Oh, I hope so.

I have the technical acumen to do this myself, but if my ISP wants to implement similar policies the next few hops up, that also provides me with positive value. And of course most customers can't set this up for themselves, so they can only get positive value from having an expert -- like their ISP -- enact upstream preferencing and blocking for them.

Why make providing a service some people will prefer a federal crime?

We've made it almost 20 years without FCC rules to protect the internet. The internet is faster and freer each year, without any help from the FCC. (Thankfully, the FCC can keep busy fining broadcasters for dirty words.)

It is not true that "we must assume... vast powers of control" are about to spring some trap. We can wait until actual harms are demonstrated -- if ever. We can wait even further, until such harms persist after enough time for competitors to adapt, before freezing into federal law starry-eyed notions of how the network should work.

Network neutrality regulations: YAGNI.

donohoe• 16 years ago

Do not confuse a Law with text from a Declaration. Not the same planet.

bhiggins• 16 years ago

The internet does not need 'saving' by a bunch of people INSIDE Google.

alecco5• 16 years 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?

patrickaljord4• 16 years ago

> Too many startups and small businesses are in jeopardy.

No they're not.

alecco5• 16 years ago

If Google/Verizon get their way any new (or existing but not participating) major competitor can be throttled to oblivion.

trunnell• 16 years ago

Well, it's all theoretical. But in theory, startups are in jeopardy.

The #1 threat to ISPs is for their network to be commoditized-- there's little profit in dumb pipes.

ISPs see a way out. They see billions of dollars of commerce happening on their networks and they want a cut.

But that might not be what's good for society. Startups, at least, want dumb pipes, i.e. equal access to customers without a shakedown by last-mile network owners.

moultano8• 16 years 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• 16 years 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-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).

jsz02• 16 years 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• 16 years 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.

drivebyacct23• 16 years ago

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

SudarshanP• 16 years 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• 16 years 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!

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

Related Stories