Sunday, December 19, 2010

The greater enemy: why Facebook, Netflix and Amazon will join the Google-Apple truce

The Google-Apple war officially ended in September. I've not seen any convincing explanation of why the war ended; my best guess is that both companies realized that Verizon, AT&T and Comcast are the greater enemy. The three big carriers want to bring the cable TV business model to the net through the IP Multimedia Subsystem ... (emphases mine)

Mobile Carriers Dream of Charging per Page | Epicenter | Wired.com:

... The companies, Allot Communications and Openet — suppliers to large wireless companies including AT&T and Verizon — showed off a new product in a web seminar Tuesday, which included a PowerPoint presentation (1.5-MB .pdf) that was sent to Wired by a trusted source.

The idea? Make it possible for your wireless provider to monitor everything you do online and charge you extra for using Facebook, Skype or Netflix. For instance, in the seventh slide of the above PowerPoint, a Vodafone user would be charged two cents per MB for using Facebook, three euros a month to use Skype and $0.50 monthly for a speed-limited version of YouTube. But traffic to Vodafone’s services would be free, allowing the mobile carrier to create video services that could undercut NetFlix on price....

... “It certainly is exactly the thing we have been warning the companies will do if they have the opportunity and explains why AT&T and Verizon are so insistent that the wireless rules be solely about blocking and not anything else,” said Public Knowledge legal director Harold Feld....

... The ideas don’t look too different from the way cable companies price their video offerings, with different packages of programming at different levels.

... “I have been saying that this is where they want to go for a while,” van Schewick wrote to Wired. “The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), a technology that is being deployed in many wireline and wireless networks throughout the country, explicitly envisages this sort of pricing as one of the pricing schemes supported by IMS.”...

... And as van Schewick points out, this model is already showing up in European mobile networks, where some networks charge users an extra fee to use internet telephony or to use an e-mail client on their phone....

... For instance, Comcast runs an online video service called FanCast that competes with NetFlix and YouTube, and is trying to buy NBC, which owns more than 30 percent of Hulu.com. And every cable and satellite company offers pay-movie services for an extra monthly fee and a la carte video on demand that compete with third-party streaming video services, like Blockbuster and Amazon....

I love the Orwellian twist of calling a cable-company business model venture "Openet".

Google and Apple will never be best buds again, but the vision of a net run like cable TV has concentrated their minds. At the moment then, though betrayals are certain, we have Google, Apple, Netflix, Amazon and even Facebook on one side. On the other side we have Verizon, AT&T and Comcast. Microsoft, the wounded Titan, lurks in the background, perhaps contemplating an acquisition.

As a consumer and citizen, there's no doubt which side I support. On a scale of corporate evil, AT&T & Verizon are far above Google and Apple (Facebook is another matter). Politically Google and Apple are pretty much on the Dem side, and Verizon, AT&T and Comcast are very much GOP.

Should be interesting, and scary.

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