image
Update. 8:23 a.m.: Google and Larry Lessig are
questioning the accuracy of the WSJ. – D.R.

To go by a Wall Street Journal article, they might be backing off from Net Neutrality.

If the fears are on target, this would be one more reason to worry not only against Amazon dominating the e-book business, but also Google doing so.

The issue are different from the Net Neutrality debate, but the risk is the same—of a monopolistic mindset.

The e-book ramifications

E-book themselves don’t take up much bandwidth right now. But wait until they become truly multimedia. Moreover, how about bandwidth issues associated with videos promoting e-books? Maybe even vids in high def? I’d love to see the EFF try to get at the full truth here, especially since Larry Lessig might end up as Obama’s FCC chair.

The possible bright side: If the telecom are, ugh, working their magic on the Net Neutrality crowd, maybe one good thing could come out of this. Hollywood-bought copyright laws are the enemy of bandwidth consumption, and some of the savvier telecom people understand this. Could the proper kind of copyright reform eventually be on the Obama administration’s plate? Or will the usual Hollywood money prevail instead?

The Kindle and the neutrality issue: From the Journal: “Amazon’s popular digital-reading device, called the Kindle, offers a dedicated, faster download service, an arrangement Amazon has with Sprint. That has prompted questions in the blogosphere about whether the service violates network neutrality. ‘Amazon continues to support adoption of net neutrality rules to protect the longstanding, fundamental openness of the Internet,’ Amazon said in a statement. It declined to elaborate on its Kindle arrangement.”

And speaking of endangered faith: Google now admits that humans play more of a role in search results that some of the company’s boosters previously thought.

Usual disclosure/reminder: I’m a very small Google shareholder, although I guess you’d never know it from the above.

(Via David Farber’s e-mail list.)

2 COMMENTS

  1. Responses to the Wall Street Journal article are now appearing. The Google Public Policy Blog which has the subtitle “Google’s Views on government, policy and politics” is presenting an article by Richard Whitt, the Washington Telecom and Media Counsel, titled ”Net neutrality and the benefits of caching”.

    The GigaOm blog is running a story ”Google NOT Turning Its Back on Network Neutrality” by proprietor Om Malik:

    In response to an earlier story in The Wall Street Journal, Google offered a clarification and reaffirmed its stance on network neutrality and pointed out that it is not backing away from it. It has dismissed the WSJ story as confused. Instead, Google explained that the OpenEdge effort (the subject of the WSJ story) was a plan to peer its edge-caching devices directly with the network operators so that the users of those broadband carriers get faster access to Google and YouTube’s content.

    “Google has offered to “colocate” caching servers within broadband providers’ own facilities; this reduces the provider’s bandwidth costs since the same video wouldn’t have to be transmitted multiple times,” Richard Whitt, Google’s Washington Telecom and Media Counsel wrote on company’s Policy blog.

    Larry Lessig is responding on his own blog with a piece called ”The made-up dramas of the Wall Street Journal”. But I cannot read the item right now because the hosting server is not responding. The beginning states:

    I got off the plane from Boston to find my inbox filled with anger about an article in the Wall Street Journal. To those who were angry, I hope you will direct any anger at the Wall Street Journal after you read what follows.

  2. Thanks, Garson. Since you’re a regular contributor, I’ve moved your update to the main section of the blog. If the WSJ piece is wrong, which I now suspect it is, could the hand of Rupert Murdoch be in this, directly or indirectly? Or is it just an honest mistake? At any rate, I’m glad I used a question mark in the headline over the original post ;-).

    David

The TeleRead community values your civil and thoughtful comments. We use a cache, so expect a delay. Problems? E-mail newteleread@gmail.com.