Google Won't Pay Bell South

grandgator writes "Google has offered a clear response to Bell South's proposal to charge content providers an additional fee for access to their network: They won't pay. In an email, Google's Barry Schnitt told the folks at networkingpipeline: 'Google is not discussing sharing of the costs of broadband networks with any carrier. We believe consumers are already paying to support broadband access to the Internet through subscription fees and, as a result, consumers should have the freedom to use this connection without limitations'"

Way to Stand up for us all

I commend Google for standing up to the Dark Lord for us.

Re:Way to Stand up for us all

yay! Google is not evil, and they might even be good!

Re:Way to Stand up for us all

No, they just do not want to pay, and they feel they will get away with it (as they should). Fighting a company which is perceived as evil is just a side effect here, IMO.

Re:Way to Stand up for us all

Given the details in this story: Feds seek Google records in porn probe [cnn.com], I'd say they are definitely not evil. At least not at the moment.

Re:Way to Stand up for us all

I mean, I'm with Comcast myself...but I'm sure they'll be following in the same steps as Bellsouth pretty soon too

Actually, if they are smart, they'll do the opposite. This is a huge opportunity for the cable companies, who don't have a vested interest to hold the voip down.

Re:Way to Stand up for us all

who don't have a vested interest to hold the voip down.

You mean "to hold their voip down." Time warner is already pushing their own voip, and they'd probably be more than happy to degrade the service of anyone using any other voip provider.

Re:Way to Stand up for us all

choosing between the least bad of two candidates reminds me entirely too much of politics.

Heh, and you can blame politics for that situation actually... kinda sad.

2 decades ago, I used to look at what the typical consumer could get from their telco in the USA with some envy. Things like local calls being effectively free (which made hanging out on a BBS all day long and such an option...), being able to go into a shop and buy yourself some random phone and connect it and the like..

Those things were virtually unheard of overhere in Europe. Local calls were and in cases still are charged per minute or per second even. Being able to connect my own equipment (legally that is) is also something that is 'relatively' recent.

Nowadays there seems to be little reason for envy. I have a wide choice in local providers now, even for the last mile (former national telco is forced to sell them off when the customer wants another provider), a wide choice of dsl providers, and with that amount of competition, also very decent prices (currently around the equivalent of $50 for 24mbit downstream, 1mbit upstream) and conditions (things like fixed IP, being allowed to run servers from your home connection etc are pretty standard), and, part of the cause of this, a local government that seems pretty much convinced that they should never again allow for a monopoly on a specific form of communications infrastructure.

Re:Way to Stand up for us all

There's a second economic aspect to this other than the one you mentioned. They're getting free publicity because they're doing "right" by the consumer (it also just kinda happens to save them money)

Personally, I want companies to start thinking about the free publicity of doing what's good for the consumer. I want companies to start thinking about the value of all the publicity they can get from altruistic acts. I want the leadership of companies to see altruistic acts as having positive economic affects.

Sure google isn't handing thier money out to SBC, but they're also a company that recognizes that being altruistic has it's own value. Hence the way they made this statement.

And like the poster you replied to, I'll applaud them too. I want them to get as much value from being altruistic as I can. Maybe they'll do it again someday if we do.

Re:Way to Stand up for us all

They're getting free publicity because they're doing "right" by the consumer

You're right, I was about to use altavista until I read about this.

OMG I just checked to see if it was still there and altavista has moved from altavista.digital.com to altavista.com. And there aren't any ads! It's scary how you can get distracted for 5 to 10 years and then next time you look, eveything's changed.

Re:Way to Stand up for us all

People always forget and try to deal with large companies as if they are individuals with morals, feeling and so on. The companies are not like that, they exist only to make money and will only do whatever makes them more money (I am talking about for-profit organisations only here).

Here is when everyone will say, but isn't such and such company donating to such and such charity? -Yes, but only because they did a cost/marketing analysis and determined that it will generate good publicity to do just that. How come a lot charitable giving from companies is to museums, operas, local TV stations and not as much to soup kitchens for the homeless or rehabilitation of drug addicts and such? - Because that would not generate as much good publicity!

The same with Google. Everyone thinks - "Oh Google, the defender of the consumers, we love you!" - but Google needs that attitude too, that is in part why they are so profitable. It is (or it should) be every company's dream to be perceived like a noble, charitable, honest and good entity - existing solely to help and benefit everyone else, but in reality there is not such thing - there is just $$$. Microsoft can afford to be bully and be mean -- because it already secured most of the software market, I think they will loose out in the end but that's not because they are just a "mean bad bully" but because their strategy/marketing team did bad forecasting .

Re:Way to Stand up for us all

There is even a name for this. It's called "Good Will." Traditionally it has been considered one of a company's assests that even carries a cash value.

Not exactly. The "Good Will" that you see on an accounting balance sheet isn't the same thing at all. It's really more of a fiction invented by accountants as a placeholder for the fact that the value of a company isn't the same as the value of its tangible assets. If Google manages to generate a huge amount of the non-accounting, karmic Good Will through its actions, that doesn't mean it gets to increase the goodwill number in its quarterly report. The way goodwill is acquired is through mergers and acquisitions.

As an example of the meaning of the term as accountants use it, suppose that Google buys KFG Enterprises for $100M, but KFG only has physical assets of $20M. So when Google's accountants update the balance sheet, they subtract $100M from Google's cash balance, but add only $20M in assets. On paper, it appears that the purchase was a very bad deal which lowered Google's total value by $80M. This isn't true, because everyone knows that $100M was actually an excellent price for KFG, but that's how it looks on paper.

This presents the accountants with both a problem and an opportunity. The opportunity arises because they'd love to report that $80M "loss" to the IRS and take a big bite out of the year's taxes. On the other hand, they do *not* want that $80M loss showing up in the SEC filings and making the company look less profitable in front of the shareholders.

Goodwill addresses both problems. What the accountants do is to add a goodwill line item to the asset side of the balance sheet, in the amount of $80M. That way, the net effect of the transaction on the balance sheet is neutral, the company neither made nor lost anything by buying KFG. This is nice for the SEC filings.

For the purposes of dealing with the IRS, goodwill becomes a depreciable asset, which the accountants can write off over time (in spite of the fact that the company may actually be acquiring more karmic Good Will by playing nice, and may even be capitalizing on the intangible value of KFG that the fictional goodwill stood in for). Each time they write off a chunk of goodwill, they take the hit on their assets in their SEC filings, and they also get to claim the tax deduction. I'm sure there are some rules about how and when they can claim those "losses", but I think they do have some latitude which they can use to juggle the numbers.

I am not an accountant, but this is how a corporate accountant friend explained it to me (with lots of qualifiers that he was oversimplifying nearly to the point of inaccuracy).

Re:Way to Stand up for us all

Thats essentially correct, but it isn't really done because they don't want to show an 80M loss on the balance sheet...its because it is a "balance sheet" and obviously things must balance. If I pay $100 million for your company, then obviously it is worth $100 million. So I need to record $100M of assets. Since there are specific depreciation rules for things like physical assets and other rules for things like contracts and whatnot, I record those as I normally would. But you have to record the premium over book value somehow, because otherwise the transaction doesn't balance and your accounting system breaks down. And that is where good will comes from. It is the plug that makes the transaction balance. Now in theory you should eventually depreciate your goodwill as well, though that is a very complicated subject in accounting terms because the period of time isn't obvious at all.

Re:Way to Stand up for us all

Let's not forget the other Google story today, that while all the *other* major search engines rolled over and gave the government their log files to protect us from porn, Google alone refused. To suggest this was just about the money is shortsigted. How would you like the web if every site required a subscription so the broadband monopolies could get their cut? This strikes at the very heart of how the model of how the internet works.

Re:Way to Stand up for us all

All Google had to do was refuse to give their money to someone else. Let's think this situation through before applauding Google's altruistic nature.

Shrug. If Google wanted to screw everyone else they could -- by paying the extortion money.

After all, it's likely to be a fairly trivial amount of money to Google, and in return they'd be guaranteed that their VoIP and video data packets get highly prioritized.

And, more to the point, they'd ensure that anyone who wants to compete against them has to do the exact same thing. It's called creating a barrier to competition, and it's generally worth every penny in the long run because you end up with less competition, particularly from pesky startups who have nifty ideas but little or no capital. I'm sure Yahoo!, Alta Vista, etc. would've vastly preferred such a barrier, since it would mean that Google never would've managed to completely usurp all of them.

Dark Lord?

"One rule to ring them all!" No, wait...
"One Bell to web them all!" Hmm...
"And in the darkness Bell them" No, something's not right...

"Ma' Bell to sue them all!"

THERE! :D

Re:Dark Lord?

"Ma' Bell to sue them all!"

...and in the darkness bill them.

Re:Way to Stand up for us all

In the words of the Wolf, "Let's not start sucking each other's [word removed by Google safe search] just yet."

It would be rather easy for Bell South to let massively popular sites like Google get away with not paying while throttling out less popular sites for not paying. It would also be somewhat easy for Bell South to not throttle bandwidth on what Google is typically used for (searches) while throttling Google's other features that Bell South might want to compete with.

Re:Common Carrier Status...

Do remember you're talking about the same FCC who's probably gonna side with all these big ISPs against municipal wirless access... Don't you know all our politicians swing in the direction of the highest dollar these days?

Re:Common Carrier Status...

We've already [slashdot.org] established [slashdot.org] in the last article [slashdot.org] about Bell South that ISPs generally don't have common carrier status. [wikipedia.org]

Thank goodness

I was wondering when someone was going to get a clue. Looks like Google is going to force the hands of providers' to keep billing for structure and not content. The Bells wished they could have done this with VoIP. Their loss; everyone else's gain.

block all traffic from Bell South subnets

That'll teach 'em good.

Re:block all traffic from Bell South subnets

But then I would have to switch to Road Runn^[NO CARRIER]

The failed QoS modell

There has been talk about applying extra fees for "higher quality network" for a long time. In the beginning it sounded like a great idea: data that needs to be transported in realtime (phone calls, stock ticker) would be charged more then data where in time or even in order delivery would be unimportant (ftp transfers etc.)

But something else happened: transfer and bandwidth exploded. I think I remember predictions that by 2008 (????) the average internet user will transfer about 600MB per day. At the same time the bandwidth needed for voice transfer (and even video conferencing) is decreasing. So even if the carriers would charge ten times more for a high "Quality of Service", the data transfered for these services is neglectable and would not justify the extra cost for providing networks with different levels of QoS or even the extra cost for billing it.

So if you want to maintain the idea of "extra charges", you have to look for important data services with "high importance", maybe not being just in time, but being always accessible. There was an outcry a couple of days ago, when (I think) del.icio.us wasn't accessible for some time, the same would be true for ebay or amazon. So the idea is economically right, if you still believe in QoS.

But in reality bandwidth the amount of bandwidth made reserving part of it for special purposes less necessary, other problems can be solved by technology, like caching for video streaming. And since those all work on raw IP networks, there is no big challenge to make a better offer than the bells, once they increase their operating costs by adding technology to enable delivery of QoS network transfers and their billing. I'm sure the carriers know that, so this will never happen. I think it is more PR and demanding "protection" from the market. Usually followed by lobbying to change some law to protect the poor companies from the non existing harm they just created themself.

Re:The failed QoS modell

Yeah, I think the explosion of transfer rates and bandwidth is key. At some point, it became cheaper for companies to simply provide more bandwidth than for them to go around metering the amount of bandwidth users are actually using.

This is what happened to the British Penny Post [wikipedia.org] in the 19th century: originally you had to pay a different amount depending on how far your mail was traveling, within Britain. However, Rowland Hill showed that it would actually be cheaper for NEARLY EVERYONE to charge a flat rate, because the postal service wouldn't have to pay people to determine the postage rate for every darned letter.

More recently, I believe this explains why the Internet took off quicker in the US than in France: in 1997, when I lived in France, *no one* that I knew in my high school had Internet access, while practically everyone I knew had access in the USA. The reason was simple: in the US you pay a flat monthly fee for local calls. In France, you get a pamphlet that goes something like this (I'm not exaggerating):

Local calls are billed per unit. The cost of one unit is 0.13F on Monday through Saturday at noon, and 0.10F on Saturdays after noon, Sundays, and government holidays. The length of calling time per billing unit varies as follows:

• Between 9 am and 4 pm on weekdays (1 pm on Wednesday): 39 seconds
• Between 4 pm (1 pm on Wednesday) and 6 pm on weekdays: 62 seconds
• Between 6 pm and 10 pm on weekdays, as well as 9 am and noon on Saturdays: 70 seconds
• ...
• ...

So in France in 1997, not only did you pay per call, and not only did the rate vary depending on the time of day and day of the week, but ON TOP OF THAT the amount of time that each billing unit was good for was constantly shifting. It was a mess. No wonder no one wanted to use their phone line for Internet access.

"Get Loooooooooost"

The summary: Give us more money, and we won't throttle traffic to your site. In response, Google tells them to [results filtered by safe search].
 

Do no evil

Between this and resisting turning over search data [slashdot.org], it looks like Google is really trying to "do no evil". I was beginning to wonder about them from some of the more recent stories, but this helps restore my confidence in Google.

Re:Do no evil

Moreover, they did it in a brilliant way. If I was a big guy, and somebody said something I strongly disagreed with, my initial reaction would be to tell them why I disagree with them. But that would have given Bell South an opportunity to argue back, and keep this concept in the headlines for a week or two. By resisting the urge to enumerate why it's such a stupid proposal, and making it clear that there should be no conversation between ISP's and website providers, Google has effectively killed this news story immediately, making it pretty clear that it doesn't matter what ISP's try to say about the issue in the press, because it's simply a non-isuse.

Double charging != OK

If the other major sites publicly state this it will help to nip this in the bud.

Double charging for network access is not equitable period, and yes, US consumer are paying too much comparitively already.

Re:Double charging != OK

I never have understood this. I mean, content providers are already paying for the bandwidth to upload the content, and consumers are already paying for the bandwidth to download it.

Charging people for both the bandwidth and the content reminds me of this joke menu:

Soup: $0.99
With Bowl: $5.99

Biting the hand that feeds you

Why would Bellsouth charge Google? Without Google (and other useful sites), nobody would subscribe to their internet service. We're paying to get access to the internet, and they're complaining because our access is costing them money. Sounds like a problem with your business plan to me.

What might make more sense would be a pay-per-use plan, where you pay a flat rate for X amount of bandwidth or whatever and more if you use more. But of course if customers don't like the complication, they will choose another ISP.

Re:Biting the hand that feeds you

What might make more sense would be a pay-per-use plan, where you pay a flat rate for X amount of bandwidth or whatever and more if you use more.

What, like this [bellsouth.com]??

BellSouth already sells connection packages, with varying degrees of bandwidth etc. I'm sure someplace in the fine print is a bandwidth cap and corresponding charges for overages.

What they think they can do now, is charge google on top of charging their customers -- in theory so Google can be guaranteed their stuff will reach a Bell South customer without any degradation -- you know, "nice kid, shame if he hurt himself on the way to school" type stuff.

This is exactly why Google has just basically shrugged off what they had to say and shut the door on any talks.

Bell South is trying to play a shell-game whereby they charge the customer for a certain bandwidht, and then charge the provider to ensure they will be delivered at speeds close to what they've promised/charged the customer.

The worst case scenario:

What I fear more than anything else in this whole "tiering" push is the following:

BS eventually implements a tiered QOS policy. Google responds by saying, "fine. You charge us for the pipes, we'll charge you for the content that makes them useful." Cue the lawyers, who huddle up, then spit out a cross-licensing agreement such that BS pays Google exactly what they charge Google for the pipes. Google goes away happy; nothing has effectively changed. BS goes away not particularly happy with Google, but in a position where they absolutely can demand a net positive cash flow from content providers with less market clout than Google.

Consider VOIP: there are enough players in the VOIP game, and it's a small enough market, that no one company has the market leverage to demand much from BS. At the same time, a fairly small change in BS' service (a little bit of lag here, a little bit of jitter introduced over there) will result in completely destroying the VOIP company's ability to serve customers.

It'll end up being the same thing as the way large companies wield their patent portfolios. It means everything goes on just fine for the big players, but the little guys get screwed in the process.

I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that Google doesn't cave on this, even if BS offers up a cross-licensing agreement. Here's hoping "don't be evil" covers this.

I'll bail on BS quickly

This positioning on the part of BS/Verizon/other money-grubbing ISPs has to be put down like a rabid dog. If they insist on milking not only their customers of the ~$30-60/month charge for their DSL service, but the sites that service their customers through their already-paid-for service, then I must insist on them choosing from whom they wish to derive their revenues - us, their paying ISP customers, or them, those Internet destinations that "us" wish to visit.

Any company that threatens to fracture the Internet as we know it doesn't deserve my dollars. How about yours?

Imagine you were Bell South...

what would you do in this situation?

Re:Imagine you were Bell South...

what would you do in this situation?

The first thing I would do is Google ingenuity and innovation. [google.com]

Switching Matrix

> Bill Smith, chief technology officer at BellSouth justified content charging companies by saying they are using the telco's network without paying for it. "

Agent Smith: "If I go to the airport, I can buy a coach standby ticket or a first-class ticket," Smith said. "In the shipping business, I can get two-day air or six-day ground."

Neoogle: Wow, that sounds like a really good deal, Bill. But I think I've got a better one. How about I give you the finger, and you give me my phone call.

Costs of broadband?

Didn't we (shareholders/taxpayers/markets) already pay/subsidize for the massive install of 'dark-fiber' (unused fiber optics cables) in the dot.com runup? There is so much unused fiber out there that ISP prices should be dropping, not increasing.

Re:Costs of broadband?

Well yes there is a ton of dark fiber out there. But let me explain about how cheap it is. I work for a cable installation company. We plow in new phone/power/cable tv systems. If you have a fiber in the ground and we come along, then you have to mark it so that we can cross it without cutting it. Minnesota one call laws and others states as well define the liabilty on this pretty well. If it's not marked we aren't liable. So even if the fiber is dark(not in use) it causes expense, someone has to pay the locator. If it gets cut it's lost inventory unless fixed(a typical, say 4 fiber, cut is around 20 grand to splice now). so the cost is still there on dark fiber even though there is no revenue being generated. The fiber in question remains dark for a reason. Generally it's due to one of three things. The Company that owns the fiber has no current need for it. The fiber doesn't go to an area where it is needed. Or the usual scenario is that it is simply surplus. We often place 96 fiber through an area. Only 10 of those are needed, so the other 86 are dark. This is what MOST of the dark fiber out there is. Dark fiber then becomes somewhat of an urban myth. So yes broadband costs go up due to what seems like basic reasons, but which are actually far more complicated. If we only placed the 10 fibers that we needed now, and then found that 10 more were needed in say 2 years, we actually cause more expense. How? Well, now we need to locate the existing fiber($), buy new fiber to place($), pay someone to place it($$), and maintain it($). So in essence references to "dark fiber" are misleading at best. Just 2 cents from someone on the inside of the construction part of the scene.

Competition

Statements from large Internet presences such as this one from Google, combined with competition in the ISP arena, will ensure that stupidity such as the tiered bandwidth model will never materialize. If BellSouth starts clamping down on bandwidth for content providers who won't pay, then their competitors just have to start running ads saying that they offer service that's just as fast, just as cheap, and that gives you the full power of their service no matter what website you visit or what service you use.

In fact, the only uncertainty in this equation is whether there is sufficient broadband competition in all markets. Since the stakes for the consumer are increasing due to BellSouth's plan, one would hope that the federal legislature would take a closer look, but BellSouth also happens to be a massive political donor as well.

Google is very ballsy these days

Google has been showing a very large ammount of testicular fortitude lately. First Google says no to US government's request for logs of searches [slashdot.org] and now they told Bell South to stick it.

Its only a matter of time before Google hires Chuck Norris [chucknorrisfacts.com] to simply roundhouse kick all of their enemies.

Re:Google is very ballsy these days

Chuck Norris doesn't use search engines. All the relevant results simply huddle together in fear.

This fight has only just begun, unfortunately

SBC/AT&T, Bell South, and soon others will be at Congress's heels to get the concept changed.

The mentality of the telcos, now that their monopolies are being rapidly deregulated, is to get as much revenue as possible from their infrastructure. Now that voice is virtualized and becoming removed from their revenue models, they feel they have to make money some way to compete with cable, BPL, fiber, and other broadband providers to survive.

They won't be shaken easily, and a pooh-pooh from Google won't slow them down an inch. These are guys that go into Congressional offices armed with a dozen lawyers-- per visit-- every visit. Do not mistake their resolve.

This is just the first salvo, folks. Get you umbrellas.

Given Google's Growth...

I doubt that for very long those telcos will be able to compete in the political arena, when/if Google starts throwing their money around for political clout.

Considering how long it took the Telcos to get their current wealth, compared to how rapidly a small group of people (Google) became wealthy in a mere fraction of the time, I'll bet it won't be long before companies like Google team up with their insane amount of market and actual worth, and put a stop to this madness altogether.

Finally

About time someone in the content business stood up and flatly, publicly opossed the idea of charging content providers for sending their data.

I even run a small ISP, and I agreee that charging content providers for traffic is a horrible idea. The only way to fairly do this would be to have huge burdensome regulations (like the phone companies who receive money through a regulatory scheme for each call they receive from another carrier).

I hate intrusive regulation more than I hate bandwidth hogs. Besides, Bell South could just charge by bandwidth instead of by link capacity if they really wanted to cover the costs of some traffic consuming more resources than others. They won't do this of course because the consumer is hooked on unlimited traffic--much like what is happening more and more with unlimited phone calls.

Google's counterproposal

We have given your proposal the attention that it deserves, and offer the following counterproposal:

We will allow you to continue to offer our service to your customers, at no additional charge to you, and you will save the immense amount of money that it would cost you to explain to all of your customers whey they can no longer get through to Google, and why they shouldn't switch to another internet provider that does offer Google access.

BellSouth should pay Google

I think google should charge BellSouth for the content. Bellsouth is getting a lot of money from customers for connections. Without web sites and content to deliver over that connection, customers wouldn't buy it - why get a connection if there's no internet to connect with? So Bellsouth is just getting all that for free. They're selling the content that WE provide as web authors, but not paying us a penny for getting all that content!

How does cable TV work? Isn't that the same thing? We pay the cable provider, and they pay the stations. No one says the stations should have to pay the cable providers for using their cable bandwidth. I say the internet should be the same thing. So if you have a web site, send BellSouth a bill.

regulation?

I may be going really radical with this, but I personally believe internet access should be a regulated utility just like gas, power, and the like. Its a fact that most people now NEED access to the internet on a daily basis. I am required to get my homework assignments off the web for school, and e-mail is one of my primary forms of communication with work and friends.

The fact that ISP's will try to do something like this just to make an extra buck on top of their outrageous fees just screams government regulation.

Don't we have double charging, this is triple?

I mean we pay for our download/upload bandwidth on the user end. The companies pay for it on their end already.

So already the content user and the content provider have paid for their upload/download bandwidth agreements.

Now they stroll out and want to extort the content provider. Hey, you want your users to not run into trouble, you need to pay us some money to protect your interests, otherwise it could get messy for them. Sheesh!

Didn't google buy some dark fiber. Google ISP. Lightweight no frills, no throttling. Sign me up. :-)

Economics of the situation

Google can play the game. Let's say there there are two broadband internet providers in an area, and Google decides that it's only going to pay the fee to one of them. What is going to happen to the subscribers of the other? They will leave -- if I can't even get Google on my ISP, but I can on the competition, I'm going to switch.

The real problem isn't in current services -- it's in high-bandwidth (mainly video) applications. Not only will this will require rolling out new technology, but it will compete directly with services that the cable companies want to offer themselves. Why would you go to the cable company's pay-per-view service when you can get the same movie from the studio's internet video-on-demand service and pay less? From the ISP's point of view, increasing bandwidth is actually going to decrease revenue. And, that's why they want to charge content providers.

The other thing is that Quality-of-Service (QoS) becomes more important with video and that requires marking all packets at some point. If you don't have any way to distinguish between the traffic that gets better service and the traffic that doesn't, then you can't do QoS. To the ISPs, the best way to ration that is to charge those willing to pay for it.

Actually, the fees should be just the opposite!

Google should charge BellSouth a large amount of money for premium access to Google's networks. BellSouth's customers will benefit by high bandwidth/fast response times to one of the most popular destinations on the web.

BellSouth has the fees backwards. THEY should be the ones paying!

hey everybody

i'm going to write a book

and then, with any luck, a publisher will pick up my manuscript

and then all i have to do is give $10,000 to the publisher for them to publish and distribute it!

huh?

hey bell south: that's not reality

you opened up a can of worms you shouldn't: at best, YOU should be paying google

you just had to be as greedy as humanly possibly, didn't you?

morons

Fighting back against $ellSouth

It seems that BellSouth are hell bent on becoming the new SCO, or Micro$oft. In addition to this latest 'antic', they continue to behave badly in all sorts of other ways. In New Orleans, as people will recall, they decided not to give a building that they had promised to the N.O. Police dept, when the city started to offer free wi-fi. Also in Louisiana, the small town of Lafayette's utility system, L.U.S. has proposed laying fiber to every home. BellSouth forced a referendum, that they massively lost. Despite this, they keepfighting L.U.S. in the courts, trying to slow the project and cause as many problems as possible.

These activities have not been without consequences, however. People in Louisiana are figuring ways of fighting back. For instance, many people now have their phone service with AT and T, or Eatel (both of which are cheaper). Another good trick is that people in appartments are having a single BellSouth DSL subscription, that they then share with their neighbours, using a cheap wireless box from Wal-Mart. BellSouth don't seem to realise how their actions are influencing their revenues. Perhaps in the light of this latest silliness, people in other parts of the country should take similar steps against BellSouth, especially in cases where they are a monopoly, or duoploy broadband provider.

Does this remind you of anything?

It is intereresting that two oligopolized industies, the local telecoms and the recording industry, are currently deploying the indentical propagandist tactict; Both are conflacting the issues of tiered prices with higher prices.

In their dispute with Apple over the price of an iTune, recording companies justify a proposal to BOTH tier prices AND to raise prices for some tunes above $0.99 by ONLY arguing the mertis of tiered pricing. The merits of tiered pricing aside, iff instead they correctly identified their proposal as a plan to BOTH tier AND raise prices, then they would not be arguing deceptively. If record company executives proposed keeping the weighted average cost per tune at $0.99, charging less than that amount for some tracks and more for others, then they could legitimatley advocate for that scheme on the merits of tiered pricing because that proposal would be only about tiered pricing. But the issue is in not really tiering at all, either among advocates in the record industry or opponents on ./; As strong is the opposition here on ./ to tiered pricing, that would instantly switch to approval of an equal magnitude if recording companies advocated for a tiered pricing scheme in which $0.99 was the maximum cost, with some tunes available at lower prices.

So now with the telecoms, we see copycat propaganda; proposing BOTH tiering prices AND raising prices, and defending that conjunction of acts on the merits of tiered pricing alone. What appears to be a merititious argument about tiered pricing is deviously conflated with a scheme to raise prices. Neither Google, nor all the slashdotters who have argued here against tiered pricing really oppose tiered pricing per se. Instead, they oppose the higher prices which telecoms seek to introduce in conjunction with tiered pricing. If Bellsouth had proposed paying Google money instead of chargeing them a fee, this would also have been tiering. Google, rationally, would be in favor of receiving payment from Bellsouth.

The convergent rhetorical tactics of separate industries owes to their shared oligoplostic nature. Normally the penalty to a seller for raising prices is reduced sales. This is, like, why I have been so unsuccessful at selling my AA battery for a $1,000,000.0. The quantity of AA batteries demanded at that price seems to be 0. If I want to make any money, I had better lower the price. But for oligopolies, this pattern of an inverse relation between the price and the quantity demanded does not apply; They can raise prices without reducing sales, or at least to a greater degree than they could in a more competitive market. But there is a downside for ologipolsits when they raise prices: That downside is not reduced profits, but public backlash and political and legal action against them. With propaganda, oligopolists compete against consumers in the political realm to raise prices. The shared propagandist tactic of conflating price tiering with price raising is no coincidence; all oligopolists have to hoodwink the public somehow and what works for one works for another. In fact, it does seem to be working: some of the public goes along because they approve of tiered pricing while most opponents have fallen for the trick and argue against tiered pricing instead of correctly identifying their opposition to price raising.

Of course, In competitive markets, it rarely is worthwile to propagandizie on behalf of higher pricing, because even if you successfully supress political opposition with propaganda, you ultimatly loose sales and profits with higher pricing. This is why, when you go to the grocery store and notice that the price of filet mignon has gone up $0.20, the increased price is not accompanied by a representative of the beef industry explaining the market efficiencies of tiered pricing.

As a consumer, both of internet service and music, more competition among suppliers would benefit me, so I advocate for that. With internet service, acheiving more competition i