French Telecom Claims To Have Forced Google To Pay For Traffic 207
Dupple writes "The head of French telecoms operator Orange said on Wednesday it had been able to impose a deal on Google to compensate it for the vast amounts of traffic sent across its networks. Orange CEO Stephane Richard said on France's BFM Business TV that with 230 million clients and areas where Google could not get around its network, it had been able to reach a 'balance of forces' with the Internet search giant. Richard declined to cite the figure Google had paid Orange, but said the situation showed the importance of reaching a critical size in business. Network operators have been fuming for years that Google, with its search engine and YouTube video service, generates huge amounts of traffic but does not compensate them for using their networks. An editorial piece at GigaOm says Google is abandoning its principles and giving Orange 'the incentive to demand the same from other content providers.'"
Re:Google is a free service, it is a public good (Score:3, Informative)
the worlds largest tax evading commercial advertising data miner is NOT for the public good, however well their services are technically, forgive me if i dont gush praise on them.
Re:Makes no sense. (Score:5, Informative)
From the article:
It sounds like they are not talking about traffic that goes from Google to their customers, but rather traffic that passes through their network on its way to a customer of another provider. If this is the case, then the situation is a little bit different than the "their customers already paid them for the bandwidth" argument. I'm not saying that Orange is in the right; merely that without more information I don't think anyone could make that determination.
Re:Makes no sense. (Score:5, Informative)
It's a peering dispute. (Score:5, Informative)
For a less clueless article, see "France Telecom and Google entangled in peering fight". [fiercetelecom.com]
Re:Makes no sense. (Score:2, Informative)
More info http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/01/frances-second-largest-isp-suspends-ad-blocking-for-now/
Re:Makes no sense. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Makes no sense. (Score:5, Informative)
It's actually a peering fight [techdirt.com] between cogent and france telecom; cogent being google's carrier, with google being the hostage and orange being france telecom's consumer arm.
Basically youtube (and streaming tf1, a popular french tv channel) are getting throttled because there's not enough capacity on the peering links between FT and cogent. Since much more traffic goes from cogent to FT, FT want more money to carry it. Note, this is not unusual in the peering world. Where they agree to carry each others traffic (because it's roughly equal) then they do it for free i.e. peering. When one party sends much more traffic, then sender pays for transit is common - after all, the receiving party is the one that has to pay for more equipment to carry the traffic, often including more 'last mile' infrastructure for that data to actually go to, or big pipes to other networks the transiting party needs access to.
In this case, FT is saying they want more money from cogent for transit, i.e. for all the google traffic - not money from google directly, but from their carrier; and because they have exclusive access to many households because they own and maintain the physical phone lines and exchange infrastructure, cogent can't just peer with someone else and route round FT (many french ISP's have to pay to use the FT infrastructure even though they're competitors to orange, in a similar way that a lot of British ISP's use BT lines and exchanges for DSL). If Cogent don't cough up more cash for transit to, then google traffic will continue to get throttled along with other cogent traffic at the boundary to FT's network.
The reporting on this has been woeful though, confusing the 'receiver pays' model of end users, the 'sender pays' model of big transit networks, and of course google with cogent, and France Telecom with orange.