Tech Philosophy: The Google Tax
Two days ago I came across this: Orange ‘forces Google’ to pay for mobile traffic. Clearly Orange has no idea how the internet works and what’s their involvement in it. The ISP is just a dumb pipe to connect the user to a server, nothing more. If their users are using too much bandwidth and the…
Orange knows exactly how the internet works. They’re just trying to change it for the worse.
This is the logical consequence of people moving their activities from decentralized, open services (email, IRC, and usenet) where revenues are generated (and cost incurred) at the ISP, to centralized, closed services (Facebook and twitter) where cost, revenue, and control is centralized by the platform owner.
The natural response will be for Google and Facebook to compete (or simply threaten to compete) with residential ISPs, forcing some sort of accommodation by the ISPs, and binding ISPs to the media platforms (Facebook, Google, et. al.) in ways never before seen.
Tech Philosophy: The Google Tax