Wednesday, April 28, 2010

And You Think Washington Has Sticky Fingers

Vodafone has entered the arena of trying to get more from its customers by charging Google for each time a customer seeks a result on the Google network. You see the customer already paid Vodafone for its service but now the greedy folks across the pond want to ply more for nothing.

In a recent post in Rethink Wireless they state:

(Vodafone) wanted to charge internet players like Google for their usage of his firm's networks. Now Vodafone has got behind that call too, and is to petition the European Union to take action to "facilitate bilateral agreements between telecom operators and online content providers like Google"...This amounts to a 'Google tax', enabling mobile and fixed carriers to charge online content providers variable fees according to the network quality they receive, and/or the amount of bandwidth they consume.

This is the fear of Internet Neutrality folks, the "taxing" of the user via the taxing of the provider of the service.

We have argued for years that the user may enter into agreements with the providers and the provider may charge whatever they want yet they cannot interfere with the relationships with the user and providers that the user chooses to deal with. In fact there should be some form of privacy related with who I a user desire to communicate with. And this is Europe. Just another glimpse of the anti Americanism at play.