Posted by Mike Bijon January 06, 2006
It’s not a stock price bubble now, but the inflated heads of network & telecom companies. Om Malik notes in “Slow Lingering Death of Net Neutrality?” that ISPs want in on the riches of all that data running across their networks. In a very carfully worded proposal the network providers are “offering” content providers better performance for a fee. From the Wall Street Journal’s front page article (found via Rob Hyndman’s “Still More on Network Neutrality”):
The phone companies envision a system whereby Internet companies would agree to pay a fee for their content to receive priority treatment as it moves across increasingly crowded networks. Those that don’t pay the fee would find their transactions with Internet users — for games, movies and software downloads, for example — moving across networks at the normal but comparatively slower pace. Consumers could benefit through faster access to content from companies that agree to pay the fees.
It’s absurd that the network carriers are making promises beyond what they have already failed to deliver on. Consumers already pay ISP subscription fees to get just 60-80% of the connection’s rated bandwidth, yet they still see sound-outs during VoIP calls. At the other end of the carriers’ networks, content providers do have quality of service (QoS) worries, but it isn’t the network carriers delivering solutions to help them. Despite all the service level agreements in the world - every major content provider is already connected to the internet via multiple carriers and uses content delivery network (CDN) providers, companies like Akamai, Digital Island, and Xcelera, to maintain their own QoS levels.
There isn’t a chance that trying to take a slice of the content delivery pie will be good business for the network and telecom carriers. It may bring in more revenue at first, but good business involves keeping your customers happy enough to want (and even demand) more product. The ISPs are having trouble doing that, but they get greedy as they watch Google and iTunes pull in cash by using their networks. If they want to be content providers, then the ISPs should get into the market and see just how competitive it is. Instead the carriers cut risk by adopting a “utility” business model with subscription services and ’stable and predictable future revenue’. Stable and predictable earnings are risk-free though and don’t deliver some upside to annual earnings for execs looking to get rich on stock options. Instead the carriers could start provisioning their networks to reduce the quality of their product - instead of making a better product the carriers will want to be “paid off” like mob intimidators.
Carriers and ISPs surely see good business as anything that juices the stock price, as evidenced by already poor service levels, but it’s likely to bite them in the tail soon enough. I have no doubts that big ISPs will use even worse service quality to drive both content providers and subscribers to pay more for “better service”. The proposal cited above may be carefully-worded but I imagine service quality will drop unless someone pays up. The door for new network providers is just opening wider and wider. Whether it’s Google turning on dark fiber, Intel building its own WiMax network, or a content provider starting direct delivery - the company that figures out “connection delivery” the same way that Google figured out “information delivery” stands to be a major competitor in a very short time.
Posted by Mike Bijon January 02, 2006
Running Wordpress? Grab the Wordpress Admin Drop Down Menu plugin to save yourself from the click-and-load-and-wait for submenus (thanks to Owen Winkler/Asymptomatic.net for finding this one).
Amd, while I like this plugin and most of the fancy interfaces on the web now, but I’m not an average user. The funny thing about user interfaces on the web is that they’re getting faster as more javascript (aka AJAX) features are added. Wonder how long it’s going to take to put web apps into the semi-unusable state that most desktop apps present to users - bet it happens before we hit two billion people online.
Posted by Mike Bijon December 28, 2005
Steve Rubel suggests you can Read Most of O’Reilly’s Hacks Books for Free Using Google via the Google Print book-search system. His method only works well on books that have been “opened up” by Google, presumably with the publisher’s permission. Books that have not been opened up are much more restricted, and even books with publisher permission have some restricted passages (examples below).
Google Print has implemented protection for copyright holders (and to protect themselves from copyright holders) so Steve’s technique doesn’t work well in most books. Not long after the idea of reading entire books by searching Google Print with terms like “and | but | of | a | on | or | the | from | I | you | it” came out - Google shows about two pages of results before informing you that “Your search is too general. Please try again with a more specific query.“. Google Print also requires users to be signed in to a Google account before viewing whole pages of books at all. Once someone is signed in Google tracks page-views on a per-book basis and restricts viewing to just 10-20 total pages in most books. Books with more pages available for viewing are typically presented with the permission of the copyright holder, as the notice “Provided by O’Reilly through the Google Books Partner Program” on pages of both Podcasting Hacks and Google Hacks indicates, or are copyright-free.
Example of restrictions in an un/semi-restricted book, Podcasting Hacks
:
The book Podcasting Hacks, which Steve Rubel uses as an example, is unrestricted enough that O’Reilly has probably granted permission for it to be almost entirely available. Nevertheless, some content can not be accessed regardless of the search terms or method of viewing: try to access page #173 in Podcasting Hacks and let me know if you’re successful. I wasn’t able to view page #173 with Steve’s method, the list-of-all-pages method, or by any other search of page-specific terms.
Example of a restricted book with more typical restrictions, Google Hacks:
Using my own and two other Google accounts, I found that I can’t read more than 12 pages from Google Hacks before I see the message:
You have reached your viewing limit for this book (why?). You may continue browsing to view unrestricted or already viewed pages, or visit the About this Book page.
Additionally, page #7 is restricted altogether from viewing - and if I had more accounts to test with I’m sure I would find other restricted pages.
It’s likely that smart publishers, a group I think includes Tim O’Reilly, are finding a balance of promotion and sales by releasing slower/older content via Google Print. and, judging from the layers of page-count restrictions and even page-specific limitations, I suspect that Google Print is really becoming a tool for promoting publications, rather than a tool for reading printed content for free.
Posted by Mike Bijon December 15, 2005
Anyone remember that Yahoo bought del.icio.us this week?
Well, if you also haven’t forgotten that Yahoo bought blo.gs in mid-June this year and that Yahoo promptly “broke” the ability to add new links to blo.gs favorites for almost 6 months - then the current del.icio.us one hour maintenance outage (or see image below) won’t strike you as surprising. Unless my internet connection is stuck in a hole and my DNS isn’t updating right, the current del.icio.us outage started around 6pm PST and is still going 6 hours later:
Is Yahoo doing maintenance, rebuilding these sites from scratch, or trying to completely devalue their new investments?
Update: Sometime in the past 6 hours (it’s 6am PST) del.icio.us has been brought back online. I haven’t noticed any obvious changes. Has anyone else? Maybe the greatly extended blo.gs outage is actually due to major architectural or security issues…
Mike Bijon: I work as senior technology manager and technologist for 
