Nick Carr’s new book “The Shallows” examines how our brains are changing in response to the Web. While there is cause for concern, it’s not all bad.

Originally posted at Relevant Results

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This can’t really come as a surprise, but it appears that Google’s plan to redirect all traffic from China to its Hong Kong site, in response to China’s censorship… and hack attack isn’t making China very happy. The country has apparently threatened to take away Google’s Internet Content Provider license… so, now it appears that Google is taking a step back into China in an attempt to keep the license. Google’s argument (effectively the same one it had when it first went into China despite concerns about censorship there) is that having some access in China is better than no access for people there:

Without an ICP license, we can’t operate a commercial website like Google.cn–so Google would effectively go dark in China.

That’s a prospect dreaded by many of our Chinese users, who have been vocal about their desire to keep Google.cn alive. We have therefore been looking at possible alternatives, and instead of automatically redirecting all our users, we have started taking a small percentage of them to a landing page on Google.cn that links to Google.com.hk–where users can conduct web search or continue to use Google.cn services like music and text translate, which we can provide locally without filtering. This approach ensures we stay true to our commitment not to censor our results on Google.cn and gives users access to all of our services from one page.

Over the next few days we’ll end the redirect entirely, taking all our Chinese users to our new landing page–and today we re-submitted our ICP license renewal application based on this approach.

I’m not sure this will actually satisfy the Chinese government, or do Google much good either. It seems like taking a bit of a step backwards after insisting that it would stay out of China if China continued to require it to censor results.

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Last week we noted that Pakistan had chosen to start censoring a bunch of big websites, including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon. And now the EFF notes that Afghanistan has created new rules for the internet, saying that ISPs need to start filtering websites that fall under the following categories:

• Alcohol
• Dating/Social Networking
• Gambling
• Pornography

Because it’s not easy to properly filter, reports coming out of the country suggest that ISPs are just choosing to block Facebook, Gmail, YouTube, and Twitter outright. It looks like more and more countries are deciding to censor the internet. This may not be a surprise, but it is a little upsetting if you believe in the importance of free expression.

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Last week we noted that Pakistan had chosen to start censoring a bunch of big websites, including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon. And now the EFF notes that Afghanistan has created new rules for the internet, saying that ISPs need to start filtering websites that fall under the following categories:

• Alcohol
• Dating/Social Networking
• Gambling
• Pornography

Because it’s not easy to properly filter, reports coming out of the country suggest that ISPs are just choosing to block Facebook, Gmail, YouTube, and Twitter outright. It looks like more and more countries are deciding to censor the internet. This may not be a surprise, but it is a little upsetting if you believe in the importance of free expression.

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If Google wants to stay afloat in China it will have to stop automatically redirecting searchers to Hong Kong, and it’s not clear that Plan C will work.

Originally posted at Relevant Results

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The Dutch “anti-piracy” group BREIN has been one of the most aggressive in bringing all kinds of lawsuits in attempting to use basically any means possible to block various torrent sites. It has sued ISPs telling them they need to block The Pirate Bay and it has sued The Pirate Bay, telling it that it needs to block all Dutch users from accessing the site. On the ISP front, it appears that a few Dutch ISPs are teaming up to challenge the demand that it needs to block foreign sites like The Pirate Bay:

“The basic principle of the Internet is that ISPs pass on traffic to their customers unfiltered, they are merely a gateway,” says Niels Huijbregts, spokesman for XS4ALL. “The Pirate Bay website is not hosted on a Ziggo server, so Ziggo can’t be held responsible for restricting access to the website. BREIN is targeting the wrong people.”

While this makes sense, it seems like every time we hear about court cases involving BREIN, the group comes out on top. So if I had to guess, I’m assuming that BREIN will win again. Hopefully I’ll be surprised and the Dutch courts will pick up some common sense somewhere along the way.

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Ryan Single has an excellent piece at Wired that details how incredibly misleading telcos are being in claiming that the FCC’s attempt to reclassify broadband access will lead to less “innovation.” He highlights how far behind other countries the US has fallen, and how hard the telcos seem to work at not competing and not investing in innovation. Basically, Singel points out what many of us have pointed out all along. All of this posturing by telcos is about lowering their own costs (i.e., not investing) and squeezing more money out of customers, in an attempt to please Wall Street:

The dirty secret of ISPs is that even as broadband usage on their networks continues to increase 30 to 40 percent a year, their annual costs for shipping data onto and off the net’s main pipes continues to fall.

The problem isn’t the cost of shipping data.

The problem is that the large ISPs answer to Wall Street and instead of planning and investing for abundance, they prefer to spend their time thinking of ways to extract more money from customers without having to invest significantly in future-proof infrastructure.

He does note that Verizon may be the exception, but as we recently pointed out, with CEO Ivan Seidenberg on his way out, the company has shifted gears and is pulling back heavily on investing in new infrastructure. Seidenberg has long fought Wall Street, pointing out that putting down fiber was the best long-term bet, but the short-term thinkers on Wall Street didn’t want to hear about high capital expenditure that would cost a lot initially, but not pay off until later. And, now, without Seidenberg leading the charge, Verizon is going back to not wiring up fiber.

Singel highlights how all of the “innovation” that seems to come out of the telcos isn’t consumer focused at all. Nearly all of it is about limiting consumers with artificial rules and barriers to try to squeeze more money out of them:

In the last couple of years, ISPs “innovated” by changing how they handle users who type in a URL that doesn’t exist. Under net protocols, the ISP’s DNS servers are supposed to report an error code to your browser in those circumstances. Instead, ISPs are now serving up pages with ads, sometimes in ways that introduce huge security risks.

As a reaction, Google set up a fast, ad-free DNS service. And if you want to see what real innovation in DNS looks like, take a look at OpenDNS, which has built fraud protection, security measures and optional web content filtering into its robust DNS service.

ISPs have also long insisted on customers using “installation” software that did nothing but drive customers onto ISPs’ web properties to get ad dollars; tried to sell — for a monthly fee — wireless home network capability you could set up easily with a $50 router (and then blame service problems on any home wireless networks you didn’t buy from them); and even hijack address-bar searches that might otherwise, per the browser settings, use an actually useful search engine like Google.

ISPs also recently dipped their toes into another innovation: Selling access to everything their customers do online in order to build profiles on them and secretly insert targeted ads into other company’s web pages.

From there, he covers just how much effort the telcos put into regulatory efforts to block competition in the face of overwhelming consumer demand:

It’s literally not in telecom executives’ best interest to invest in broadband and solid networks.

That’s why you get companies like Time Warner trying to squeeze customers into limits on the amount of data they can use — not because bandwidth is expensive — but because building a real network is. It’s far better, in their minds and for the stock price, to focus on bleeding as much from their current customers using self-serving policies instead of gaining loyalty by making networks that are generous, quick and reliable.

When towns get tired of begging for fast internet — only to be told it doesn’t make financial sense for telecoms, they sometimes decide to build their own fiber networks.

And then telecoms sue the cities — as they did in the case of Monticello, Minneapolis, and run to state legislators to write laws outlawing citizens from organizing their own networks as Time Warner Cable did in the case of Wilson, North Caroline, which set up its own fiber network known as Greenlight.

All of this is a pretty accurate description of what’s actually happening. The one point where I disagree with the article is Singel’s assertion that what the FCC is doing in response to this makes sense. While I agree it’s not nearly as big a deal as the telcos are making it out to be, I still think that supporters of the FCC’s move are underestimating what will result, and what kind of loopholes the telcos will gleefully make sure are present. With the recent reports coming out, saying that the telcos are willing to “agree” to legislation on this topic, combined with the fact that they’ve hired up a ton of ex-high level government officials to help craft any rules, suggests that what comes out in the end will be a lot more “friendly” to the type of short-term Wall Street-driven “innovation” that the telcos want.

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It appears that newspaper giant Gannett, owner of USA Today and a bunch of regional newspapers, is beginning to experiment with putting up some paywalls on many of its regional newspapers. Jeff Sonderman has been pointing out, on his Twitter feed, that many of the newspaper’s announcements about their own paywalls are really bad reporting. Now it looks like Steve Buttry has written up a blog post pointing out just how bad these newspapers are at announcing their own paywalls.

They give misleading headlines, they pretend that paywalls are some huge journalistic advance (rather than just a business model choice — and one that’s been tried and failed a bunch), and most importantly, they all totally bury the lede, and don’t bring up the paywall until many paragraphs into the article. In the online announcements from The Tallahassee Democrat, the Greenville News and the St. George Spectrum, the paywall isn’t even mentioned on the first page of each of those articles. Instead, you have to click through to the later pages to even find out what the announcements are about! Talk about burying the lede…

All three waste the beginning of their articles talking up how great they are and how important they are, as newspapers, to their community. But it’s all just a way to try to butter people up before hitting them with “so now we’re charging for access to our web content.” They’re acting as if they think their readers are stupid — which isn’t exactly a strong selling point for getting people to pay you money.

Buttry points to other failings in these announcements that any business journalist would have certainly covered if doing the same story about another business:

The editors and publishers who signed the Gannett announcements boast of the resources they commit to covering local news, without acknowledging they have cut those resources severely in companywide staff cuts in recent years. The Tallahassee and Greenville announcements prattle on at length about their newspapers’ history (appropriate, I guess, since they are clinging to a strategy rooted in the past).

None of the three announcements discloses that the papers are conducting an experiment for Gannett (in fact, none of the announcements even mentions Gannett). I’m pretty sure that the editors of those papers would expect their business writers to note such a fact in stories about any other business in town.

What we’re seeing is the implicit realization that these newspapers know a paywall won’t work. If it was something their audience wanted, they would be upfront and honest about it. Or if they had a good rationale for the decision they would be upfront and honest about it. Instead they have to be misleading, defensive and hide the important point. Quite an “experiment” by Gannett…

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The electronic payments company announced a new service that will eventually get people buying software via credit card through PayPal–without a PayPal account.

Originally posted at The Download Blog

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