Google has its own enterprise-grade cloud storage offering which competes with the likes of Amazon and Microsoft for storing data from big Internet players like Snapchat and Netflix. Now you can send your data to their cloud in the most literal, or most lazy, way ever before possible.
Even though Google announced in December of last year that sign-ups for its Fiber TV and Internet service were live to residents of southern and southeastern Austin, they’ve actually been opened and closed several times. Sign-ups are going live in the southeastern section yet again today, according to the official Twitter account for the company’s broadband cable and Internet subsidiary.
Google and Facebook have each been slapped with a R$50,000 fine ($16k USD) in Brazil for not removing or blocking morbid images. The move comes after pictures of a Brazilian musician in a mortuary made their way online. Christian Araujo, the artist in question, died alongside his girlfriend in a car crash last month.
The Guardian reports that Judge Denise Gondim de Mendonca declared both companies had acted in “bad faith” after ignoring an earlier ruling. In response to today’s news, Google had the following statement prepared:
The Marco Cilvil of the Internet (local law which regulates removals) requires that any court order for content removal specify the URLs to be removed. In parallel, we have already taken down many of the videos which have been flagged by users due to YouTube’s policies regarding offensive content.
Facebook is yet to comment officially on the ruling, but Google has stated that it will be appealing the decision. In an age where it’s so easy to share any kinds of images online, it brings in to question how much of this can be blamed on Google and how much is down to those who took the photographs or shot the videos to begin with.
Not to be too crude or disrespectful, but I couldn’t think of much worse than someone pulling out their smartphone to snap a picture of my dead body lying in a morgue. The fact the picture is posted online afterwards is more of a side effect, surely?
That’s not to downgrade the severity of the companies supposedly not taking action. As huge corporations, they too have a responsibility to ensure these kinds of images aren’t seen by anyone. It certainly brings in to question where the line should be drawn.
Google Fiber’s VP of access services Milo Medin says that while the company is a strong supporter of net neutrality, what consumers really need is legislation that enables greater competition in the broadband market. FierceTelecom reported Medin’s remarks in a keynote speed at the Comptel conference.
No consumers are seeing higher speeds than before the order was passed; no consumers are paying less for their Internet services than what they were paying for; no consumers are seeing higher volume caps that they had before; and no consumers have additional choice of providers than they had before.
Governments cannot legislate for better customer service, he said, but they can pass laws that increase competition in the market, and this is what will make the most difference to consumers …
Expand
Expanding
Close
The Wall Street Journal reports that Google’s ultrafast Internet service Fiber has a new leader running the show, and not just any new leader. Dennis Kish, a former executive at semiconductor company Qualcomm, is replacing Milo Medin to head Google Fiber going forward. The Journal reports that Medlin will remain “an adviser to the Google Fiber team,” but the Google vice president will begin work on other unspecified projects.
Kish was brought in for his operational expertise and will lead Google Fiber as the high-speed Internet and television service expands to new cities.
We thought we understood the net neutrality argument: the need to ensure that ISPs like the big cable companies don’t extort cash from services like Netflix to provide them with greater bandwidth than companies who don’t pay the toll.
But no, according to Time Warner, we’ve got this backward: it’s popular websites like Google who could do the extorting, reports National Journal.
In a filing to the FCC, Time Warner Cable claimed that the controversy over Internet providers potentially charging websites for access to special “fast lanes” is a “red herring.” The real danger, the cable company claimed, is that Google or Netflix could demand payments from Internet providers. Customers expect access to the most popular websites, and an Internet provider may have little choice but to pay up.
The National Cable and Telecommunications Association, a trade association representing all the major cable companies, backed this view, saying that it’s companies like “Google, Netflix, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook” that we should be concerned about. It is, of course, merely coincidence that these are the mostly the same companies who wrote a joint letter to the FCC in support of net neutrality.
Google is on record as saying that there is no conflict between co-location – which enables faster delivery of content to consumers – and net neutrality.
We give companies like Netflix and Akamai free access to space and power in our facilities and they provide their own content servers. We don’t make money from peering or colocation; since people usually only stream one video at a time, video traffic doesn’t bog down or change the way we manage our network in any meaningful way — so why not help enable it?
The FCC has, understandably, rejected Time Warner’s claim, stating that “such conduct is beyond the scope of this proceeding.”
Following a proposal that many fear threatens net neutrality, a plethora of tech companies today have come together to support net neutrality in a letter to the Federal Communications Commission. The group is led by Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix, and Twitter, as well as many others.
The letter voices disapproval of a recent proposal that would allow people to pay more in order to gain a higher priority from their internet service provider. The letter focuses on keeping the internet open, and perhaps treated as a utility. The companies make the case that with this new paid prioritization proposition, ISPs would be discriminating both technically and financially against internet companies
Photo: @FindikKahve
Turkish citizens, who found access to Twitter blocked yesterday in an apparent attempt by prime minister Recep Erdoğan to stem the spread of corruption allegations against him, have been able to work around the block by switching to Google’s public DNS service.
The Turkish government blocked access to Twitter by requiring local ISPs to change the DNS entries so that twitter.com could no longer be reached. As soon as the method of blocking access was discovered, a campaign started to spread the word that it could be circumvented by changing network settings to use Google’s DNS servers at 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 (update: a comment suggests the Turkish government is blocking these addresses too) …
Expand
Expanding
Close
Google officially started rolling out its new gigabit fiber Internet and TV service in Kansas City in July. Google asked households in the various “Fiberhoods”, which are made up of 800 or so residents each, to sign-up, but the service has not yet rolled out to businesses. Now, as reported by GigaOm, businesses are going as far as purchasing residential homes in the city to take advantage of the $70 per month Internet plans:
the startup community wasn’t willing to settle — and since most of them worked from their homes, coffee shops or communal space anyhow, it wasn’t a big leap to decide to find a house in an area slated for fiber and move in.
Tyler Vanwinkle of Leap2, a mobile search company, said his company was already based near a neighborhood slated to get fiber and a friend of his owned a house there. So he talked to his friend about renting space for the company in the house, now dubbed the Hacker House. “Google fiber the speed is phenomenal but it’s only residential,” he said. “Since we were interested in renting the house as office space and so were some of our friends, this has evolved into this common bond of entrepreneurship.”
GigaOm also noted many other startups and businesses in the city are considering making the switch to residential to gain access to Google’s new Internet service. The company originally said it would provide more information on offering the service to businesses at a later date, but has yet to do so.
Capstone Investments‘s Rory Maher this morning had some reflections in the wake of Google’s announcement last Thursday that it plans to offer free Internet service in some parts of the U.S. and paid packages with access up to a gigabit per second.
Writes Maher, it looks like Google is planning nationwide availability given an ad the company has put up for a sales person to sell the service to businesses on a nationwide basis. Maher thinks building a network coast to coast would be too expensive, so probably Google would seek to “barter” fiber: “We believe in most markets Google will likely build in outlying areas where fiber capacity is limited and barter with other fiber providers to build the capacity to serve an entire market. We believe this could cut construction costs significantly.”
BI noted that this would cost nearly $400 billion—significantly ahead of Google’s war chest allotment.
Whatever Google needs to do to make this happen is totally worth it. I have taken to looking at Zillow’s Kansas City pages, noting the $1,000’s plus charge for Gigabit in NYC would quickly offset the cost. Does anyone know how good the pizza is in Kansas City?
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uZVqPuq81c]
Google plans to make a “special announcement about Google Fiber and the next chapter of the Internet” at 12 p.m. EST.
The company revealed earlier this week that it would launch the “100 times faster than broadband” Internet service today in Kansas City.
Google’s homepage today features an animated video for the first drive-in theatre coupled with a notice below the search field that informs folks of the IPv6 protocol rollout.
So, lets discuss the cool animation first: Double click on the video for aggregated search results on the “opening of the first drive-in theater.” A quick perusal details how R.M. Hollingshead Corporation debuted the drive-in theater 79 years ago today in New Jersey. The original lot on Admiral Wilson Boulevard at the Airport Circle in Pennsauken squeezed in 400 cars, but it eventually inspired thousands of locations to pop-up around the country. Eventually the phenomena of watching a movie from within a car became a favorite American pastime.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=STXaUI67pyA]
Go below for more information on IPv6.