You Can’t Have Your Cake and Eat it Too! – Google Called Hypocrite by AT&T
As was thought in an early post, apparently Google just does not know how to play the game…or does it? Now, it seems that Google is hindering calls to rural areas with its Google Voice application. Google admits to this practice with the excuse that the local phone carriers in these rural areas are charging exorbitant fees to long distance carriers, such as AT&T and Google is trying to protect those long distance carriers. In all actuality, Google wants it’s cake (non-discrimination) and eat it too (being able to stop calls to certain rural areas).
Google’s apparent posture is that the rural phone companies believe they are permitted to charge the larger phone companies for connection fees, even though these fees seem to be well over 100 times higher than would be the norm. This overcharge revenue of fees is then divided amongst several “partners” of the rural phone companies in a practice known as “traffic pumping”. AT&T and other phone carriers have to swallow the connection fee costs since their customers pay flat fee rates for unlimited local and long distance calling privileges, reveling in lost profit of as much as $200 million a year to some of the larger phone companies. In an effort to deter traffic pumping, Big Daddy FCC has stopped the rural companies from charging rates and is fine-tuning future rules to ban such practices.
With the Google Voice app, customers get to keep one phone number and get their calls redirected over the Internet, but this luxury supposedly comes at a price to Google wherein they are also charged the high rates from the rural phone companies. They do not like this and thus their reasoning for hindering the calls. “Foul”, cries AT&T, because they, as do other regular phone companies, are forbidden to block calls and must adhere to common carrier rules and cannot stop anyone from using their network for access. This is outlined in the FCC’s 4th principle in their Internet Policy Statement. Google speaks out of both sides of its forked tongue – fairness to all, but rights to do what it wants. In an attempt to plead its “innocence”, Google says that Google Voice should not have to adhere to the rules because it is software running on someone else’s infrastructure, it does not charge for this app and it was never created to replace regular telephone services.
Google certainly is finding itself in the position of “wolf in sheep’s clothing” and leaving the other comrade phone companies suspect of it’s true intentions. Good thing the FCC is looking into this and hopefully all this backstabbing, will end soon.
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The telephone network is a Public Switched Telephone network with 100s of different companies interconnecting.
ATT tries to sell unlimited access to other companies networks. The PSTN is based on a per minute model and can not be sold as an all you can eat plan with out risk.
Google wants to sell access to the PSTN to its customers because with out it their application is useless. Google want to selective connect to the PSTN and I don’t agree with that. People rely upon the PSTN to connect their calls to all points of the network. Google would then be able to say we are no longer connecting to… and if customer have set up on Google to connect calls this could be very damaging.
ATT says Google should have to connect but ATT does not pay for its connection because it too is using self-help by not paying. Google is bad for not connecting! ATT is bad for connecting and withholding payment. BOTH ARE BAD FOR THE CUSTOMER if they don’t live up to the expectations of the users they are soliciting from the PSTN.