It is good that providers should be looking to provide parity, not just keep legacy kit and offer "take it or leave it". However providing 25MBs is probably not that practical out in the sticks, even if it is in central urban areas.
Perhaps a spread of offerings would be more sensible?
Less than 4 down or .5 up - "Low Speed" Internet, or indeed any marketing term they choose to use, provided it doesn't include the word "broadband" anywhere in it
4 down, 0.5 up - "Basic" Broadband (not allowed to be called just "broadband", always this combo)
10 down, 1.5 up - "Standard" Broadband, or just "broadband", but not the terms set out below for 20+
20 down or better - "Advanced"/"High Speed" broadband, and/or marketable as "broadband-nn" where "nn" is the lower of download speed *or* 8xUpload speed; so you could advertise "broadband-25" provided upload was over 3mb.
with the -nn notation, providers can then compete on advertised speed with other providers, without having to worry about definition of terms?
UStream could build an automation system - content providers upload a DMCA notice, go to offending urls, select the notice from a pulldown, hit "sure" to a box asserting that they claim the material is infringing, a genuine human has indeed checked this isn't a false positive or fair use, and that they would like the entry removed, and hey bingo, it gets replaced by a message saying it was taken down by the content provider and referencing the DMCA notice and the terms of use for the service.
Of course, to *qualify* for an account on the system, the content provider would need to sign an agreement that they will carefully check each and every takedown under the system, and should they take down a link that wasn't infringing, would be liable for UStream's legal costs and compensation of $500 to the uploader - but hey, that's fine, yes? they aren't going to use a comparebot or blanket-select hundreds of urls without checking, so it shouldn't matter...
(and it creates a brand new revenue stream for eager young users; if you can create a link that looks infringing to a bot but isn't, hey, $500 a pop :)
That is clearly an option too. have google news charge Spanish citizens the "snippet tax" - plus 10% handling fee, of course - then pass that along like they are requested to :)
Wouldn't be surprised to see them double down - but Google would then just remove all those news sites *entirely* from google search, and wait (in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they removed all sites from the .es domain from their search entirely, then replaced it with a banner saying "this search does not include results from the Spanish TLD by request from the Spanish government"
Still, the Spanish government obviously has another choice - they can buy a datacenter full of servers, provision it with bandwidth, pay programmers to write code to scan every news site in the world and correlate news stories, and generally reproduce Google's news service at their own expense. Then pay the Spanish news orgs for the privilege, of course, because they aren't immune to the law either.
Techdirt has not posted any stories submitted by Dave Howe.
Technology does move on, and..
Perhaps a spread of offerings would be more sensible?
Less than 4 down or .5 up - "Low Speed" Internet, or indeed any marketing term they choose to use, provided it doesn't include the word "broadband" anywhere in it
4 down, 0.5 up - "Basic" Broadband (not allowed to be called just "broadband", always this combo)
10 down, 1.5 up - "Standard" Broadband, or just "broadband", but not the terms set out below for 20+
20 down or better - "Advanced"/"High Speed" broadband, and/or marketable as "broadband-nn" where "nn" is the lower of download speed *or* 8xUpload speed; so you could advertise "broadband-25" provided upload was over 3mb.
with the -nn notation, providers can then compete on advertised speed with other providers, without having to worry about definition of terms?
There is another solution of course...
Of course, to *qualify* for an account on the system, the content provider would need to sign an agreement that they will carefully check each and every takedown under the system, and should they take down a link that wasn't infringing, would be liable for UStream's legal costs and compensation of $500 to the uploader - but hey, that's fine, yes? they aren't going to use a comparebot or blanket-select hundreds of urls without checking, so it shouldn't matter...
(and it creates a brand new revenue stream for eager young users; if you can create a link that looks infringing to a bot but isn't, hey, $500 a pop :)
Re: Re: Re: Re: Sweet, sweet schadenfreude
Re: Sweet, sweet schadenfreude
Still, the Spanish government obviously has another choice - they can buy a datacenter full of servers, provision it with bandwidth, pay programmers to write code to scan every news site in the world and correlate news stories, and generally reproduce Google's news service at their own expense. Then pay the Spanish news orgs for the privilege, of course, because they aren't immune to the law either.
Techdirt has not posted any stories submitted by Dave Howe.
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