fronesis

ihatescreennames said:

fronesis said:

Um, did a bot write the summary of this story???

Google's recent EU ruling-driven rule changes for licensing access to the Google Play Store and the company's other apps to Android devices could cost some vendors as much as $40 per unit, according to internal documents, but the high fee could be significantly reduced down or eliminated entirely if Google's clients preinstall specific apps onto European smartphones. 

I have no idea what an "EU ruling-driven rule change" is, and I'm fairly certain that "down" is the ONLY way you can "reduce" a price. It can't be "reduced up." 

The EU issued a ruling to Google to make policy changes. The changes made by Google are a “rule change” in the policy. 

You are right: that IS what they were trying to say! The hyphenation and the repetition of the word "rule" (with two different referents) made it impossible for me to follow; technically the hyphenation should be "EU-ruling-driven-rule-change" since it's one single object to which they are referring. 

If editors still existed in this world, one of them might have suggested something like this: "Google's recent changes to its licensing policy (dictated by an early EU ruling) could cost..."

Um, did a bot write the summary of this story???

Google's recent EU ruling-driven rule changes for licensing access to the Google Play Store and the company's other apps to Android devices could cost some vendors as much as $40 per unit, according to internal documents, but the high fee could be significantly reduced down or eliminated entirely if Google's clients preinstall specific apps onto European smartphones. 

I have no idea what an "EU ruling-driven rule change" is, and I'm fairly certain that "down" is the ONLY way you can "reduce" a price. It can't be "reduced up." 

sdw2001 said:.  

It’s also worth noting that NN wasn’t even on the books until 2015.  Everything was fine without it.  One has to wonder why Big Tech and Obama wanted it (the latter tells me it’s bad on its own).  

 No - that’s just not true. This idea that there was no net neutrality before 2015 is awful history. 

Just read the the Wikipedia page on the history of net neutrality: the FCC was upholding the principles of net neutrality and opening investigations as early as 2004. 

These pre-2015 cases that were sorted out occurred in the context of the threat of intervention form the FCC. It wasn’t just “the market” that stopped companies from creating multiple tiers and blocking sites it was the threat of regulatory intervention. 

The repeal of net neutrality is a direct signal to those companies to go ahead and create a multi-tiered system without worrying about regulatory issues. It didn’t happen prior to 2015 precisely because the FCC was explicitly advocating net neutrality. 

To say don’t worry is like  saying “hey, that banked hasn’t been robbed in many years so there is no need to post a security guard out front!”

Finally, the market incentive here is NOT to uphold neutrality. The market incentives for a big ISP are to charge Netflix and others BIG money for a fast pipe. Comcast will make more profit, and that money eventually has to come from someone.