March 4 2011 Friday
Blogspot banned: Thoughts on Google’s cloud...
Many may have heard of it. This week, strange things happened in Turkey.
One actor of the incident is Digiturk, which is a leading company providing digital broadcasting services and the owner of all media rights for Turkish Super League football matches (with a record deal, 321 mil. USD).
Recently, Digiturk has sued a bunch of web site owners, including Google. Court has restricted access for these web sites and Google Blogspot. The problem was that these sites are being used for illegal broadcasting live matches. The claim about Google was because some individuals were using blogspot sites to stream live matches. The story is also on bbc...
There is a great (negative) reaction towards Digiturk in online community. Twitter tag "#blogumadokunma" (Meaning: don't touch my blog) was in the first place in trends yesterday.
This endless discussion will continue for a while. We are dealing with these problems for several years. Government blocked some Google IP's last year to prevent Youtube access and GoogleApps has been down accidentally for a while, since they were using the same IP block with Youtube.
It is hard to say who to blame about these problems. The legal regulations are probably more guilty than any parties. Turkish legislative power is resisting to understand technical infrastructure of the Internet. In blogspot case, when a couple of subdomains violates the regulations, there should be better methods to restrict those instead of whole blogspot site. In current situation, punishment is absolutely unfair for bloggers. There is another problem here. The restriction is based on DNS blocks. So switching to OpenDNS or Google DNS solves the problem for users. Therefore, it simply doesn't work for people watching live streams :)
However, it does not mean that Google has no fault here. They clearly ignore such violation notices as in the recent case. Youtube ban has been lifted when Google decided to start listening. They simply lifted violating videos from Youtube and agreed with local government for a content verification system. However, Google sites service is still inaccessible and some GoogleApps services cannot be reached from local ISPs.
According to some discussions, the problem is not related directly with the content. Some governmental authorities explicitly criticized Google not to pay taxes for local activities in the past.
Are these problems really due the poor management of Google? In fact, no!
Google is doing business. They don't have an ethical point of view here, just business. They disregard Turkish authority because they don't see a great economic potential in Turkish market. If they were an idealist company that approaches issues from freedom of expressions point, they would not apply some censorship filters all over the world. In addition, they really trust community reaction which will not be against themselves. So far, we saw this works.
My point is to question the position of Google about cloud computing...
Right now, Google is suffering from targeting both consumer and business markets. Their actions in consumer markets clearly affect their service continuity, stability and reliableness.
It is an endless discussion about tough issues like the freedom of expression or governmental resistance to globalization of Internet economy. Although I blame Google, failing to manage Blogspot crisis, this whole issue is stupid! It seems each parties have secret agendas in their pockets.
One thing is clear, it is an opportunity for rivals of Google in cloud computing services.
One actor of the incident is Digiturk, which is a leading company providing digital broadcasting services and the owner of all media rights for Turkish Super League football matches (with a record deal, 321 mil. USD).
Recently, Digiturk has sued a bunch of web site owners, including Google. Court has restricted access for these web sites and Google Blogspot. The problem was that these sites are being used for illegal broadcasting live matches. The claim about Google was because some individuals were using blogspot sites to stream live matches. The story is also on bbc...
There is a great (negative) reaction towards Digiturk in online community. Twitter tag "#blogumadokunma" (Meaning: don't touch my blog) was in the first place in trends yesterday.
This endless discussion will continue for a while. We are dealing with these problems for several years. Government blocked some Google IP's last year to prevent Youtube access and GoogleApps has been down accidentally for a while, since they were using the same IP block with Youtube.
It is hard to say who to blame about these problems. The legal regulations are probably more guilty than any parties. Turkish legislative power is resisting to understand technical infrastructure of the Internet. In blogspot case, when a couple of subdomains violates the regulations, there should be better methods to restrict those instead of whole blogspot site. In current situation, punishment is absolutely unfair for bloggers. There is another problem here. The restriction is based on DNS blocks. So switching to OpenDNS or Google DNS solves the problem for users. Therefore, it simply doesn't work for people watching live streams :)
However, it does not mean that Google has no fault here. They clearly ignore such violation notices as in the recent case. Youtube ban has been lifted when Google decided to start listening. They simply lifted violating videos from Youtube and agreed with local government for a content verification system. However, Google sites service is still inaccessible and some GoogleApps services cannot be reached from local ISPs.
According to some discussions, the problem is not related directly with the content. Some governmental authorities explicitly criticized Google not to pay taxes for local activities in the past.
Are these problems really due the poor management of Google? In fact, no!
Google is doing business. They don't have an ethical point of view here, just business. They disregard Turkish authority because they don't see a great economic potential in Turkish market. If they were an idealist company that approaches issues from freedom of expressions point, they would not apply some censorship filters all over the world. In addition, they really trust community reaction which will not be against themselves. So far, we saw this works.
My point is to question the position of Google about cloud computing...
Right now, Google is suffering from targeting both consumer and business markets. Their actions in consumer markets clearly affect their service continuity, stability and reliableness.
It is an endless discussion about tough issues like the freedom of expression or governmental resistance to globalization of Internet economy. Although I blame Google, failing to manage Blogspot crisis, this whole issue is stupid! It seems each parties have secret agendas in their pockets.
One thing is clear, it is an opportunity for rivals of Google in cloud computing services.
