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Comment by RyanMcGreal | Hacker News Reader

I can never tell how much of a given Register article is prescient contrarianism and how much is straight trolling.

Orlowski's articles are often blatant trolls, this one is way out there claiming that the mobile operators who've had us over barrels for so long should be felt sorry for because they can't break the net. Nobody is stopping them making a video on demand service, people are stopping them from making a video on demand that has priority and blocks others. And calling all the civil society groups that fought for net neutrality Google sockpuppets is a bit much.

He's siding with all the other players to be a troll but we side with Google not because we love them but because we don't want the carriers to be anything more than ISPs. They are simply too stupid to manage it, look at SMS data transfer still costing four times more than data transfer to the Hubble telescope. Whereas you have Google pushing open jabber chat protocols and then building Wave on top of them. Who do you trust, a bunch of dying lock-in mongers with a track record of squeezing everything they can out of you and the troll-jester Orlowski or Google which has a decent track record open sourcing most of their stuff and adding value?

As someone who has suffered iPhone lock-in and incredibly poor customer service (3G on my 3G iphone has never worked from day one and the carrier and Apple refused to do anything about it - even suggesting I "turn off 3G to abate the problem" WTF) I can't wait for unlocked no-contract Linux phones to become the norm and just wipe them all out. And I don't think Google cares about "the mobile industry" either, they can burn bridges there because that industry doesn't work as a block (there is no honour among thieves) and they can always find one to make the hardware for them.

> we side with Google not because we love them but because we don't want the carriers to be anything more than ISPs. They are simply too stupid to manage it...

Amen! For now, I trust Google because they've positioned themselves in such a way that they benefit from doing the right thing. The balance of incentives favours openness, because Google is in the best position to exploit open platforms to deliver their services. The rest of us benefit more or less incidentally.

I don't trust Google myself, but you bring up very good points.

Yes, exactly.

In addition to being a troll, Mr. Orlowski has a long-standing and irrational dislike of Google in particular, and while this is the most credible piece I've ever seen from him, everything he says about the company should be taken with huge heaping spoonfuls of salt.

In his typical M.O., he takes an initially rational argument (Google is competing with mobile operators it was previously partnering with, which is going to accelerate their transformation into dumb pipes) and then extrapolates to ridiculous conclusions (Google is secretly attempting to build its own private Internet and become the only ISP in the world).

Google is definitely a threat to mobile operators, but then the writing has been on the wall for their business model for a long time -- a disruptively cheap VoIP operator with a data-only handset is going to be the end of the archaic concept of "voice minutes" and thus their profits. It might be Google, or it might not, but it's going to be somebody.

Yeah, it's a little over the top. I don't like how articles like this always fail to put forward the theory that maybe Google did the N1 to avoid Windows Mobile's fate by creating an in-production reference platform that commits them to backwards compatibility. It probably won't prevent further fragmentation, but it's worth a shot.

Also, it's not Google's fault that the other Android devices suck ass.

Nothing says intelligent debate like righteous indignation :/ (referring to the register, not you)

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