WHEN you call Grandma on her farm in Iowa, your long-distance phone company pays her local phone company an access fee. That’s fine. It’s much higher than elsewhere but few calls go to her and her neighbors, so the fees don’t add up quickly. And it’s a business-to-business transaction. You, the caller, aren’t even aware of the fees paid on your behalf. But Google is aware. It has entered the long-distance phone business, having introduced this year a service, Google Voice, that includes the ability to make free long-distance calls anywhere in the United States. It knows that access fees are a part of the phone business. But it quickly noticed that a few numbers in sparsely populated areas were accounting for a disproportionate percentage of Google Voice’s total costs.
In a company blog post last month, Google said some rural phone companies partner with “sex chat lines and ‘free’ conference calling centers to drive high volumes of traffic” in what is called “traffic pumping” in the telecom industry.
“People are on the phone for hours — Grandma wouldn’t be on all day,” said Richard Whitt, the Washington telecom and media counsel for Google, in a recent interview.
source (NYTimes.com)
So, Google is annoyed that some businesses are using legal tactics to make LOADS of money. Seems to me that Google is annoyed with the whole "free market" thing. As a mega-corporation they should understand the drive to make as much money as possible. Too bad you're trying to "innovate" and actually improve the world, kinda.
I love Google Voice and have used it since it was not owned by Google (or at least since it was still called "GrandCentral"). However, we live in a free-market world, where companies are allowed to do, largely, what ever they want to make as much money as they can. They can use chemicals in their products banned in other countries or territories. They can sell you a product that may give you cancer or possibly induce diabetes. If it saves the corporation money or (even better) makes them money, they (in most cases) can do it.
As such, all other companies must understand this and if other companies are getting gouged, they should change their business model--in other words, shut down Google Voice because it's a money-loser.
OR we could all grow up and realize that unbridled capitalism and devotion to the free market system MIGHT not be a good thing.
If not that, Google can stop being a whiny bitch, grow up and realize that this is a corporation-eat-corporation world.
What about us little people? What do we measly consumers get to say about any of this? Nothin'. We're just grist for the mill. Beans for the hummus. Yeast for the beer. We're not important.
