Who shot JR (that great Dallas broadband)? Add Dallas, Texas to the ranks of cities set to enjoy Google Fiber broadband. The Chocolate Factory has begun exploring the Lone Star city as a likely market for the broadband service. The third-largest city in Texas would be among the largest US markets to benefit from the Chocolate Factory's high-speed broadband network. " …
"AT&T and Comcast have an uncanny knack for deciding to expand their own fiber offerings to cities that get Google Fiber"
Bus wankers! AT&T had since 1977 to lay down some fibre, and didn't do it. If not for the Googles of the world, we'd still be using rotary dial phones and AT&T would be damn proud to overcharge you for that service, and extra for the phone itself, and surcharges, and tax.
Bus Wankers. A reference from the the UK series The Inbetweeners. Clip sound is NSFW so use headphones!
Jay tries it a second time and it all goes wrong.
There is a US version floating around which also includes the Bus Wankers sequence but I can't find it.
1977 was a little early for anyone to get fibre as a backbone but your sentiment was well meant.
My issue with Google is their need to be fed data about virtually everyone.
Does Google Fibre slurp your data back to the Chocolate Factory or are they playing a clean game and not sucking your data from under you so that it can be used in their AI, to improve your life with Adverts etc?
It would be nice to know that side of the coin.
Is it a choice between 100Mbits and data sucking (with Google) or 20Mbits and ISP Data Neutrality with AT&T/Comcast etc?
I'm not a US resident so it does not matter to me which wat round it is but it would be nice to know.
One thing not mentioned in the article is that AT&T world HQ is located in Dallas. This is really a shot across their bow.
I happen to be just over a mile down the street from that HQ. The best "broadband" (hah!) DSL service they were able to deliver to my address was just under 3Mbps, with lots of down time. Fortunately a local company installed a fiber backbone in the neighborhood, and I now get 50M promised / 100M actual for just $50/month. If Google can do that for the whole city ATT will be in a world of hurt.
Soon they'll only be one website left on the internet and only one provider to get to it from your house and only one mobile operating system, all owned by one company!
If this is true, and they are making the gobs of money that one would expect, who wouldn't line up to try and take that market share from them? So long as regulations don't insulate their monopoly, then they won't stay one for very long.
Google has a fresh list of reasons why it opposes tech antitrust legislation making its way through Congress but, like others who've expressed discontent, the ad giant's complaints leave out mention of portions of the proposed law that address said gripes.
The law bill in question is S.2992, the Senate version of the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA), which is closer than ever to getting votes in the House and Senate, which could see it advanced to President Biden's desk.
AICOA prohibits tech companies above a certain size from favoring their own products and services over their competitors. It applies to businesses considered "critical trading partners," meaning the company controls access to a platform through which business users reach their customers. Google, Apple, Amazon, and Meta in one way or another seemingly fall under the scope of this US legislation.
Special report Seven months from now, assuming all goes as planned, Google Chrome will drop support for its legacy extension platform, known as Manifest v2 (Mv2). This is significant if you use a browser extension to, for instance, filter out certain kinds of content and safeguard your privacy.
Google's Chrome Web Store is supposed to stop accepting Mv2 extension submissions sometime this month. As of January 2023, Chrome will stop running extensions created using Mv2, with limited exceptions for enterprise versions of Chrome operating under corporate policy. And by June 2023, even enterprise versions of Chrome will prevent Mv2 extensions from running.
The anticipated result will be fewer extensions and less innovation, according to several extension developers.
The United Kingdom's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) on Friday said it intends to launch an investigation of Apple's and Google's market power with respect to mobile browsers and cloud gaming, and to take enforcement action against Google for its app store payment practices.
"When it comes to how people use mobile phones, Apple and Google hold all the cards," said Andrea Coscelli, Chief Executive of the CMA, in a statement. "As good as many of their services and products are, their strong grip on mobile ecosystems allows them to shut out competitors, holding back the British tech sector and limiting choice."
The decision to open a formal investigation follows the CMA's year-long study of the mobile ecosystem. The competition watchdog's findings have been published in a report that concludes Apple and Google have a duopoly that limits competition.
Google has promised to cough up $118 million to settle a years-long gender-discrimination class-action lawsuit that alleged the internet giant unfairly pays men more than women.
The case, launched in 2017, was led by three women, Kelly Ellis, Holly Pease, and Kelli Wisuri, who filed a complaint alleging the search giant hires women in lower-paying positions compared to men despite them having the same qualifications. Female staff are also less likely to get promoted, it was claimed.
Gender discrimination also exists within the same job tier, too, the complaint stated. Google was accused of paying women less than their male counterparts despite them doing the same work. The lawsuit was later upgraded to a class-action status when a fourth woman, Heidi Lamar, joined as a plaintiff. The class is said to cover more than 15,000 people.
A year after the Dutch data protector said there were too many "legal obstacles" for its civil servants to use Google Workspace, a re-worked agreement will permit the public sector to fire up the productivity suite.
Google has placed one of its software engineers on paid administrative leave for violating the company's confidentiality policies.
Since 2021, Blake Lemoine, 41, had been tasked with talking to LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications, as part of his job on Google's Responsible AI team, looking for whether the bot used discriminatory or hate speech.
LaMDA is "built by fine-tuning a family of Transformer-based neural language models specialized for dialog, with up to 137 billion model parameters, and teaching the models to leverage external knowledge sources," according to Google.
Google Cloud and other internet service providers are recovering from network issues attributed to a network cable cut that began in the Middle East and Asia just before 0700 PDT (1400 UTC).
The cable, Asia-Africa-Europe-1 (AAE-1), is a 25,000km submarine cable operated by a telecom consortium. It connects South East Asia to Europe by way of Egypt.
According to Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at network monitoring biz Kentik, problems with AAE-1 affected internet connectivity in various countries in East Africa, Middle East and South Asia, including Pakistan, Somalia, Djibouti, and Saudi Arabia.
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) roped the Lone Star State into its cloud empire this week with the launch of its Dallas, Texas region.
The $600 million datacenter campus, which broke ground in 2019, is located approximately 25 miles south of the Dallas metro. The site, Google’s 11th in the US and 34th globally, is the latest in an ongoing effort to expand the cloud provider’s reach to new markets.
“We’ve heard from many of you that the availability of your workloads and business continuity are increasingly top priorities," Stacy Trackey Meagher managing director for Google’s central region, said in a statement. “The Dallas region gives you added capacity and the flexibility to distribute your workloads across the US.”
The Internet Engineering Task Force on Monday published the RFC for HTTP/3, the third version of hypertext transport protocol.
As explained in an IETF summary:
Even in the waning days of the pandemic, extended lead times and delayed packages are an inescapable reality. Logistics giant XPO this week picked Google Cloud to try to change that.
XPO is among the largest freight-transport brokers with more than 42,000 employees operating in 731 global locations. In a collaborative effort with Google, the company plans to deploy workloads on Google Cloud Platforms’s (GCP) AI/ML and data analytics platforms to mitigate supply-chain disruptions and improve package delivery and tracking services.
“We’re bringing out innovative AI/ML and data analytics solutions to XPO to help it transform supply chain management, ensure its deliveries are on time, and give its customers an accurate, up-to-date view on the location of their freight," Hans Thalbauer, managing director for global supply chain logistics at Google Cloud, said in a statement Monday.
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