Telecom or all

I can’t believe I’m going to do this, but I’m going to do it.

Yesterday, Dave Winer ranted about how blogs have become an ecosystem of recycled conversations about an original thought that happened long ago. Even so, I am going to talk about a post that Dave Winer wrote this weekend.

No, not that post, the one about the pig in Walnut Creek. Winer stops at a traffic light and a pig tells him (I know, that part makes no sense to me either — if you get it, please fill me in) that Google is going to move into the kinds of web services on which Amazon built its amazing turnaround. Only for free.

Maybe this talking pig thing is some uncharted territory in deep backgrounding, or maybe it’s a very useful hallucination. Either way, Winer is really onto something. And if Google wants to secure its dominance of all things Internet, even in the face of flat clickthrough rates or a brain drain, it had better find that pig — fast.

The real juice of the idea isn’t in the post itself, but in something that Winer went in and wrote in the comments.

“Google until they came up with their text ads had no business model other than VC, and they managed to take over an industry with that approach. I don’t see why Amazon charges me for my use of AWS… I’d use their services for new things if there was no cost to it. I think perhaps that’s what Google is thinking, acquisitions. How much would it be worth it to them to buy companies without having to transition their technology to their cloud? I think if that’s how they’re thinking they’re smart to approach it that way. “

When I read that, my mind flashed back to an interview I conducted last year with an executive at Amazon’s web services. In the interview I speculated aloud that what Amazon was doing was a lot like what corporate VC arms like Intel Capital do — invest in startups with which they will work — or buy — later on. Only instead of using hard cash, they were using infrastructure. Very shrewd, I said.

The executive’s response was that Amazon was not doing that at all, and that it would never do that with web services. I thought but didn’t say: Well, if you don’t do it someone else will.

Now some pig is saying that Google is doing it. As valued Google workers pack up their desks and launch new startups, this is the single best strategy for Google to bring them back into the fold. And it’s a great way to pull the rug out from under Amazon, strategy-wise and profit-wise.

While not exactly an original thought, it may be something for blog superdelegates to chew on.

The big news in the blog world today is the $2.75 million in funding received by Publish2, a startup founded by former GigaOM contributors Robert Young and Scott Karp. I wrote about the company quite some time ago and still have not seen a working prototype, a worrisome sign in my book.

One of the reasons the company is getting so much attention is that the funding came from Velocity Interactive Group, the fund that was created out of the ashes of Com Ventures and the Ross Levinsohn-Jon Miller investment vehicle previously known as Velocity. Just because VIG invested in the company doesn’t mean that Publish2 is a slam dunk, however. I have to wonder if Miller-Levinsohn were just itching to do a deal, any deal.

I’m not saying Publish2 is a bad idea. Karp and Young are very smart guys, much smarter than simple scribes like yours truly. But is it a big enough idea to command $2.75 million in Series A funding? Reading various blogs today, you get the sense that this is a Digg-type service for journalists. However great the product might be, that’s a small market — and thanks to the current downturn, it’s only going to get smaller. So while the concept may be sound, I have to wonder about the business potential.

AT&T, the San Antonio, Texas-based phone company, is going through some executive changes and making some cuts in its big VP corps, sources tell me. Cutting costs at this level shows that Ma Bell’s C-Suite is worried about today’s economic realities.

First the juicy bit: Ma Bell is offering packages to VP-level executives in the hopes that they’ll leave. If they don’t want to leave, they will be demoted, my sources tell me. Now that’s a carrot-and-a-stick approach if there ever was one!

At the higher echelons, there have been some moves as well. AT&T recently hired former VeriSign executive John Donavon to be CTO, overseeing network upgrades and research, a move that got less prominence than the destined-to-fail and quite dumb idea, the 3D Pogo browser. Andrew Stern, who used to be the CEO and chairman of USi, a company recently acquired by AT&T, has left, another bit of news that AT&T didn’t share with those who follow the company. Chris Rice is apparently taking over for him.

Comcast recently announced a deal with BitTorrent that left me dazed and confused. It was basically a roundabout way for the cable company to backtrack from its P2P traffic-blocking gaffe. In describing the deal, Comcast tried to shift the focus away from their so-called “network management” — and by extension, the limitations of their network that prompted them to resort to traffic manipulation in the first place.

On Friday, I caught up with Tony Werner, chief technology officer of Comcast Cable, to get the real skinny. When asked to explain the so-called announcement in language a simpleton like me could understand, Werner said: “Historically we had looked at a basket of P2P protocols during peak load times and would slow them down. In the new approach, we don’t do this any more.” In short, no P2P blocking!

Werner said that between one half and two percent of Comcast’s customers can be described as “bandwidth hogs” — users that consume so much bandwidth that it can cause network quality degradation. According to Werner, the company is currently experimenting with software (including that from Sandvine) that would allow them to fractionally de-prioritize the traffic from these bandwidth hogs during peak load times, while at other times, leaving them alone.

Comcast will not discriminate against any protocol, but bandwidth baddies are going to be the ones to suffer. Or at least that’s what I took away from our conversation.

Problem is who’s to say they’re not going to manage everyone’s traffic? Although a company spokesperson assured us Comcast will be clear and transparent with anything related to traffic management, my skepticism stems for Comcast’s past actions. When it comes to traffic management, the Philadelphia-based operator has a checkered past.

Comcast assured the FCC during the Network Neutrality deliberations in 2005 that it would not degrade traffic; it repeated the assurance again in 2006. Yet the company started “traffic managing” that very same year. And now they’re cleaning up their act?

I asked Werner, why manage traffic to begin with? Why not just add more capacity? “You can’t quadruple the size of the streets and take away all the traffic rules,” Werner said.

He said Comcast is not alone in traffic management, that even in places like Japan, fiber operators that sell 100-megabits-per-second connections are managing traffic, too. “A vast majority of ISPs do perform traffic management, including NTT, and the reason we do it is because we want to have balanced traffic performance at peak times,” Werner said. (See here for “Why Shaping Traffic Isn’t Just A Comcast Issue.“)

Of course, my views on broadband align with those of French broadband maverick Xavier Niel, who believes giving people more bandwidth — not getting in their way. Still, his view (and mine) are the minority in a broadband world dominated by large incumbents.

For their part, the incumbents have started to talk about taking a protocol-agnostic approach to traffic management. They have to, otherwise we’ll have more snafus like the ones experienced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Although the CBC released a torrent legitimately, downloaders had a hard time grabbing the video shows. Werner’s comments and recent throat-clearing by Verizon and AT&T reveals a thaw in ISP views on P2P.

On a larger scale, Werner said traffic management is “very tricky.” “We need to get the whole industry together and tackle this issue,” he said.