
Why Orange's dominance in Africa forced Google to pay for traffic - lleims
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2013/01/20/why-oranges-dominance-in-africa-forced-google-to-pay-for-traffic-over-their-mobile-network/
======
mtgx
In Africa? Well that explains it. Many African countries actually voted for
those proposals at WCIT. I think most of the media missed this, and only
focused on the US and Europe rejecting the proposals and "winning", but
actually almost half the countries there took the deal. That means the
Internet is about to get less free very soon there, once their governments put
the UN proposals into law. And part of those proposals was the "sender pays"
thing. Now let's just hope the countries who rejected it this time around
won't use these countries as a role model next time.

It's very likely Orange was one of the European ISP's lobbying for sender pays
at ITU, as well. I don't know why Google would offer to pay them, considering
Africa is going to be dominated by Android either way. Nokia's Lumias or RIM's
phones are nowhere near the $50 mark Android phones have reached there, and
they are going to dominate just like in India and China, where they've also
almost killed Nokia and RIM from their leading positions in the past. So if
Google really did this voluntarily then they weren't very smart. But I still
think they _had_ to do it after the WCIT.

