Google entered a new business beyond Internet search on Wednesday with a service within Gmail to make phone calls over the Web to landlines or cellphones.

The service will thrust Google into direct competition with Skype, the Internet telephone company, and with telecommunications providers. It could also make Google a more ubiquitous part of people’s social interactions by uniting the service for phone calls with e-mail, text messages and video chats.

“It’s one place where you can get in touch with the people that you care about, and how that happens from a network perspective is less important,” said Charles S. Golvin, a telecommunications analyst at Forrester Research.

Gmail has offered voice and video chat for two years, but both parties must be at their computers. Google said the new service would work well for people in a spot with poor cellphone reception or for those making a quick call from their desk.

Google and Verizon, two leading players in Internet service and content, are nearing an agreement that could allow Verizon to speed some online content to Internet users more quickly if the content’s creators are willing to pay for the privilege.

The charges could be paid by companies, like YouTube, owned by Google, for example, to Verizon, one of the nation’s leading Internet service providers, to ensure that its content received priority as it made its way to consumers. The agreement could eventually lead to higher charges for Internet users.

Such an agreement could overthrow a once-sacred tenet of Internet policy known as net neutrality, in which no form of content is favored over another. In its place, consumers could soon see a new, tiered system, which, like cable television, imposes higher costs for premium levels of service.

Any agreement between Verizon and Google could also upend the efforts of the Federal Communications Commission to assert its authority over broadband service, which was severely restricted by a federal appeals court decision in April.

Few weeks later, I was at a relative’s place, the kind of place where you still have to go to the garden to get a decent signal (much improved from when I was DGT when one had to stand in a precise location in the middle of a paddy field). Again a question arose on what medicine was what. While everyone else was dialing pharmacists (unsuccessfully) and searching for prescriptions, I wandered off to the garden, googled the brand names and came back with the answer, thanks to the doctor in DC. Plan for driving to the nearest town to get the answer was scrapped.

The Economist has a good piece on the special applications for medicine from wireless.

Doctors are an obvious early target for wireless health. A forthcoming report by the California HealthCare Foundation (CHCF), a think tank, estimates that two-thirds of American physicians already have smart-phones. Over one-third of American doctors use Epocrates, a program for mobiles and laptops which offers instant information on drug-to-drug interactions, treatment recommendations and so on. The software will soon be able to access electronic health records (EHRs) via mobiles—which the author of the CHCF’s report thinks could be “the killer application” of wireless health.

So it seems the DC doctor was not googling, but using a specialized database optimized for mobiles. But what my little emulation showed was that Google is not too bad either.

In Milan, Judge Oscar Magi sentenced the Google executives in absentia to six-month suspended sentences for violation of privacy. Prosecutors said Google did not act fast enough to remove from the site a widely viewed video posted in 2006 showing a group of teenage boys harassing an autistic boy.

But Judge Magi, who has 90 days to issue his reasoning, cleared the Google executives of defamation charges. The three were Peter Fleischer, chief privacy counsel; David Drummond, senior vice president and chief legal officer; and George Reyes, a former chief financial officer. A fourth defendant, Arvind Desikan, charged only with defamation, was acquitted.

Internet activists and the American ambassador to Italy cried foul about the ruling, which some likened to punishing the mailman for delivering a nasty letter.

A spokesman for Google, Bill Echikson, called the ruling “astonishing” and said the company would appeal. In its blog, Google added that the ruling “attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built.”

We do not moderate comments on this blog, because we do not have the time, except for obvious spam that jumps the filters. While all sorts of attacks are made through comments, we let all that be, especially attacks on me and LIRNEasia, because we think that the nastiness is better than the sterility of a moderated blog. If more countries follow the Italian lead, we will definitely have to change our ways. Or stop blogging and start watching TV again. But that is what the Berlusconi’s of this world want us to do. So we won’t.

“Google, indeed, appears to be playing a chess game,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. “If they can create an even mildly credible commitment to offer superfast broadband to the home, it could strike fear in the hearts of cable and telcos, stimulating an arms race of investment — just as they did in the auction for spectrum a few years ago.”

In a post on its corporate blog, Google said it planned to build and test a high-speed fiber optic broadband network capable of allowing people to surf the Web at a gigabit a second, or about 100 times the speed of many broadband connections. Thase trial could be offered in several communities and extend to as many as 500,000 people.

In an interview, Richard S. Whitt, Google’s Washington telecommunications and media counsel, said Google was not entering the broadband or Internet service provider business, but rather was using the test to push the industry into offering faster Internet access at lower cost. “This is a business model nudge and an innovation nudge.”

“How am I going to live without Google?” asked Wang Yuanyuan, a 29-year-old businessman, as he left a convenience store in Beijing’s business district.

China’s Communist leaders have long tried to balance their desire for a thriving Internet and the economic growth it promotes with their demands for political control. The alarm over Google among Beijing’s younger, better-educated and more Internet savvy citizens — China’s future elite — shows how wobbly that balancing act can be.

By publicly challenging China’s censorship, Google has stirred up the debate over the government’s claim that constraints on free speech are crucial to political stability and the prosperity that has accompanied it. Even if it is unlikely to pose any immediate threat to the Communist Party, Google’s move has clearly discomfited the government, Chinese analysts say.

Full story.

As people increasingly rely on powerful mobile phones instead of PCs to access the Web, their surfing habits are bound to change. What’s more, online advertising could lose its role as the Web’s primary economic engine, putting Google’s leadership role into question.

“The new paradigm is mobile computing and mobility,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. “That has the potential to change the economics of the Internet business and to redistribute profits yet again.”

In recent decades, the power of industry giants like I.B.M. and Microsoft, which once seemed unassailable, waned as computing shifted from big mainframes to PCs, and from PCs to the Internet. Many analysts say it is now Google that is faced with a less certain future in the face of another shift.

Google plans to begin selling its own smartphone early next year, company employees say, a move that could challenge Apple’s leadership in one of the fastest-growing and most important technologies in decades.

Google’s new touch-screen Android phone, which it began giving to many employees to test last week, could also shake up the fundamentals of the cellphone market in the United States, where most phones work only on the networks of the wireless carriers that sold them.

Full story

Google paid for the final design of the stations and is covering the monthly fees for satellite bandwidth. The company has also invested in O3b, a start-up that hopes to deploy a constellation of satellites over Africa by the end of next year.

“Building infrastructure is not necessarily Google’s objective, but if you look at all the areas that Google has gone into, in many cases it has been to fill a gap,” said Joseph Mucheru, who heads Google’s East Africa office. “The market should see the opportunity.”

Just how much opportunity there is remains unclear. Google is uncertain whether such satellite stations can pay for themselves in rural areas, given the cost of equipment and bandwidth. Communities may well benefit from the connection, but they do not all have the means to afford it.

Bandwidth fees for stations like the one in Entasopia could cost as much as $700 a month, though slower ones cost less, said Wayan Vota, a senior director at Inveneo, a nonprofit that works to disseminate Internet technology throughout Africa and the developing world. As these connections are introduced more widely, which is O3b’s goal, the price could fall, Mr. Vota said.

Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea, according to new research.

While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 Boiling a kettle generates about 15g. “Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power,” said Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard University physicist whose research on the environmental impact of computing is due out soon. “A Google search has a definite environmental impact.”

I don’t want to waste too much time on this, but this kind of research makes two classic errors:  first, it does not assess the websearch in relation to whatever it replaces.  So a person doing product comparison on the web has to be compared with a person physically comparing prices in multiple shops, using walking, public transport, a Prius, a Ferrari, etc.   Obviously, the research will have a bigger carbon imprint than the search.

Second, this whole approach is Luddite, in that it does not account for the fact that we as humans need to do new and better things, rather than just do the same old, same old.   So even if the above opportunity cost problem is addressed, the fact that the Google searches may be improving the quality of the user’s life is not addressed.

By doing the research, the researcher is burdening Mother Gaia, by publicizing it the Times is burdening Mother Gaia, and by blogging about it I am really hammering her.  People who are into this line of thinking should consider low-carbon imprint ways of euthanising themselves.  Because, that, we can be sure, will have the lowest carbon imprint.

Abstract:
Knowledge is an important driver of development. As the production and dissemination of knowledge become increasingly mediated by the Internet, the Internet presence and connectivity of researchers are becoming more valid than the conventionally used publication- and citation-based indicators. This
article presents a methodology that includes the use of the Google Scholar search engine to locate knowledgeable individuals in Asia in a policy-relevant field, paying particular attention to locating researchers in developing countries or in nonacademic settings in Asia. Internet presence is not a guarantee
of quality. Increasingly sophisticaticated search engines offer viable means of assessing research quality and enable us to measure the connectivity of researchers on the Internet. Although the focus of the research is information and communication technology infrastructure reform in East, Southeast, and South Asia, the method can be used to assess knowledge capacity and locate knowledgeable individuals in any field.

Supreme Court today (Nov 01, 2008) ordered the suspension of three environmental levies imposed recently, reported Lanka Dissent.

Accordingly, the levies imposed on telecommunication towers, CFC bulbs of more than 40 Watts as well as the levy imposed on vehicles in the Western Province were directed to be suspended.

Should we open a bottle of Champaign? May be not. It was not LIRNEasia that took Environment Ministry to courts. Still we take pride in fighting against these irrational environmental levies which would have served nobody.

Some of our earlier blog posts:

Small Victory for LIRNEasia: Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court issues Interim Order against Tax on Mobile Phones and Telecom Towers (Sept 23, 2008)

Digital cigarettes (Sept 21, 2008)

Sri Lanka: Udaya Gammanpila says Environmental Levy does not burden public (Aug 19, 2008)

Sri Lanka: Road to ‘Dharma Rajya’ does not look ‘toll-free’ (Aug 14, 2008)

Sri Lanka: Taxing poor to clear the e-waste of rich (Aug 03, 2008)

Is mobile phone a polluter? (April 10, 2008)

“Green” tax to be imposed on mobiles? (Oct 30, 2007)

By the way, please note the 2% envy tax on mobile usage is still not off. So the battle is only half won.

If any reader wishes to offer their deepest condolences to Udaya Gammanpila, Chairman, Central Environmental Authority and Champika Ranawaka, Minister of Environment, about their failed attempts to irrationally burden a selected group of consumers to cover the recurring costs of Ministry of Environment, please feel free to use space below for the same. Guaranteed reading by both gentlemen. After all, LIRNEasia still comes within first ten Google hits for their names.

Some 7.3m people accessed the net via their mobile phones, during the second and third quarters of 2008.

This is an increase of 25% compared to a growth of just 3% for the PC-based net audience – now more than 35m.

It also found that the mobile net audience was younger and searched for different things.

While Google remains the most popular site for those logging on via the desktop, on mobile internet BBC News is the most visited site, with nearly a quarter of mobile internet consumers using it.

Other popular sites include BBC Weather and Sky Sports.

“This highlights the advantage of mobile when it comes to immediacy: people often need fast, instant access to weather or sports news and mobile can obviously satisfy this,” said Kent Ferguson, a senior analyst with Nielsen Online.

Read the full story in BBC here.

Big Brother might not have liked Dr. A.T Ariyaratne. When visited Google headquarters, Sri Lanka’s Savrodaya leader was shown a central system that tracked every Google search and displayed the aggregate outcome in a huge globe. Dr. Ariyaratne’s first reaction was shock. He thought about the immense possibilities the omnipotent technology offers to Big Brother. Isn’t somebody tracking all our information needs too scary? Will that be post-modern form of information slavery? He is still waiting for answers.

Yesterday’s workshop – ‘Know your Broadband’ - LIRNEasia jointly organized with Sarvodaya’s ICT for Development arm Fusion too promoted a monitoring system, but the similarities ended there. Instead of Big-Brotherly approach our AT-Tester (developed jointly with a team from IIT Madras) depends on Public Source Computing (an arm of Distributed Computing or Grid Comuting). There is no central control. Each volunteer does his/her monitoring and feed the individual data to a central web site – open to public.

What does that mean? Visualise the map of Sri Lanka. Pick a district of your choice. Click to see the broadband quality parameters of different packages at different times of the day. We are hardly there yet, but that is our aim. The outstation telecenter operators who participated yesterday’s workshop were only a tiny section of the growing regional broadband users. They will ensure the system up and data accurate.

More information to follow, but if you are curios here is the link: www.broadbandasia.info

The policy working group on Technology, Innovation and Government Reform will “develop proposals and plans from the Obama Campaign for action during the Obama-Biden Administration,” according to the president-elect’s transition web site www.change.gov.

The authors of what could be sweeping changes in broadband rules, privacy and government transparency include:

–Blair Levin, a telecom investment analyst at Stifel Nicolaus and former chief of staff to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hundt. Levin is also seen among a short list of candidates to head the FCC in the new administration.

–Julius Genachowski, former chief counsel to Hundt at the FCC and a member of Obama’s transition team. Genachowski, a former law school classmate of Obama’s and an active and early member of the campaign, has been talked about as a candidate for the nation’s first chief technology officer or FCC chairman. He is venture capitalist, the co-founder of Rock Creek Vetnrues and LaunchBox Digital. Genachowski also served as a senior executive at IAC/InterActiveCorp, where he was head of business operations.

–Sonal Shah heads Google’s philanthronpic arm, Google.org’s global development efforts. Shah has a lengthy resume on international development issues: prior to joining Google she was a vice president at Goldman, Sachs and Co., developing the firm’s environmental policy. She is also the co-founder of Indicorps, a U.S.-based non-profit organization offering one-year fellowships to Indian-Americans to work on development projects in India. Sonal worked at the Department of Treasury from 1995-2002 on various economic issues. She is on the Obama-Biden Transition Project Advisory Board.

The announcement comes amid speculation about who will take the job of national CTO and the FCC. High-tech and telecommunications leaders around the nation are also eager to learn what the job of CTO entails.

Read the full story in Washington Post here.