According to a statement from the company, the 70-plus engineers that Amazon will hire will work on technologies for supporting various hypervisors, management tools and operating systems. This is effectively a major expansion of the development team Amazon has already had in Germany since buying Berlin-based Peritor last year – a purchase that led to the release of the OpsWorks devops toolkit this February.

The engineers, who will be hired over the next year, will also develop machine learning technologies to be used across Amazon’s business.

“Locating the development of key parts of the Amazon Web Services cloud in Germany speaks to the broad set of talent here and the investment we are making in the country,” the managing co-directors of the new Amazon Development Center Germany, Ralf Herbrich and Chris Schlaeger, said in a statement.

Amazon’s big European data center is located in Dublin, Ireland, although it also has a couple of edge locations in Germany (Frankfurt, to be precise) for content delivery purposes. The company also already has teams of AWS sales and business personnel in Germany.

UPDATE: Someone who would know says:

@superglaze they've already been hard at hiring machine learning folks the last 2 months.—
Mikio L. Braun (@mikiobraun) May 03, 2013

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We’re into classic net neutrality territory here. As the company announced a few days ago, Telekom’s customers will be able to stream films from the carrier’s own T-Entertain service without any problem, but streaming a film from a rival would count towards the cap – effectively meaning Telekom’s caps will discriminate in favor of its own products. And all services, activists argue, should be treated equally on the open internet.

Concerned citizens have already set up a Change.org petition that has garnered around 30,000 signatures at the time of writing, but now the German government itself has weighed in. This isn’t just a regulatory thing – the government is Telekom’s biggest shareholder, too.

Der Spiegel claims to have seen a letter from Philip Rösler, the federal economics and technology minister, to Deutsche Telekom chief Rene Obermann, in which Rösler warns that the government and competition regulators will “very carefully follow ongoing developments with regard to a possible differential treatment of [Telekom's] own and rival services under the aspect of net neutrality.”

In a statement, Telekom claimed that “net neutrality is partly confused in the debate with a free internet culture” and that “T-Entertain is not a regular internet service, but a television service for which the customers pay separately.”

“Regular internet services are not subject to discrimination,” Telekom added, while noting that the alternative to introducing the caps would have been to raise the flat-rate tariffs for all customers.

Discriminatory caps

Telekom’s proposed changes work like this: customers on the slowest DSL lines (up to 16Mbps) will get capped at 75GB a month; those on up-to-50Mbps plans will face a 200GB cap; an up-to-100Mbps plan will max out at 300GB; and an up-to-200Mbps plan at 400GB. After that, speeds will be throttled to 384Kbps, although customers could also pay extra for more usage at normal speeds. The carrier claims its customers typically use 15-20GB a month.

On the face of it, these caps do appear reasonable, given the data volumes consumed by the average user, and they are supposedly aimed at stopping people from consuming extremely high data volumes at the standard rate — Telekom says only 3 percent of its customers will be affected. However, as those in the telecoms industry know all too well, data usage is only going one way: up, up, up.

Ultimately, it’s the principle of the thing that seems to be the problem here. Once you establish a precedent that certain services can be freely used while others cannot, you potentially raise the barriers to entry for new players. After all, with Telekom being Germany’s biggest ISP, would you set up a competitor to T-Entertain once the discriminatory caps are in place?

Yes, Germans are already used to data caps on mobile, and indeed Telekom itself has a cellular-centric agreement with Spotify that exempts traffic from that service from counting towards caps for customers on certain tariffs. The principle is already broken there. However, the way out of that for a Telekom mobile user who favors a rival to Spotify, is to offload as much traffic as they can onto their home Wi-Fi connection. If they’re also with Telekom for fixed-line services, as many are, now they’re going to face caps there too.

So, with traffic volumes set to keep on growing on all fronts, it’s not hard to see why many of Telekom’s critics are spoiling for a fight.

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And with every deal it strikes, Google makes it harder to argue that paying publishers for excerpts is unnecessary and even counter-productive — or that there is something to be gained by allowing even large companies to engage in the “fair use” of content for the larger good.

As my colleague David Meyer has reported, Germany’s lower level of government, the Bundestag, passed a bill on Friday known colloquially as the “Google Law.” It doesn’t officially become legislation until it is approved by the second chamber, the Bundesrat, but it has already caused a firestorm of criticism — much of that stoked by Google and its “Defend Your Internet” campaign. The law was promoted by most of Germany’s major media companies, who believe Google News is stealing their content by including excerpts of news stories.

Is it a victory for Google? Not really

In its original form, the bill would have required Google and others who use even a single word of a publisher’s copyrighted content to pay for the privilege. After what appears to have much lobbying and late-night pressure from the search company, the German legislature tweaked the bill so that the use of a single word or a “small snippet” by services such as Google News would not require licensing or payment — which Google says is a victory.

As David notes, however, on closer inspection this doesn’t really look like much of a victory at all: it’s not clear that Google News has been absolved of anything, in fact, since the wording of the bill doesn’t specify what a “small snippet” consists of. The legislation also clearly gives publishers the right to control what a third-party site or service does with their content, and in effect it leaves it up to them to determine what constitutes unfair use.

Germanys Bundestag just said goodbye to modern digital society with a lobby made law from day-before-yesterday's times. #lsr

—
anke domscheit-berg (@anked) March 01, 2013

In a similar way, Google tried to argue that its deal with French publishers — which involved the payment of $82 million to set up a “digital innovation fund,” as well as a commitment by Google to help publishers with their digital advertising — was a victory, when what it really looks like is hush money or an extortion payment. As in Germany, the search giant might protest that it could have been much worse, but to other publishers and media players in Europe it looks a lot like Google is willing to cave in on its core beliefs if you push hard enough.

Has Google lost the will to fight?

Some publishers — even those in the United States — would probably argue that this is a good trend rather than a bad one, and that Google should be paying publishers for their content, even short excerpts (I happen to believe that they are wrong). And Google has obvious corporate reasons for being expedient and cutting deals, even if that involves backing down on its principles, because it needs to do business in these countries.

While Germany's new ancillary copyright is confusing, I am worried more about how much social capital the publishers have lost in this.#lsr

—
Wolfgang Blau (@wblau) March 01, 2013

Despite all that, however, it still feels as though something has been lost, or is in the process of being lost. In the past, Google’s argument in cases like these — or other cases on similar issues, such as the Google Books lawsuits launched by publishers and authors — has always been that a) the principle of “fair use” should allow it to use short excerpts of both books and news articles, and b) that there is an exchange of value involving the users that Google News drives to a publisher’s content that many media companies fail to appreciate.

Of course, the U.S. principle of “fair use” doesn’t exist in the same way in most European countries. And perhaps it’s unfair to expect Google to try and somehow force other jurisdictions to see the value of such a principle. But if Google doesn’t do it, then who will? So much of its success has been based on it that it seems a little churlish to just cut a deal with whoever comes along, regardless of the long-term effects that might have on the open web.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Alexander Santander and Flickr user Pew Center

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The German parliament has passed a controversial law that will force search engines and news aggregators to pay publishers royalties for providing snippets of their articles in results.

The Bundestag passed the Leistungsschutzrecht für Presseverleger (LSR), or “ancillary copyright for press publishers” law, on Friday by 293 votes to 243. Germany’s coalition government was the driver behind the law, and the main opposition, the SPD, now says it will try to defeat the law in the country’s second legislative chamber, the Bundesrat.

The text that got passed in the Bundestag exempts individual words or “small text snippets,” although it does not state how short a text snippet has to be to be royalty-free – if it is shorter than a headline, this will probably mean the wholesale removal of all German news publications from Google’s search results.

Google has been a vocal opponent of the law, for obvious reasons. In France and Belgium the company has settled related disputes with publishers in deals that many have seen as tantamount to a payoff.

Google’s spokesman in Germany, Ralf Bremer, hailed the watering-down of the law but still bemoaned the lack of a proper settlement:

“As a result of today’s vote, ancillary copyright in its most damaging form has been stopped. However, the best outcome for Germany would be no new legislation because it threatens innovation, particularly for startups. It’s also not necessary because publishers and internet companies can innovate together, just as Google has done in many other countries.”

Who won?

Google’s attempt to paint this as a victory — claiming the recently-added exemption clears it — is only partially on-target. You can tell this by the fact that the German publisher’s association is also claiming a semi-victory.

According to that association, the BDVZ, the legislation’s passage will “enable [publishers] to set the conditions under which their content is used by search engines and aggregators for commercial purposes”. Crucially, the BDVZ also points out that “an automatic right of use” is not permitted by the law, leaving it “open to publishers to make the business decision that they agree with search engines and aggregators who wish to use the content for commercial publishing”.

In other words, the publishers now have an even stronger hand in their behind-the-scenes negotiations with Google than their counterparts in France and Belgium did, because they have a rather muddled law they can point to. And I doubt Google will stand its ground for long in such talks — the company has seemed increasingly willing of late to quietly settle issues that it previously yelled about as matters of principle.

So who really won here? The publishers. Google just didn’t lose as hard as it was going to before the text got revised.

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The Bundeskartellamt (Federal Cartel Office) is looking into complaints about the “price parity clause” that Amazon imposes on its third-party merchants. The clause forbids the merchants from selling goods they sell on Amazon cheaper elsewhere online, including on eBay and through their own sites.

“Amazon’s price parity clause, under which sellers are deprived of their freedom to sell a product offered through Amazon cheaper on another internet sales channel, could violate the general ban on cartels,” Bundeskartellamt president Andreas Mundt said in a statement.

“This applies in particular if the restriction of the sellers’ freedom to determine prices also restricts competition between the different internet marketplaces. Such a restraint of competition seems likely as, under normal circumstances, sellers have an interest in offering their products on several internet marketplaces.”

The authorities have identified two particular problems with this setup: first, that it makes it very hard for new marketplaces to challenge Amazon, and second, that Amazon can therefore charge higher seller fees than necessary, hurting the consumer.

To find out more, the Bundeskartellamt is now surveying 2,400 third-party Amazon merchants. If this confirms what it suspects, it will very likely force Amazon to remove the price parity clause from its terms in Germany.

This is hardly the first time that people have complained about Amazon’s price parity clause, which was introduced a few years ago. In the UK, the Office of Fair Trading said in 2011 that it was looking into complaints about the clause as applied to e-books, but it didn’t open a formal investigation. Apple’s EU e-book antitrust inquiry also had to do with a similar clause, which the European Commission forced it to scrap.

We have asked Amazon for comment, and will add it in if and when it arrives.

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Hensel European Security Services’s (HESS) methods were the subject of a documentary last week by the German TV channel ARD, which used secret filming to establish how the firm harassed and intimidated foreign workers and also how some of its military-style employees appeared to have far-right allegiances.

The firm itself has strongly denied such links – it noted in a statement that it itself employs many immigrants — but the documentary quickly attracted the attention of Chancellor Angela Merkel and other leading politicians. HESS’s case has almost certainly not been helped by the fact that the acronym it uses was also the name of Hitler’s deputy.

For those who understand German, the program can be watched here:

The documentary alleged that HESS regularly searched temporary staff members’ accommodation and even frisked them after breakfast, to check that they did not steal rolls. On Friday, Amazon said it was looking into the claims, but early on Monday the U.S. company said it had parted ways with HESS:

“Amazon has secured that the criticized security service is not used any longer, effective immediately. As a responsible employer of approximately 8,000 salaried logistics employees, Amazon has zero-tolerance for discrimination and intimidation and expects the same from every company we work with.”

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Veteran tech blogger Lauren Weinstein describes this risk well in a recent blog post, in which he calls what the government of France is doing “extortion,” and warns of the long-term risk of Google acceding to such demands that it pay for the simple act of linking and excerpting content:

“There is little evidence to suggest that ‘paying off’ a party making unreasonable demands will do much more than quiet them for the moment, and they’ll almost inevitably be back for more. And more. And more. Even worse, caving in such situations signals other parties that you may be susceptible to their making the same (or even more outrageous) demands, and this mindset can easily spread from attacking deep-pocketed firms to decimating much smaller companies, organizations, or even individuals.”

As my colleague Jeff Roberts noted in his post on the Google settlement, the French originally wanted the company to pay as much as $100 million, and wanted almost all of that to go into a fund that publishers could use for their own purposes, rather than into ad buying or other joint ventures. And he also noted that with the latest deal — which comes on the heels of a similar settlement with Belgium — Google is sending a very obvious message to other countries such as Germany that it is prepared to pay.

Google’s tactics set a dangerous precedent

This may make sense for Google, since it is trying to avoid as much litigation as possible, and wants to be on good terms with European countries (where it has already run into multiple roadblocks and barriers around services like Street View and privacy concerns). But I think Weinstein is right when he argues that this is only going to encourage countries like Germany — and plenty of others as well — to assume that if they push Google on the subject of linking, they will get cash.

Google wants these payments to be seen as a helping hand to publishers, which is why the fund is described as “supporting digital publishing initiatives,” and why it puts so much emphasis on the strategic partnership angle. But regardless of the picture it is trying to paint, the settlement is being described by many as a “pay for links” deal, and that perception is dangerous. As Weinstein puts it:

“France’s complaints regarding Google related to activities that are absolutely part and parcel of the fundamental and fully expected nature of the open Internet when dealing with publicly accessible Web sites [and its] success at obtaining financial and other concessions from Google associated with ordinary search and linking activities sends a loud, clear, and potentially disastrous message around the planet, a message that could doom the open Internet and Web that we’ve worked so long and hard to create.”

In other words, this issue is much bigger than just Google. While it may serve Google’s purposes to settle with France and Belgium, and perhaps other countries as well, all that does is encourage other governments and companies to see payment for links as an appropriate strategy. How long until U.S. newspapers and publishers start to argue the same thing? What about other companies? Director Harvey Weinstein (no relation to Lauren) said in a recent interview that the U.S. should have legislation to make this a reality — and Google is helping that kind of thinking gain momentum.

It’s cruelly ironic that the company spent so long arguing (correctly) that excerpts of books were fair use in its long-running legal battle with book publishers and authors — a battle in which at least one court has agreed with the company — and now here it is paying newspaper publishers for what is fundamentally the same practice. It’s a short-sighted appeasement strategy, and we could all be the worse for it.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Alexander Santander and Flickr user Affiliate

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With Fruux‘s new version, teams can jointly manage address books, calendars and to-do lists, with supported platforms including iOS, Mac OS X, Windows, Android, Linux and BlackBerry. The service also includes a team-management web interface and scheduling support – if a meeting is created in iCal, for example, team members will get requests to find out about availability.

Compared with Fruux Pro, which includes unlimited storage, contacts, calendars and tasks, Fruux Team also adds dedicated support.

There is one big gap in Fruux’s support: Microsoft Outlook. Fruux uses the open CardDAV and CalDAV protocols, and Outlook famously uses the proprietary and license-fee-bearing Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) instead.

However, after Google recently said it was dropping EAS support for Gmail on Windows Phone, Microsoft was sent scrambling for a fix, and that solution seems to include the integration of CalDAV and CardDAV support into Windows Phone.

“That’s great for us,” said Fruux CEO Dominik Tobschall, who noted that this probably meant Outlook would get CardDAV and CalDAV support sooner rather than later.

Team support is a major shift for Fruux, taking the service from a mostly personal syncing tool to one explicitly tailored for teams. Clearly aimed at business users, Fruux Team costs €4 ($5.45) per user per month.

The company is making money elsewhere, though. Tobschall told me that the service is being resold in volume by ISP partners and also being integrated as a white-label sync feature into third-party software (an example here might be a CRM application). However, he was loath to name names.

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I know, it’s confusing, but bear with me. Here’s what happened so far: GEMA, which represents recording artists as well as publishers, wants YouTube to pay a fee for each and every video viewed on the site that contains music of one of the artists represented by GEMA (which include every major label artist, as well as most indies). YouTube has rejected that approach, and instead wants to pay a percentage of the ad revenue it makes with those videos.

Negotiations between both parties broke down in 2010, and GEMA asked YouTube to block videos containing music of some 600 artists. YouTube responded by blocking a wide range of videos, telling users that these videos are “unfortunately not available in Germany” because they could contain music for which GEMA hadn’t granted the rights to YouTube.

GEMA officials have long complained that this wasn’t true, suggesting instead that YouTube simply didn’t pay for licenses to these rights. Of course, the licenses that YouTube is offering are based on the rates that YouTube is challenging, so it’s pretty much semantics and fingerpointing.

Except, most users are upset about GEMA, and the group apparently doesn’t want to shoulder all the blame anymore. GEMA’s CEO Harald Heker told local paper Wirtschaftswoche that YouTube’s handling of the blocking is “pure demagogy.”

A YouTube spokesperson sent me the following comment about the lawsuit:

“YouTube believes that rights holders and artists should benefit from their work. We have dozens of collection society deals in place across more than 40 countries because we provide an important source of income for musicians and a platform where new artists can be discovered and promoted. We are open for negotiations to find a solution with GEMA compatible with YouTube’s business model so that we can again provide a source of revenue for musicians and a vibrant platform for music lovers in Germany.”

So there you have it. Each side wants to sound completely reasonable as, all the while, the actual licensing dispute drags out further and further. At this point, it’s pretty unlikely that German YouTube users are going to get access to their music videos any time soon.

Image courtesy of Flickr user  nyghtowl.

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Apparently back in Dec. 2008, a German citizen found himself disconnected from his DSL line because of some error and was stuck without a connection for two months. He sought compensation for his expenses (he spent more time using his mobile phone instead of his wireline VoIP service) as well as €50 ($67) per day he had no connection. He didn’t get that much because the courts felt he was overeaching in seeking compensation from his ISP beyond actual costs for his fax line and VoIP line, but it did send the case back to a lower court telling it to set the fine accordingly.

The court’s rationale was that so much of modern life is conducted via the internet that going without was worthy of some compensation when it was cut off. A Google translation of the court’s press release notes:

The internet replaces, because of the easy availability of information, more and more other media, such as encyclopedias, magazines or television. It also allows the global exchange between its users, for example via e-mail, forums, blogs and social networks. In addition, it is increasingly for the initiation and conclusion of contracts, used for making transactions and to fulfill public service obligations. The majority of people in Germany uses the Internet daily.

The release goes on to say that because of these things it is not easily replaced and essential to modern life. Thus, it sent the case back so the man might get his compensation. In light of AT&T’s massive service failure last week that affected thousands of users, I’m curious how our own court system might view access to the web and what type of compensation — above and beyond a service credit — might be due those affected by multiday outages.

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