Seems surprising to me that any company would make a pseudo-non-announcement like this. What would they have to gain by acknowledging rumors or speculating like this?
Would announcing this not increase the value of Yahoo!, which would in turn increase the cost Verizon would have to pay? Doesn't seem very rational to comment on the rumours unless they have no intention to buy.
Not significantly more than waiting to announce. This is because of SEC rules that require anyone intending to buy more than 5% of a publicly traded company to publicly announce with some time period before actually purchasing shares. These rules were intended to prevent the pervasive private equity pump and dump schemes of the 90's by making it harder to take a company private.
These rules are also pretty heavily blamed for our current problem of outsized CEO compensation because CEOs now rarely have to worry about hostile takeovers.
Here is my prediction if Verizon does buy Yahoo... all mobile traffic to Yahoo and Yahoo owned properties will not count against your monthly data cap. This sets up yet another streaming service(s) that Verizon can make money with ads and/or subscriptions with. Since Verizon also provides DSL and Fios, this also might incentivise Verizon to implement data-caps for those services as well; with the exception of course for Yahoo content.
T-Moble started the trend for free traffic for certain services, but Verizon will copy the idea and bend it for their benefit.
No - they aren't gimping specific competitors or doing anything to filter data over public internet - they are offering a new tier of service - just like you have IPTV as a separate service from public internet.
And why should the government care ? Who is getting hurt here ? Not to mention there are multiple competing entities in mobile space.
We have something similar arround here with 0.facebook.com where you get free access to mobile FB version over 3G even on prepaid cards - it's popular with younger people - why should this be illegal ?
So what ? New businesses are always getting hurt by successful vertical integration because it increases efficiency through methods they can't match - as long as there is no monopoly the government should not care - it's role is to protect consumers from monopoly behaviour - not help sprout new business by preventing optimization.
There are many, many many content providers and only a relative few ISPs. It would be pretty easy for ISP's to coordinate or even just act independently and abuse their oligopoly status and extort money from content providers who don't have the same leverage they do.
There are many, many many content providers and only a relative few ISPs. It would be pretty easy for ISP's to coordinate or even just act independently and abuse their oligopoly status and extort money from content providers who don't have the same leverage they do. And the nature of wired internet access is such that the barrier to entry for a potential new competitors are pretty much prohibitive, so even if customers wanted more options, there is almost no chance that they will become available.
That practice is called zero-rating, and the reason T-Mobile’s Music Freedom and Binge On initiatives have thus far escaped FCC scrutiny is likely twofold: The services included are not owned by T-Mobile, and T-Mobile is receiving no payment from the services to zero-rate their traffic.
If Verizon were to start a large-scale, first-party zero-rating scheme, I have to think there would be at least some calls for FCC action. And given that Wheeler’s FCC actually passed Title II, there is the real potential of an actual regulatory stick being wielded against Verizon.
Comcast is running around Net Neutrality with their new Stream TV service. It uses their cable network to stream to your IP devices and it won't count against your cap like using every other IP streaming service will.
Overall this needs to be stopped, it's highly anti-competitive! If it walks and quacks like a duck it's a duck.
Economics interprets law as damage and routes around it. The only way to preserve "net neutrality" is for most people's actual usage to rely on the long tail of P2P or at least P-2-cottageindustry, opaque to the network provider. Once "the Internet" is effectively just centralized "channels" like Google/Facebook/Netflix/etc, it's only a matter of time until business runs its age-old playbook and coalesces power.
It is already common in other countries. I was in South America last week and saw ads for a wireless service there (Claro) advertising "free WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter and/or [streaming music service, can't recall the name] doesn't count against your data cap."
This is essentially how cable TV packages are priced now, and most people believe that software apps will replace TV channels eventually, so yeah--it's believable that cable companies would try to do this.
If the new Engadget is any indication of Verizon's vision for these content companies, I think we can safely say that Yahoo has not seen the worst of it yet.
Well the press has been covering her disappointing tenure basically throughout 2015. Everything from a slew of VPs/C-levels leaving (including those she hand picked) to increased turmoil between managers and employees to product decisions that didn't result in noticeable ROI.
The wire-management companies are racing to become content companies before their wire-management business becomes totally commoditized by net neutrality, content companies (Google), and municipalities (municipal fiber programs are gaining steam).
Verizon essentially ended their FiOS buildout once Ivan Seidenberg retired, in favor of putting all their investment into wireless. Why? Because they saw the writing on the wall: wires and fiber are infrastructure, and infrastructure always becomes a commodity.
Looks like this is the outcome of the 5 day long bard meeting. They got a "maybe" from Verizon and promised Mayer $110m so that she tries hard to close.
Looks like this is the outcome of the 5 day long bard meeting. They got a "maybe" from Verizon and promised Mayer $110m so that she tries hard to close.
Parent was talking about acquisitions. There is a reason for the "LargeCompanies" HN account name, and the first comments from that account is not difficult to find.
You said that already. I'm wondering why the name or comments from a specific user is so important to you. Certainly many others on HN have discussed acquisitions (a search by comment or story gives tons of results). The fact that you repeatedly single out a specific user seems a bit "stalkish".
Surprisingly enough, I left a comment on the parent thread(above) and then lo and behold scrolled down & found YuHoung talking about me (huh... i don't know him, yet a few weeks ago before I was on a TV show (does he work for their production company?) I saw that he left a comment on my blog post linking to my comments here).
I don't consider this to be a fiasco... it just goes to show how important having the right connections, people and their money behind you(as an inventor I have struggled making those connections, though have & continue to try). You can go and meet a huge tech company, but don't expect much without having a ton of users/downloads and or people with a network & their money driving your success. Though, even at times with the money and connections similar things happen; there are YC alums with similar stories.
More then two years later this meeting was my first of others. I learned a lot from it and later realized our tech didn't work while demoing it because of their corporate firewall. An issue we later ran into with another client, so we were wrong to think it was something on their end and again you won't find any audio sync technology in the Moto X.
Well, I'm just going to keep on doing what I love to do and feel I have a knack for. If there are other technologists or biz guys will solid networks out there who'd like to talk shop and potentially work on some projects together (adventure awaits us) I'd love to hear from you (ryan (at) speakerblast.com or @ryanspahn on Twitter).
Indeed. I think Yahoo is already a liability to the Mozilla brand. DDG should just become the default for search. That move would at least create goodwill for Mozilla.
I assume DDG does not have $300M in the bank to pay Mozilla for year one, but perhaps DDG could scale that big with Firefox traffic? I prefer DDG's privacy, UI, and search results over Google, so Firefox users might conceivably be less likely to dump DDG than they were Yahoo!.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 97.9 ms ] threadThese rules are also pretty heavily blamed for our current problem of outsized CEO compensation because CEOs now rarely have to worry about hostile takeovers.
T-Moble started the trend for free traffic for certain services, but Verizon will copy the idea and bend it for their benefit.
And why should the government care ? Who is getting hurt here ? Not to mention there are multiple competing entities in mobile space.
We have something similar arround here with 0.facebook.com where you get free access to mobile FB version over 3G even on prepaid cards - it's popular with younger people - why should this be illegal ?
Businesses that wish to enter this market.
If Verizon were to start a large-scale, first-party zero-rating scheme, I have to think there would be at least some calls for FCC action. And given that Wheeler’s FCC actually passed Title II, there is the real potential of an actual regulatory stick being wielded against Verizon.
Overall this needs to be stopped, it's highly anti-competitive! If it walks and quacks like a duck it's a duck.
https://www.google.com/search?q=claro+free+facebook+whatsapp
https://i.imgur.com/5RrWm.png
Now apparently it is a roadmap for corporate.
(source: https://www.reddit.com/9yj1f )
And right when the press is dragging her tenure through the mud.
[1] http://money.cnn.com/2015/12/07/technology/marissa-mayer-sev...
Verizon essentially ended their FiOS buildout once Ivan Seidenberg retired, in favor of putting all their investment into wireless. Why? Because they saw the writing on the wall: wires and fiber are infrastructure, and infrastructure always becomes a commodity.
http://ryanspahn.com/my-google-NDA-experience.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=LargeCompanies (the first comments are not hard to find)
I don't consider this to be a fiasco... it just goes to show how important having the right connections, people and their money behind you(as an inventor I have struggled making those connections, though have & continue to try). You can go and meet a huge tech company, but don't expect much without having a ton of users/downloads and or people with a network & their money driving your success. Though, even at times with the money and connections similar things happen; there are YC alums with similar stories.
More then two years later this meeting was my first of others. I learned a lot from it and later realized our tech didn't work while demoing it because of their corporate firewall. An issue we later ran into with another client, so we were wrong to think it was something on their end and again you won't find any audio sync technology in the Moto X.
Well, I'm just going to keep on doing what I love to do and feel I have a knack for. If there are other technologists or biz guys will solid networks out there who'd like to talk shop and potentially work on some projects together (adventure awaits us) I'd love to hear from you (ryan (at) speakerblast.com or @ryanspahn on Twitter).