PARIS: Meg Whitman, Michael Dell and Eric Schmidt, chief executives of three of the world’s most powerful Internet companies, have spent some of their June in Europe, and not just because the weather is pleasant and the culture abundant. They were here to do business.
Terry Semel, the chief executive of Yahoo, another dominant presence on the Web, couldn’t make it – he was busy quitting his job under pressure from investors – but that didn’t stop the company from announcing this week that it was bringing its mobile phone service to 13 countries in Asia and Europe.
Like Google’s YouTube subsidiary, which on Tuesday started video-sharing sites in seven new languages, Yahoo has «localized» its mobile offering, called Yahoo Go 2.0, for languages other than English. Yahoo Go will now be available for over-the-air download to your cellphone in Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Spain, Britain, Thailand and Vietnam.
Yahoo Go makes the company’s e-mail, address book, calendar and other Web services available over a mobile phone network, expanding Yahoo beyond the world’s one billion personal computers to the two billion-plus cellphones.
All of this points to the importance of geography in the digital age. Where once the Internet was seen as a boundary-free communications channel, uniting humankind in a utopia of information and entertainment, reality has taken hold.
As Schmidt, chief executive of Google, said at a news briefing in Paris this week, «Anyone who thinks the Internet is borderless hasn’t been paying attention to people going to jail,» a reference to various legal prosecutions, by both governments and businesses, to enforce national jurisdictions over issues like copyrights, counterfeiting and political dissent.
«We have to pay attention to local laws, we have to work with the governments, we have to understand cultural sensitivities,» Schmidt said. «We don’t have a choice, nor should we.»
There are good business reasons. For Google, only about 20 percent to 30 percent of its traffic comes from the United States. While less than half of its revenue is from international sources now, Schmidt said he expected the 50 percent threshold to be breached this year.
Whitman, the eBay chief executive who spent Wednesday in Strasbourg meeting with European Union commissioners, said her online auction business was already available in places that account for 98 percent of the world’s e-commerce, and by its nature was already local for each country, with buyers and sellers locating one another.
Similarly, eBay’s Internet voice service, Skype, originated in Luxembourg and is better known in Europe than in the United States, and so doesn’t need to fight for European attention.
But PayPal, the online payment system that eBay owns, has a higher hurdle abroad. While 40 percent of PayPal transactions globally have branched out beyond eBay transactions, that figure is closer to 80 percent in Europe, Whitman said. «We’re sensitive to how we come across» as an American Internet company, she said.
Geraldine Wilson, Yahoo’s vice president for broadband and mobile services in Europe, said the company’s mobile entry abroad had a lot to do with the spread of flat-fee subscriptions that cellphone carriers are offering for Internet access by phone. The fees themselves are also declining; Vodafone UK this week cut its data-plan rate for mobile devices. And high-speed phone networks are increasingly widespread in Europe and Asia.
The localized beta versions of Yahoo Go will be available for more than 200 different mobile phones by the end of July, and that will expand to more than 400 by end of year. It will also be shipped on new phones from Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, LG and HTC later this year.
The march of American Internet giants into turf that is often now dominated by local or regional players is no different from the U.S. invasion of retail chains and movies abroad. DailyMotion, the French video-sharing site, and existing mobile services are on notice.
Fuente: International Herald Tribune
