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Net Neutrality Opponent Calls Google a "Bandwidth Hog"
Adrian Lopez writes "According to PC World, an analyst with ties to the telecom industry — in a baseless attack on the concept of Net Neutrality — has accused Google Inc. of being a bandwidth hog. Quoting: '"Internet connections could be more affordable for everyone, if Google paid its fair share of the Internet's cost," wrote Cleland in the report. "It is ironic that Google, the largest user of Internet capacity pays the least relatively to fund the Internet's cost; it is even more ironic that the company poised to profit more than any other from more broadband deployment, expects the American taxpayer to pick up its skyrocketing bandwidth tab."' Google responded on their public policy blog, citing 'significant methodological and factual errors that undermine his report's conclusions.' Ars Technica highlighted some of Cleland's faulty reasoning as well."
If you're an ISP then you will note that almost all of your customers are hitting google, and google is sending data back to them. It's not the search engine crawler that people are complaining about, it's the traffic in both directions. The traffic that is a fundamental part of google's business.
Of course if both ends just paid a fair price for traffic (which is currently the case), then there does not need to be any complicated scheme of prioritizing packets at each hop based on what you paid to that provider.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Your customers who use google are already paying their fair share. Any bandwidth used by google for it's indexing is purchased from its ISP. The telcos just want to double dip.
Google is a content provider after all, maybe they should start charging AT&T. People pay to connect to the internet for the content, not to say they can connect to the AT&T network.
If people don't want to be crawled by google they can just get a robots.txt
I use google, I use it because I want to or rather because the other search engines aren't that good. Here's the thing : I pay my freaking internet bills! Just for the concept of being able to use any web site I'd like. So the ISPs are already getting my money for google hits. Not only that, but google also pays for its bandwidth to an ISP already. This sounds like lame excuses 2.0 with a demagogic twist. How about you fuck off?
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
So ISPs are losing money because of Google? Fine. They should do what Sprint did and block all access to Google. Let their customers use the "Internet" of the ISPs email and the ISPs news. Let's see how long that lasts.
ISPs need to wake up and realize that people don't want their email, don't want their home pages, don't want their internet "content", and almost universally don't want anything the ISP provides except a pipe to the outside world.