Slashdot Mirror
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."
Phone companies are one of the single greatest causes of people talking. More people talking means more oxygen consumption. And the externalities of all that poisonous CO2 exhalation.
Phone companies are literally living off our dimes. And the Amazon and Sting and Al Gore don't even get a cut.
Loaded fine for me. Here is the post. "Response to phone companies' "Google bandwidth" report Thursday, December 4, 2008 at 3:28 PM Posted by Richard Whitt, Washington Telecom and Media Counsel Earlier this week I thought that the announcement of a broadband access "call to action" was an encouraging sign that the phone and cable carriers could set aside their differences with Internet companies and public interest groups over network neutrality, and focus on solving our nation's broadband challenges. Unfortunately, a report issued today suggests that some carriers would still rather point fingers and keep fighting old battles. Scott Cleland over at Precursor Blog is, of course, not exactly a neutral analyst. He is paid by the phone and cable companies -- AT&T, Verizon, Time Warner, and others -- to be a full time Google critic. As a result, most people here in Washington take his commentary with a heavy dose of salt. The report that Mr. Cleland issued today -- alleging that Google is somehow unfairly consuming network bandwidth -- is just the latest in what one blogger called his "payola punditry." Not surprisingly, in his zeal to score points in the net neutrality debate, he made significant methodological and factual errors that undermine his report's conclusions. First and foremost, there's a huge difference between your own home broadband connection, and the Internet as a whole. It's the consumers voluntarily choosing to use our applications who are actually using their own broadband bandwidth -- not Google. To say that Google somehow "uses" consumers' home broadband connections shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Internet actually works. Second, Google already pays billions of dollars for the bandwidth and server capacity necessary to connect our data centers together, and then to carry traffic from those data centers to the Internet backbone. That is the way the Net has always operated: each side pays for their own connection to the Net. Third, Mr. Cleland's cost estimates are overblown. For one, his attempt to correlate Google's "market share and traffic" to use of petabytes of bandwidth is misguided. The whole point of a search engine like Google's is to connect a user to some other website as quickly as possible. If Mr. Cleland's definition of "market share" includes all those other sites, and then attributes them to Google's "traffic," that mistake alone would skew the overall numbers by a huge amount. Mr. Cleland's calculations about YouTube's impact are similarly flawed. Here he confuses "market share" with "traffic share." YouTube's share of video traffic is decidedly smaller than its market share. And typical YouTube traffic takes up far less bandwidth than downloading or streaming a movie. Finally, the Google search bots that Mr. Cleland claims are driving bandwidth consumption don't even affect consumers' broadband connections at all -- they are searching and indexing only websites. We don't fault Mr. Cleland for trying to do his job. But it's unfortunate that the phone and cable companies funding his work would rather launch poorly researched broadsides than help solve consumers' problems. "
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"
In all likelihood, most of the sites being spidered want to be indexed by Google. If they don't, they can say so in their robots.txt file.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
It is ironic that Google, the largest user of Internet capacity pays the least relatively to fund the Internet's cost
Economy of scale is not ironic. It is a appropriate, and makes sense to anyone who understands basic economics.
The "they" that are complaining about google not paying their "fare share" aren't the same "they" that sell google their bandwidth. The "they" that are complaining actually want google to pay for the pipe to the backbone and again for the pipe down to the actual consumer of the content; the problem is I all ready pay for the pipe from the backbone to my computer. I don't mind a company making a fair profit in a competitive market but what they want is to double-dip after already getting billions in tax incentives and favorable legislation and regulations.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
That's exactly right. The customers paid for a shared connection. Google (Youtube) paid for a commercial connection. The ISPs are already being paid twice for transporting the same bits.
Since the customer's connection is shared, there is no service guarantee. If contention is too high, bits get dropped. If too many bits get dropped, and the customer has a choice, they can go to another ISP.
To summarize, ISPs are currently double-dipping, and they don't like competition. To solve this "problem", they propose triple-billing for transport so they don't have to re-invest as much in infrastructure. The "net neutrality" spin is just an obfuscation of what would otherwise be an obvious abuse of their position.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
Crawl-delay directive
Several major crawlers support a Crawl-delay parameter, set to the number of seconds to wait between successive requests to the same server: [1] [2]
User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 10
The report makes a wild-ass-guess that Google pays $344M for its bandwidth, and that since (allegedly) 16.5% of a user's broadband bandwidth is for Google content, and consumers pay $44 billion for broadband in the US, Google is cheating "taxpayers" (WTF?) out of $6.9 billion.
Of course, the numbers are dubious to start with, comparing mixed fruit to oranges, and suggesting that a major Internet content provider (and consumer) should have to pay the same rates as residential broadband customers is flat out laughable (though perhaps a nice goal). If anything, all this report shows is that consumers are paying 21x more than Google is, suggesting those same ISPs are robbing them blind and (in this guy's case) stupid.
Crawl-delay directive
Several major crawlers support a Crawl-delay parameter, set to the number of seconds to wait between successive requests to the same server: [1] [2]
User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 10
Further, not only do the Google crawlers obey the robots.txt described above (or other standards for robot exclusion), they also use HTTP's if-modified-since to make a conditional request. The file is only returned to the crawler if it has been changed. That saves a lot of time and bandwidth.
PC World will also lose out if double-dipping is allowed.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Oh - and here's a big PS: If you feel you're getting too much spider traffic - meaning you're somehow SO wildly popular that you really believe Google is hitting you too often - you can reduce the Google crawl frequency via your Google webmaster account - voila, your (non-existent) problem solved.
And for those that don't use the service, and I do - the Google webmaster features in no way require you to be hosted at Google.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
Please disregard everything I just said and I apologize for my bad attitude.
I don't know how, but I read your first sentence 100% backwards from what you wrote.
I totally fucked up and I'm sorry.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
The telco's and backbone providers would love you to look at it that way.
It's important to note that there is a war on for how the Internet is perceived. The telco's would love to create the legal perception that a "broadcast model" is at work. ie: Google "broadcasts" over the tubes, and pays the tube-owners nothing. The reality -- which they are trying so desperately to avoid -- is that http is a 'request'.
The revenue stream comes from the users who pay for the right to make these requests and receive the response data.
When they say "it is ironic that Google, the largest user of Internet capacity", they're clouding the issue: Google is the "most requested service" on the Internet.
The telcos are attempting to 'share the wealth' by taxing popularity.
It is the users that are the bandwidth hogs. After all, without the users Google doesn't use much bandwidth at all.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
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.
Yep, but you're assuming that the "man in the middle", the ISP, doesn't have any business interest in things other than shuffling bits back and forth and solely getting paid to do that at a decent profit. Some of the ISPs (cable companies and the ILEC telcos themselves providing some of these big fat dedicated pipes to the Googles), also have internal business units that they want to push forth at the expense of the rest of the world they allege to serve. They want users on THEIR networks to use THEIR search engines, THEIR media delivery services, etc., not Google/YouTube, FaceBook, etc. Why? Well, they're not symbiotic partners, they're parasites. They don't want to be merely infrastructure that facilitates the rest of the system. They want to BE the system, and think that they are. The world of "The Matrix" is a colossal wet dream for them.
No problem, and I take back my insult above. I posted it before I read your second reply.
All is good.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
The Telcos are lying to us (a lie of omission): They carefully avoid estimating the reduction in total bandwidth consumed due to the optimization that search engines provide. Search engines serve as a repository of index information used to optimize our access to internet services and products. The net effect is reduced resource utilization.
Earth to telcos: Google is an example of a service that increases the value of the internet, which drives our willingness to pay for it. I have been an internet user since modem dialup days. My use of the service has increased during the last 18 years because it provides value. Google improves that value. It's a big win for the telcos and service providers, and they are trying to prevent us from recognizing that fact.
Free bandwidth indeed! Google pays for every bit of their bandwidth just like everyone else, probably with a bulk discount just like every other customer of a service with a predictable and large utilization.
Prioritization based on "price paid" is moronic, and not seriously suggested, IMO. OTOH, prioritization is a perfectly legitimate tool for congestion management, which is at the core of the problem here. ISPs have historically oversubscribed based on the prevailing assumptions about customer utilization. Those assumptions no longer hold true, because sites like YouTube and applications like BitTorrent. ISPs can do one or both of increase infrastructure to match these new assumptions (at enormous cost), and/or implement some form of QoS to drop or delay one application's packet instead of another's, when congestion occurs (where a packet has to be dropped or delayed either way). You can still have a "fair price" being paid in either direction, and have a need for QoS (prioritization) to effectively manage congestion. This runs afoul of some definitions of "net neutrality", unfortunately, and is impractical to do anyway on an untrusted network (like the public Internet).
So ISPs are actually stuck between a rock and a hard place. You have to oversubscribe to be cost-effective (this is why business-grade 1Mbit data connections cost 10x more than consumer-grade; the former is not oversubscribed while the latter is). But since that ratio has to go down to match today's expectations (through no "fault" of the ISPs), ISPs have discovered that they have to invest in significant new infrastructure, and they're looking for creative ways to pay for that. Unfortunately, most telco ISPs aren't exactly creative, so this is what we get.
The value provided by Google is far greater than the value provided by spammers. Take out the spam first.
Even though Google may drive traffic that's something that we can live with.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
That man in the middle would still be selling dial-up if it weren't for the Google offerings that consumers want, specifically Youtube. There are others too such as Hulu and Veoh and even the major TV networks' sites that stream episodes on demand, plus all the Shoutcast streaming radio stations.
What this is really about is whether the ISPs still have common carrier status, and how that conflicts with their vertical service integration for services like TV and phone. These ISPs are charging for what is either free or for less money elsewhere.
The solution is very simple. The FCC grants the ability for these anti-net-neutrality ISPs to charge whatever they like for whatever content they choose to carry over their networks, in exchange for the return of every government subsidy and grant given over the last five decades, with interest, in addition to the rescission of their common carrier status. The government can then take that money and give it to companies that will act like common carriers and build net-neutral data infrastructure.
Google pays exactly the amount that Google's ISP was willing to accept. If that's too low, then Google's ISP shouldn't have accepted it!
The ISPs on the other end of the connection -- the ones complaining -- have peering agreements (directly or indirectly) with Google's ISP. If they want more money, they need to negotiate more favorable terms for their peering agreement, causing Google's ISP to raise its rates. All this noise about charging Google again for what it already paid for is greedy, offensive, and ridiculous!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I work for Google, so I'm biased, but here's how I see it.
The Google search engine is supposed to be as useful as possible to users so that they will use it. Google adds some compromises to the usability of search (aka ads) so that the resources behind search are paid for along with a healthy profit.
That's the order of priorities as they have been repeatedly described to me.
Google search provides space where advertisers can pay for space that is simultaneously useful to users (something they're interested in investigating) and to advertisers (a selling opportunity). The first part (useful to users) is what Google is motivated to enforce, because then the ads also support the original statement: "The Google search engine is supposed to be as useful as possible to users so that they will use it."
I can't deny that Google uses usage data to improve the quality of search, but I'll assert that (1) everyone at Google is well aware of it's potential for "big brother" type scenarios and (2) everyone at Google is also aware that even a passing hint of misusing personal data would threaten the user trust on which Google's value is based. Google does better when people can trust Google, and I don't believe that an instance of data misuse would stay secret for more than a day. Far too many Googlers work there because they also trust Google's "don't be evil" policy. If Google was to breach user trust, employee trust would also be lost.
In conclusion: yes, Google system software is paying close attention to how you use Google. But no, it's not keeping a dossier on you. the goal of that software is most explicitly not to keep an eye on you, but to provide feedback so that the next time you use Google, it's even more useful to you.
Exactly how I see it.
I paid my ISP their asking price for my bandwidth.
Google paid their ISP for their bandwidth.
Why the hell would google have to pay my ISP a second time for my bandwidth?
I see it as nothing more than greed.
you're assuming that the "man in the middle", the ISP, doesn't have any business interest in things other than shuffling bits back and forth and solely getting paid to do that at a decent profit.
And that is what they should be. They are a utility -- they have no more business trying to guide you to their search engines than your power company has trying to sell you their own brand of hair dryer.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
No, but the telcos have and some of them turned into ISPs too.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Through no fault of their own?
To the contrary. The big telecoms in the USA (and many other places the situation is similar) have already been paid out of tax money to build new networks with the required capacities. More than once. They take the money, they put it in their pockets instead of rolling out fibre and adding more trunks with it, then they come back to DC next year looking to get paid yet again for the job they still havent done.
Screw em.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.