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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."
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"
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.
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.