Thursday, December 4, 2008

'Payola Pundit' Picks Fight With Alleged Bandwidth Hog

Consulting firm Precursor, which is run by analyst Scott Cleland and bankrolled by major telecom companies, released a study Thursday alleging that Google "is by far the largest user of Internet bandwidth," the company's share of bandwidth usage is rising rapidly, and it's bandwidth use "is orders of magnitude greater than its payment for its cost."

Cleland, a frequent Google critic, estimated the firm used 16.5 percent of all U.S. consumer Internet traffic in 2008, and that share could grow to 25 percent in 2009 and 37 percent in 2010. The driving force is Google’s search bots that "regularly copy every page on the Internet, some as frequently as every few seconds," and the YouTube video sharing site, which streams almost half of all video on the Internet, the paper alleged. Cleland estimated Google’s payment to fund just the U.S. consumer broadband segment to be approximately $344 million in 2008.

Google's Washington telecom counsel Richard Whitt responded to the attack on the company's policy blog, pointing out that Cleland is paid by AT&T, Verizon and Time Warner and his report is "the latest in what one blogger called his 'payola punditry.'" "In his zeal to score points in the net neutrality debate, he made significant methodological and factual errors that undermine his report's conclusions," Whitt said.

He explained that there is a difference between a home broadband connection and the Internet as a whole and it's the consumers voluntarily choosing to use Google's applications who are actually using their own bandwidth -- not Google. To say that Google "uses" consumers' home broadband connections shows "a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Internet actually works," Whitt said. He added that Google already pays billions of dollars for the bandwidth and server capacity necessary to connect data centers and carry traffic to the Internet backbone.

Read Cleland's paper here [PDF] here and more of Google's reaction here.