Net Neutrality Opponent Calls Google a "Bandwidth Hog" 320
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."
Re:Probably true (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Fair Share (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe Google should start charging them (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Probably true (Score:5, Insightful)
If people don't want to be crawled by google they can just get a robots.txt
Bad economics? (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not sure technical arguments are really necessary to demonstrate this as bunk. Google's services add a lot of value to a consumer's bandwidth. I would wager that their contributions exceed their consumption.
The fucking non-sense? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Probably true (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Not True. Economics 101 Fail. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
fairness is crap (Score:4, Insightful)
The consumers use bandwidth, and it is the consumers who should shoulder a significant cost of the bandwidth. Google, et al, need to pay for the redundant lines that connect their facility. It is true that due to different usage patterns, some consumer will pay out of proportion. It is also true that some taxpayers will pay for something they do not use. But such is life.
Let's say that I am in the city. I drive like 20 or 20 miles a day, and the roads I do use are well traveled and largely cheap surface roads. Then why am I paying taxes and high gas taxes to subsidize the suburbanites excessive travel and wear and tear on the roads? Well, for one thing I do not want them in the city. Second, i need them in the city to serve me. I am likely paying out of proportion of my direct use, but not me total use.
It is the same thing with taxes. Suppose I am in the top 25% of the income. I likely am part of the group that pays a huge percentage of the nations taxes, maybe even in excess of the proportion of money that I earn. This is caused by the fact that the bottom third of the wage earners pay almost no taxes. A family earning 30K, after deductions, maybe a token couple thousand. That is, of course, because we all get a deduction basic living expenses, just like business only pays on profit, actual humans pay taxes only on their excess income, and the more money you make, the more actual excess income you have. It is an observable that 50% of the population have almost no excess income, while, when on reaches the 10 20% of the wage earners, excess income becomes the majority.
On one hand this is bad, as it means I pay higher taxes. OTOH, this allows us to keep wages low, as it is possible to pay barely enough to keep a family together. If everyone had to pay, say, 10%, then many family might double their tax bill, which might force them to ask for raises, which they would need to have to survive. This might mean that a couple who had been earning $9 an hour each, might now need to ask for $10, which might be more than a business could afford without increasing costs.And since business do not increase cost proportionately, such an increase could end up costing more overall. Or at least this is the conservative arguments.
So, fairness is not really crap, but fairness is dangerous, as people will inevitable skew the facts to make themselves the victims.
Re:ISPs and HDD manufacturers (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Charge more? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Charge more? (Score:4, Insightful)
The "they" that are complaining about google not paying their "fare share" aren't the same "they" that sell google their bandwidth
So charge Google's providers more for peering. Or just don't connect to them and see how many customers you get if you Google isn't reachable from your part of the Internet.
Translation: (Score:1, Insightful)
Google is making money, we want some of it, so if you help us get some of that money, we might give some of it to you consumers.. maybe.. if we're really nice generous companies.
Re:fairness is crap (Score:4, Insightful)
well, it's that or fund punitive social engineering projects like jails and prisons...
Re:excuse me, dont speak foolish (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't see a way to use robots.txt to limit the number of crawler hits per interval other than just denying it. So you can block it, but that's undesirable if you want people to find it. It's also undesirable to have a robot hit your site every two seconds if ShieldW0lf is saying the truth, but robots.txt only address it in a simplistic allow / disallow.
Aside from saying the obvious "Well, keep robots.txt on from one crawling untill you are ready to get next one", as robots is really quite easy to generate dynamically, any webmaster facing the problem should be able to find out that google has google.com/webmasters/tools where you can log in, tell Google that some site is yours (verified by adding certain file there for a moment) and set them to crawl slower. :)
Aside from that... I would pay a hefty sum to get a domain crawled every 2 seconds. Bandwith would cost but the possibilities would be endless... Having all your newsposts appear immediatelly after written would mean that whenever something important appears in the news and such you can write something quickly and get all the people googling it to visit your site for a few hours...
Re:Fair Share (Score:5, Insightful)
It's extortion, nothing else. Pay us, or the people on our network might have "difficulty" reaching your site. Not much different from the people who threaten to knock out gambling sites just before the superbowl.
Can you imagine other industries trying this crap? Cable and satellite companies extorting the networks, demanding payment from the most popular TV shows, because that's what most TV users are watching, clogging up their tubes?
Net Neutrality opponents want to get away with committing extortion. Always keep that in mind when these arguments brew up.
Re:How much do they pay? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
A Modest Proposal - Block Google (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Fair Share (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Probably true (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Agreed, plus... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Probably true (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Maybe Google should start charging them (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Charge more? (Score:3, Insightful)
The people complaining have peering arrangements in place with those who serve Google and should renegotiate with THOSE providers if they don't like the results.
Re:How much do they pay? (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Re:Google is not the hog (Score:3, Insightful)
Neither Google nor the customers are the hogs -- they each paid for their half of the connection! The ISPs are the hogs, because they want Google to pay TWICE!
Re:Fair Share (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A Modest Proposal - Block Google (Score:3, Insightful)
Too bad they don't offers consumers this (Score:3, Insightful)
Then why don't the ISPs publicize this and offer consumer home connections that are not oversubscribed and charge a higher price for it, while continuing to offer hit or miss oversubscribed connections at the current rates? Those who are happy with sometimes slow traffic can stick with it, and the rest of us can move up to the non-oversubscribed lines. And our additional payments should give them money to invest in more infrastructure.
I actually probably couldn't afford this idea myself right now due to working my way out of debt and getting ready for our first child, but I can certainly see a day when I would be ready to move up a more expensive, unshared connection if one was actually an option.
Re:How much do they pay? (Score:3, Insightful)
So what? How is that Google's problem?
If they want "the force of law" to help them then they should pursue anti-trust complaints against Cogent, not try to legalize extortion against content providers!
Re:ISPs and HDD manufacturers (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd wager the profits are greater than the loss the content producers face, and are of net benefit to the global economy.
The problem is that if everybody pirate, the musician gets no money, starves to death, and stops playing. ... Or just stops playing because it can't be their day job ;)
Re:A Modest Proposal - Block Google (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:A Modest Proposal - Block Google (Score:3, Insightful)
Or, depending on how they spin it, they might also lash out at Google. Don't forget that some people actually believe the drivel AT&T is spouting.
Re:Agreed, plus... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think they're complainting that Youtube (owned by Google) is very popular with their users. Which, when you think about it, is a strange thing to complain about.
Re:Probably true (Score:2, Insightful)
I haven't RTFA but.. (Score:2, Insightful)
I haven't RTFA but...it's very simple.
1) Google has their own backbone. They bought dark fiber, put their equipment on it, and run packets over it. They don't owe jack shit for this. They bought fiber so they wouldn't have to pay some inflated monthly fee to another service provider.
2) Google also pays for transit when their packets exit Google's network.
#2 covers it. Google pays fees, that's all they owe. Some other random ISP isn't owed a damned thing, if they are having problems they can either do #1 (light up some dark fiber to keep more traffic "on-net"), or #2 suck it up and pay for a larger pipe.
Re:Probably true (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Its all about the Ben's.. duh.. (Score:2, Insightful)
And... will John Q Public ever figure out that the logic behind using up all the internet for free is a lie of biblical proportions?
Re:Charge more? (Score:3, Insightful)
If there wasn't government intervention there'd be even less free market in the ISP market than there is now.
The only reason you have a choice of phone companies is because the government forces them to share the infrastructure, without that, only really large companies could afford to offer you phone service at all because they'd either have to build their own infrastructure(which is prohibitively expensive) or hire it out from Bell(they're back if you hadn't noticed) at whatever price they choose to charge, which by very definition cannot lead to any sort of real competition.
As for cable, I've gotten cable from a number of different companies, but I've never lived anywhere which had more than one you could choose from. Cable is pretty much a single provider kind of thing and has close to zero competition.
The only way in which any sort of free market can exist is when there is a minimal barrier to entry into the market. Net Neutrality, government owned infrastructure, and general government regulation, at least in the telecommunication arena if not in other areas, serve to maintain this minimal barrier to entry. Sometimes you need government regulation to have a free market because if you don't the big guys regulate the market themselves and squeeze the little guys out.
If you think that government regulation has hurt the internet then you really have no idea how it all works, or what it'd be like without it.
Re:Probably true (Score:3, Insightful)
which is why it pissed me off when Verizon used to redirect my browser to their crappy branded search-engine rather than just relaying the DNS error--which i have a Firefox plug-in specifically for handling (by adding convenient google cache and way-back-machine links to the DNS error page).
i know a lot of libertarians see the Free Market as a cure-all for all the world's problems, but critical societal infrastructure like public utilities are too important to just leave to private corporations to commercially exploit however they will. besides being a natural monopoly [wikipedia.org] and a service with inelastic demand [wikipedia.org] (both of which make communications networks particularly susceptible to corruption/exploitation), the public has a strongly vested interest in the fair management & proper upkeep of our societal communications infrastructure.
either we effect industry regulations to protect public interest (as opposed to only catering to corporate interests as things currently stand), or local communities need to petition their municipal governments to set up their own public ISP as many cities are already starting to do. then we can start catching up to South Korea and Japan in terms of FttH deployment and address the disparity in broadband speeds/costs. instead of paying $150/month for 50 Mbps [gigaom.com] asymmetric "wideband" service, we should be paying $38/month for 1 Gbps [findarticles.com] fibre connections; that's $3.00 per Mbps versus $0.037 per Mbps symmetric bandwidth.
as things stand, consumers have no influence on how their ISPs are run. that's because individuals have no legal say in corporate policy, and due to broadband networks being natural monopolies, there are no free market forces to pressure ISPs into serving consumer interests. but individuals do have a voice in local government, and thus they would be able to influence how their municipally-managed ISP is run.
this would also bring us a step closer to ubiquitous wireless internet access. once internet access is treated as just another public utility (and a basic part of public infrastructure), the natural next step would be to roll out municipal WiFi/WiMax networks. and when that happens we'll also be able to replace our carrier-crippled cellphones with wireless VoIP handsets that aren't tied to a single (closed) cellular network.
Re:Fair Share (Score:3, Insightful)
What they expect is that their customer are ignorant sheep who will shrug, blame the problem on Google, and proceed to use the search engine AT&T "partners" with instead.
And sorry if I sound pessimistic, but a lifetime of experience leads me to believe that this assessment is true of enough people that in any mass market context it might as well be true. You and I may not fall for this, but if 95% of the public does, the remaining 5% (us) will eventually find that we have no other choice.
Re:Probably true (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
TV companies should pay electric bills (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Probably true (Score:3, Insightful)
The truth? So Comcast, Time-Warner, et al don't block google.com from sending bits to you. That's what is running in the back of their minds: "Google better pay for access to our users, or we will simply block google." Extortion.
But by doing so, they'd also be blocking their own users, and many of them will probably leave for a competing ISP.
If there is one. The last mile monopolies need to die.
Re:Charge more? (Score:2, Insightful)
And if they can't pile up the money, how will they ever build the cash-pile-of-Babel.
And they need that so they can climb up and say "Hey God(s), Religion is kinda popular on the internet. Time to be paying your ISP taxes."
Re:Probably true (Score:3, Insightful)
Put another way: I'm paying as a customer to access the world of the Internet, and as a business for the world of the Internet to access my sites. How in the *world* does Google need to contribute to payment in this anywhere?
They pay the bills for the world of the Internet to access Google.com and for Google.com's crawlers to access the world of the Internet.
If Google is costing a particular web hosting company too much, there are numerous remedies, including: