Net neutrality analyst speaks; bloggers guffaw

Welcome to a special IT Blogwatch EXTRA: as Richi Jennings watches bloggers watch the latest battle in the net neutrality war. Not to mention Fox's Photoshop disaster...

Thomas Claburn reports:

"Google uses 21 times more bandwidth than it pays for," charges Scott Cleland in a report issued under the aegis of Precursor, a telecom research and consulting firm. Cleland also runs NetCompetition.org, a group opposed to Net Neutrality legislation.
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NetCompetition.org "advocates continuing a free market Internet and opposes a 'socialized-Internet.' Net neutrality advocates activist regulation of broadband prices, terms, and conditions."

Scott Cleland "blogs":

Below is the press release for the first-ever research study of U.S. Consumer Internet Usage and Cost which I authored.
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Today Precursor LLC released a first-ever research study of U.S. consumer Internet bandwidth usage and costs with the objective of estimating how much bandwidth Google uses and pays for. The data confirm the study’s core hypotheses, that: Google is by far the largest user of Internet bandwidth, Google’s share of bandwidth usage is rising rapidly, and that Google’s bandwidth use is orders of magnitude greater than its payment for its cost.

The study estimated Google used 16.5% of all U.S. consumer Internet traffic in 2008, and that share is estimated to grow to 25% in 2009 and 37% in 2010. What drives this conspicuous bandwidth consumption is Google’s search bots regularly copy every page on the Internet, some as frequently as every few seconds, and Google’s YouTube streams almost half of all video streamed on the Internet.

Google's Richard Whitt offers a measured response:

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.
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In his zeal to score points in the net neutrality debate, he made significant methodological and factual errors that undermine his report's conclusions ... 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.
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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.

Julian Sanchez giggles:

Can we get some better telecom shills please? ... The telcos may actually have the right side of the policy question, but it'd be a hell of a lot easier to agree with them if they'd stop embarassing themselves like this periodically.
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Imagine that I proposed to you the following argument.  I have (let's pretend) added up all the fuel consumed in the process of getting WidgetCo's widgets from the factory to consumers. There's all the gas burned by the trucks that bring the widgets from the factory to the retail store.  And then there's the gas each consumer burns driving to and from the store for widgets. And having added up the costs of all this carbon, I discover that WidgetCo is paying only a tiny fraction of the total cost of the fuel consumed in the process of getting widgets from the factory to the homes of customers. Now suppose I claim that this is evidence of some form of outrageous unfairness—WidgetCo is somehow forcing you to subsidize their shipping costs! (The widgets, by the way, are free.)

If, in fact, I were to make such an argument, you would rapidly conclude that there are really only two possibilities: (1) I am a moron, or (2) I must think that you are if I expect you to find this persuasive ... This is stupid on so many levels I'm almost too stunned to know where to begin ... dubious proxy measures ... manifestly bogus ... transparently bogus ... dishonest argument.

Karl Bode's well: [You're fired -Ed.]

If you recall, the network neutrality debate truly took off in the States back in 2005, when former SBC (now AT&T) CEO Ed Whitacre told Business Week in an article that Google wanted to use Ed's "pipes", for free. "I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it," insisted Ed at the time. The comment confused a hell of a lot of people, given that both Google and Google's users already pay for bandwidth.
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Google doesn't report how much they pay for bandwidth, so Cleland guesses ... Google doesn't specify anywhere how much bandwidth is consumed by Google's webcrawling activities, so Cleland guesses there as well. The report then forgets that Google owns much of their own fiber, data centers and undersea routes while direct peering with many carriers, which oh -- kind of undermines Cleland's central thesis that Google doesn't contribute to the infrastructure of the Internet. Most importantly the report ignores that consumers are paying for much of this bandwidth on their end too, which brings us back full circle to Ed's argument being dumb in the first place.

All noted, the report does a fantastic job of taking Ed Whitacre's confused, greedy ramblings made three years ago, donning them with a coat of pseudo-science, and representing it ahead of a rekindled debate over network neutrality before DC lawmakers.

Mike Masnick shoots the messenger:

Scott Cleland is a "telecom analyst" who ... [has] become sort of a joke in DC circles ... To give Cleland credit, at least he's not as bad as Mike McCurry, who once claimed that Google doesn't pay a dime for broadband. McCurry, of course, has moved on from spinning for the telcos to spinning for the entertainment industry, so Cleland needed to up his game.
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Even if we ignore all the basic facts and information that Cleland gets wrong, if we grant his premise, his argument still doesn't make any sense. If anything, rather than being an argument in favor of the telcos' position, Clelands report (if true) suggests that telco execs all deserve to be fired. After all, they're the ones who set up the business model and the billing relationship, and if they're undercharging Google by so much, then shouldn't they raise their prices?.

Tim Lee puts it another way:

We know Google is paying its fair share because if it weren’t, the companies that provide it with bandwidth would raise their rates.
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Nobody forces ISPs to interconnect, so we can be confident that each party to the web of interconnection agreements we call the Internet is getting at least as much value out as he puts in.

Jan Dawson makes the best of it:

I’ve heard Scott argue against net neutrality at a couple of industry events and I think he actually makes some really good arguments (although I think there - as here - he sometimes overplays his hand). I have a lot of respect for the work he does and I’m grateful for the analysis he’s done here too.
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The analysis is sound up to a point but it then makes the mistake of conflating two things that are really separate and don’t make much sense being treated the same ... Scott’s doing a solid job of representing his clients - the telcos - but he also repeats a trope that began, I think, with Ed Whitacre ... The telcos have no business asking Google to fund the costs of consumer broadband connections any more than the bus company has any right to ask the store owner to subsidise bus tickets.

And finally...

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Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/adviser/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and spam. A 23 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. You can follow him on Twitter, pretend to be Richi's friend on Facebook, or just use boring old email: blogwatch@richi.co.uk.

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