Net Neutrality Not Neutered

Just because we have a new administration that has been more supportive of Net Neutrality does not mean that the battles are over or that we need to stop paying attention.  The Telco shills are still at it, trying to show people that having unfiltered access to the Internet is not a consumer issue, that it is regressive, that it is anti-freedom, that it is a myth.  The latest in a string of paid “analysts” is Scott Cleland, who uses 27 pages to obfuscate so many things that you just have to believe him when he tells you that “Google uses 21 times more bandwidth than it pays for.”

His conclusion is the worst apples to oranges comparison I’ve ever seen:

“The study estimated Google’s payment to fund just the U.S. consumer broadband Internet segment to be approximately $344 million in 2008 or 0.8% of U.S. consumer’s flat-rate monthly Internet access costs of $44.0 billion. Thus Google’s 16.5% share of all 2008 U.S. consumer bandwidth usage, is ~21 times greater than Google’s 0.8% share of U.S. consumer bandwidth costs – or an implicit ~$6.9 billion subsidy of Google by U.S. consumers.”

He uses a lot of research into SEC filings to estimate numbers, but that is all moot.  You just cannot put bandwidth costs and use by hosts in the same bucket with money paid by consumers. Having paid bandwidth bills for almost 15 years, I can attest that a decent percentage of what I have paid for is actually not even consumers accessing our sites.  Check your logs and you will see gigabytes (if not terabytes) of bandwidth that comes from search bots.  In other words, Google pays for their server bandwidth to access the Internet and check out trillions of pages of data, and the owners of those sites in turn pay a part of their bandwidth for Google to do this.  The consumer has not even turned on their computer and a ton of bandwidth has already been used by all the hosts and services out there.

Cleland estimates Google’s percent of bandwidth used by ignoring a ton of other types of bandwidth. He writes that 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.”  Really?  Google copies every page on the Internet?!? Some pages every few seconds?  They must really want to make sure they are up-to-date, copying the entire internet every few seconds.  No wonder they use the entire bandwidth of the United States every few minutes.

A year ago this report came out and blamed 49% to 89% of all traffic on P2P services.  Another report from 18 months ago says that HTTP traffic is approximately 46%, P2P 37%, Newsgroups 9%, non-HTTP video streaming 3%, gaming 2%, and VoIP 1%. It does come close to one of Clelands numbers, estimating YouTube accounting for about 10% of all traffic. Sandvine, a provider of “bandwidth management” services has a very recent study that looks at both upstream and downstream traffic from the subscriber level (ignoring the server to server action) that showed an increase in bandwidth use by P2P networks. I guess the P2P networks are harder targets than big G, as I found it interesting that P2P still dominates upstream networks and accounts for more than 61% of all upstream data well as 22% of downstream.

What is the big hog of downstream  Web traffic? Video (Web Media 15.7% of traffic) of course.  But YouTube is just one of the players.  All the networks either stream content or have deals with Hulu or another provider.

The bottom line is that attacks on Net Neutrality (simply defined as treating all traffic the same, with no regard to source or content) are still going strong and we need to make sure that our elected representatives understand the simplicity of the idea as well as the absurdity of the arguments against it.  Remember, they are not experts on the Internet and have little or no idea about what these terms mean and how this type of thing works.  Go out and make an appointment with your local House member. Talk to them about this and any other issue you think is important, and let them know that you are available to answer questions and be their expert when it comes to questions about the Internet.