A recent study conducted by Precursor LLC, a consulting firm bankrolled by major telecom companies, alleged 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.“

Scott Cleland, the author of the study, is known a frequent Google critic, stated that Google actually used 21 times more bandwidth than the company paid for. Here is the math:

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.

In response, Richard Whitt, Google’s Washington Telecom and Media Counsel, wrote on the company blog that Mr. Cleland “made significant methodological and factual errors that undermine his report’s conclusions.“

The major mistake Scott Cleland made was he did not recognize the difference between users’ home broadband connection, and the Internet as a whole. Richard Whitt stated:

To say that Google somehow “uses” consumers’ home broadband connections shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Internet actually works.

Whitt pointed out that Google is paying billions of dollars for bandwidth to connect its data centers and then to carry traffic from those data centers to the Internet backbone while the consumers, who voluntarily choosing to use Google’s applications, are actually using their own bandwidth (to the Internet backbone). “That is the way the Net has always operated: each side pays for their own connection to the Net,” he said.

Another mistake in Cleland’s report on YouTube’s impact was also identified:

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.

The last but most funny is about the claim of Google’s bots to steal consumers’ broadband connections. As we know, Google’s bots come to websites which are hosted at data centers and that does not affect user’s bandwidth no matter how often they index the sites.

“I took a difficult subject that’s never been written about before…This was a straightforward, transparent attempt to estimate something of significance,” replied Cleland to the criticisms raised by Google.

Right, perhaps Google is a matter somehow, but just imagine the Internet without search, online video, and websites being indexed by the bots what can we do on it?