Scott Cleland apparently thinks we'er all morons. How else to describe his *cough* argument *cough* that Google uses more bandwidth than it pays for?

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.

On a very small scale, I know something about how this works. We used to have a smaller corporate connection to the internet, sharing 10 mbps across all requests for Cincom content. That started to get really tight (and slow) when we started posting more audio and video content.

Now, here's the kicker: did we use more bandwidth? Of course not - we used a constant amount, but there were more requests. In response to that, we upped the size of our pipe (significantly). Now the amount being shared is bigger, and we use more bandwidth today than we did, say, a year ago. But: let's say that tomorrow 1000 people line up and start downloading "Smalltalk Daily" at 8 AM. Will Cincom's consumption of bandwidth be going up?

Of course not - but it will be split across more people, who will each be getting a slower download than if, say, only 10 or 100 showed up. To get back to Cleland's "study", he's claiming that end users asking for content represents more bandwidth being used by Google. Hmmm. Does NBC use more broadcast bandwidth if an extra million people show up to watch Heroes? Either Cleland is a deeply stupid man, or he's convinced that we are deeply stupid, and willing to hit ourselves in the head with hammers so that the telcos can get more money.

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