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[News] Telecoms Attack the Internet with Paid Shills

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Can we get some better telecom shills please?

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| I will let you decide which applies to the author of a "research study" of 
| Google's bandwidth use being pushed by the anti–net neutrality site 
| NetCompetition.org. Using some rather dubious proxy measures—which would be 
| worth further scrutiny as well, if the fundamental premise weren't so 
| manifestly bogus as to render such quibbling moot—telecom shill Scott Cleland 
| estimates that Google and its subsidiaries "used" 16.5% of consumer broadband 
| traffic in 2008, but only paid 0.8% of consumer broadband costs. This, the 
| author brazenly claims, amounts to an implicit subsidy of some $6.9 billion 
| to Google, and proves that Google "uses" 21 times as much bandwidth as it 
| pays for.         
| 
| This is stupid on so many levels I'm almost too stunned to know where to 
| begin. Why would you ever imagine that the per-byte cost of getting upstream 
| traffic out on a few enormous pipes would be the same as the per-byte cost on 
| the downstream side, where the same traffic is dispersed to a bazillion 
| consumers, each with their own broadband connection? (Nestle pays a lot less 
| per pound than you do for sugar; I await a "research study.") What would 
| possess anyone to posit that there's some inherently "fair" division of the 
| cost of connecting end users to popular (mostly free) services anyway? Google 
| adds value to the product ISPs sell, presumably helping them to attract 
| customers; should Eric Schmidt be demanding compensation for the "implicit 
| subsidy"?           
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http://arstechnica.com/journals/law.ars/2008/12/05/can-we-get-some-better-telecom-shills-please


Recent:

EU looks into telecoms blocking Internet calls

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| European Union regulators are looking into whether mobile phone operators who
| block customers from making inexpensive wireless calls over the Internet are
| breaking competition rules.
|
| The European Commission, the EU antitrust authority, has sent questionnaires
| to phone companies asking what "tools" they use to "control, manage, block,
| slow down or otherwise restrict or filter" Internet-based voice calls.
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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/11/business/mobile.php
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