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Abstract
The article cites Google as an example of "powerful defenders" that are being lost by the open Internet cause, saying that the company has asked broadband network operators for "a fast lane" for Google's content. Richard Whitt, Washington telecom and media counsel for Google, Inc., who is quoted in the article, denied that Google's position on net neutrality has changed. "Google remains strongly committed to the principle of net neutrality, and we will continue to work with policy-makers in the years ahead to keep the Internet free and open," he wrote in a Dec. 14 posting on the company's public policy blog.
Mr. Whitt also objected to a passage in the article that quoted him as questioning President-elect Obama's ongoing commitment to the principle of net neutrality and "as characterizing President-elect Obama's net neutrality policies as 'much less specific than they were before.' For what it's worth," Mr. Whitt said, "I don't recall making such a comment, and it seems especially odd given that President-elect Obama's supportive stance on network neutrality hasn't changed at all."
Asked whether the attribution of percentages of the Ciscoreported traffic categories to Google amounted to holding Google responsible for both ends of information exchanges initiated by consumers - both the consumer's request for information or content and Google's response - Mr. [Scott Cleland] said no. The consumer should be responsible only for the sending of a search term or a request for a YouTube video, but Google should be responsible for the much more bandwidth-intensive delivery of search hits, ads, and actual video clips, he said. "If it wasn't for Google, there wouldn't be this additional traffic on the Internet," he said.
He also criticized Mr. Cleland's "attempt to correlate Google's 'market share and traffic' to use of petabytes of bandwidth [as] misguided. The whole point of a search engine like Google's is to connect a user to some other website as quickly as possible. If Mr. Cleland's definition of 'market share' includes all those other sites, and then attributes them to Google's 'traffic,' that mistake alone would skew the overall numbers by a huge amount."