| That would be Ed Whitacre. He thought that Google should have to pay him so they could access his users or else they were getting a free ride.
Of course, he was ignoring some basic facts:
1. Google pays for their bandwidth. Their ISP pays for their upstream bandwidth and so on up the pipe until you get to the peering arrangements with the largest ISPs. So Google wasn't getting a free ride at all.
2. Users request files from Google before Google sends it to them. Google wasn't just sending large video files to users at random. The users would first request the files and then Google would send them. If anything, Google was offering a service that increased the value of the Internet and made it possible to sell high speed access to users. So perhaps Whitacre should have been paying Google to allow his users to access Google's website. (Just kidding, of course, but Whitacre's "logic" could easily be flipped around.)
I often used the analogy of a pizza restaurant that has phone service with Verizon. AT&T notices that their customers are calling the pizza place to order pizza. AT&T then accuses the pizza place of profiting off of AT&T's phone lines without paying AT&T, and demanding a cut of the profits. AT&T, in this example, is ignoring that the pizza place pays for their own phone service through Verizon just as Whitacre was ignoring that Google paid for their own bandwidth through their own ISP.
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-Jason Levine
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