I didn’t get a chance to write about this when it first hit my inbox, but I just can’t resist saying something about the ridiculous “study” that a consulting firm called Precursor did of the bandwidth that Google supposedly uses but doesn’t pay for. The headline on the email I got — which I assume was sent to tens of thousands of others as well — was sensational and gripping, in the same way that supermarket tabloid headlines are often sensational and gripping (“Elvis clone lands on the moon!”). The email trumpeted the fact that “Google uses 21 times the bandwidth that it pays for.” Bound to get a reaction, right? And it certainly did, with the scholarly-sounding Precursor study being cited holus-bolus by a number of websites.

The fact is, however, that the study has about as much basis in fact as the News of the World headline about Elvis’s clone landing on the moon. As far as I can tell, Precursor took some numbers about market share, extrapolated from that to produce a wildly-inflated bandwidth estimate, and then multiplied that figure by some imaginary number from telecom-lobbyist land to come up with its shocker of a headline, and a press release about how the company “used 16.5 per cent of all U.S. consumer Internet traffic in 2008″ (it makes no sense to say that Google “used” traffic, of course, but that’s the level of argument we’re dealing with). Precursor said that Google only pays $355-million for bandwidth, or 0.8 per cent of the total amount Americans pay for Internet access, which is where the 21 comes from.

There are so many errors of logic, fact and simple intelligence in the Precursor release that it boggles the mind. First of all, Google may account for a lot of Internet usage, and what the company pays for bandwidth may be a small fraction of what Americans pay for their flat-rate Internet accounts. So what? The two have very little to do with each other. Is Google supposed to pay more because I use Google image search a lot? As Tech Liberation Front points out, the Internet is paid for by all participants — me with my Internet account, Google with its bandwidth connection, and so on. Asking Google to pay for what I do with my Web connection would be (as Cord Blomquist at TLF says) like asking Best Buy to pay for all the gas I use driving to buy products at its stores. It’s nonsensical.

As Google pointed out in a response on its policy blog, most of the figures in the study make no sense, not to mention that “To say Google somehow ‘uses,’ consumers’ home broadband connections shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Internet actually works.” The company also notes that Precursor founder Scott Cleland is paid by the telecom and cable companies to lobby on their behalf against the concept of “net neutrality,” and Mike Masnick at Techdirt notes that the latest study isn’t the only example of Cleland’s problems with math.

I think — as Julian Sanchez at Ars Technica does — that those industries should get another lobbyist, because Cleland’s study is about as persuasive as a briefing paper prepared by Big Bird and the Cookie Monster.

Hats off to Erick Schoenfeld — ex of Business 2.0, and now the Numero Duo over at TechCrunch — for his post about Apple and the iPhone. At the risk of getting flamed again (or having my server melt down from the Digg-storm), I have to say that I think he has put his finger on one of the main things that bothers me about the whole iPhone/iBrick episode: namely, that by locking down its device and crippling it when anyone messes with it, Apple is acting just like every other phone company and device company. That is likely to come as a disappointment for many Apple fans — or at least those who believed that the phrase “Think different” was more than just a marketing slogan. As Erick puts it:

Apple, of course, is free to try to lock in customers to its partner AT&T and to control what software will work on the phone. That’s just the way the cell phone business works. Right? It’s all about customer lock-in and reducing churn.

More than one commenter on my previous Apple post made the exact same point: Why should we criticize Apple for cutting off that guy’s Internet access because he was uploading code from his iTouch? Why should we give Steve-O a hard time just because Apple wants to control what people do with his phone? After all, that’s what companies do.

The only problem with all of that (as some other commenters on my earlier Apple post pointed out) is that I think people have grown used to the idea of Apple as a different kind of company — the company that makes things easier to use, not harder; the one that actually cares what people want and tries to give it to them. Was that idea just an illusion?

Nick Carr says it’s because Steve sees Apple products as works of art, and doesn’t want people to mess with them, which I think is probably pretty close to the mark. According to the accounts I’ve read of Apple’s birth, he didn’t want to let people fiddle with the first Apple PCs either.

Update:

Peter Ha has some videos that also make the point over at CrunchGear.

It’s all well and good that our dollar officially hit parity with the U.S. greenback today, but it sure would be nice if we could get something approaching real competition in the mobile telecom market in Canada. Then maybe certain carriers who shall remain nameless — but whose names start with a B and rhyme with “hell” — wouldn’t be able to pull stuff like this.

As Tony notes, and Michael Geist also describes here, Bell is promoting a $75-a-month “unlimited” data plan that uses a wireless PC card — but it has some pretty ridiculous restrictions. Not only does it have an umbrella clause that says you can’t use your connection in a way that “consumes excessive network capacity in Bell’s reasonable opinion,” but it also tells you what you can’t do with your connection, and that includes:

“multi-media streaming, voice over Internet protocol or any other application which uses excessive network capacity that is not made available to you by Bell [or is used to] operate an email, web, news, chat or other service.”

So you can’t use it to stream video, do VOIP or even run a chat server. What the hell else are you supposed to do with it? I’m surprised they didn’t throw file-sharing in there too — but that’s probably included in the definition of a “web service.” Tony says that there are also reports that this so-called “unlimited” data plan is capped at 250 megabytes. Classic.

Alec Saunders has been down the limited/unlimited road before, and it isn’t something that is confined to Canadian carriers either, as Mike Masnick notes over at Techdirt. But still — come on.

There are reports floating about the tech-blogosphere that Google is going to buy GrandCentral, the mobile startup that gives you a single phone number that can then be directed to any number you choose — or to email, etc; in other words, a single point of mobile contact (of course, this holy grail isn’t available to Canadians, as far as I know). I must admit that the first word that popped into my head when I read the report at TechCrunch was: Dodgeball.

Remember Dodgeball? A very interesting mobile 2.0-type of application — way ahead of its time, in fact — that used geo-location as the foundation of a mobile social network, a little like Plazes.com is trying to do with the Web. Fantastic idea, I thought. Google bought the company in 2005, and there was a huge amount of excitement about Google getting into the mobile software arena at that time. And what came of it? Bupkis, as New Yorkers like to say (incidentally, bupkis is a Yiddish word meaning “beans,” but the phrase means something so small as to be worthless). Dodgeball is still around, but not much has happened with it as far as integrating it with anything.

Google also bought Android around the same time, including Andy Rubin — who founded Danger, the company behind the Sidekick — and nothing much has happened there either, at least as far as anyone knows (the founders of Dodgeball recently left Google and made no secret of their frustration). Could all of these assets — and others such as Reqwireless, the Canadian mobile software company that Google bought last year — become something real? Who knows.

There are still lots of rumours floating around about the secret Google phone project, which is reportedly a personal interest of Larry Page’s, and involves Andy Rubin and a host of others on a Sidekick-like device. Of course, others say that’s all bollocks, and the Google phone amounts to nothing more than bundling deals with other phone makers to install mobile versions of Gmail, etc.

I know that Forrest Gump said “Stupid is as stupid does,” but there’s really no other word for what Verizon is doing with its much-heralded launch of YouTube video on cellphones. I mean, really. How much stupider could this get? The answer, to paraphrase Nigel Tufnel in Spinal Tap, is none — none stupider. Fred Wilson sums it up in a single word: Lame. In fact, this deal is right off the lame-o-meter. How do I lame-ify thee? Let me count the ways.

Watching video clips on your cellphone would be great, right? Except that Verizon will only let you watch them if you subscribe to a monthly service called VCast. And YouTube is great because of all the cool videos on there, right? Except that Verizon will select some for you to watch, rather than letting you do the selecting. As Rob Pegoraro notes in the Washington Post, this is just reproducing the broken cable model on a cellphone.

Howard Lindzon says that Verizon’s new slogan should be “We uncool your brand,” which is both hilarious and right on the money. If this is a sign of the kind of crap Google is going to do now that it owns YouTube, then that $1.6-billion in stock is going to get obliterated pretty quickly. Michael Parekh says that “incumbent businesses keep adopting the same myopic, warped business strategies that failed the last time around,” and my friend Mark Evans has some thoughts as well.

Update:

On a somewhat related note, I came across a post from David Cohen of Colorado Startups (hat tip to Leigh Himel of Oponia) about a failed startup he was involved in called iContact, which tried to create a social-networking platform for mobile phones. Here’s what he had to say in part:

The mobile industry is full of pitfalls. If you don’t have connections to cellular operators, you’ll literally need to buy them just to get a shot. It’s an old boys club and the whole industry is just trying to keep control of the closed system they’ve put together.

Open APIs are really only open to partners, revenue shares feel like hostage situations, and network aware or location based applications sit in queues waiting for “approval” which is a euphemism for “hell to freeze over.”

Yup. Sounds about right.