Tue, May 25th 2021 12:08pm — Karl Bode Way back in 2005, former AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre whined incessantly about how Google was getting a "free ride" on his company's "pipes," and that they should be charged an additional toll (you know, just because). As we've discussed countless times in the years since, Whitacre's argument made absolutely no sense, given that Google not only pays plenty for bandwidth, but the company owns billions in international and oceanic fiber runs, data centers, and network infrastructure. Despite making no sense, this idea that Google was some kind of free ride parasite and should be throwing millions in additional money at telecom giants has been a talking point for global telecoms for years.