To transfer 1.28 kilobits over a T-Mobile mobile broadband connection would cost 0.0000005 GBP, at the rate of 15 GBP for 5GB per month (their plan of cheapest value), which works out at 0.0000004 GBP per kilobit.

(1 byte = 8 bits)

Telcos being greedy in the face of new technology is nothing new.

Vertically integrated carriers are information age dinosaurs. They don’t scale or price particularly well. Everything is averages with them; no marginal cost or consumption. You are commenting on the final stage of a struggle that began in the early 1980s and got way-laid by failed US regulatory policy beginning in 1996 and culminating with the death of equal access in 2004.

Instead of vilifying Google, you should equate net neutrality with equal access. You should also look at the carrier and internet models and argue for scaled horizontal exchanges in the lower (access and transport), middle (addressing, network management, security and settlements) and upper (application and marketing) layers.

You should also decry the notion of bill and keep and support balanced settlements. Albeit competitively costed and priced. Balanced settlements effectively “clear” supply and demand from the top to the bottom layers and vice versa, as well as unilaterally across different providers. That’s how new services and technology are rapidly introduced and amortized. Just look at how slowly things have evolved in the “internet” world with a bill and keep model. IPv6 is but one example. Furthermore, a lot of negatives (spam, phishing, security issues) are dramatically reduced with balanced settlements.

(As an aside, have you ever considered that the combination of all you can eat unlimited consumption and bill and keep killed the rural wireless broadband market in the US in the 2000s? And that metered pricing and bilateral settlements are the only way to ensure rural broadband?)

This open, horizontal model with balanced settlements will actually support universal and free access, as centralized procurement will be the key driver to infrastructure investment; not edge subscription. The foundations for balanced settlements are already developing organically with Big data and online advertising platforms whereby the central procurer can see the return on the “free” or subsidized communications session married to some commercially supported transaction.

You wouldn’t have believed me in 1984 if I told you that 90% of all long-distance communications would be free or perceived as free/unlimited by 2000; and yet it was. That’s the future we need and the sooner people see what Google is doing to take on the vertically integrated carriers, and not criticize them, the sooner we’ll get there.

FT/Orange is (also) a Transit provider (AS5511) and Google pays them to reach certain ISPs/eyeballs (in this case mostly FT/Orange affiliates), like Google pays other Transit providers to reach still other ISPs/eyeballs. Google has always paid for Transit in those cases where they don’t have a settlement free peering, probably some 30% of all their traffic.

Is Google thereby funding mobile network build-out, and paying a termination fee?, I don’t think so!
I assume Google pays market rates for this traffic, in the order of 1$/Mbps/month for a Transit service.
However, the costs of building a Local Mobile network are in the order of 1000$/Mbps/month.

That is, Google’s contribution to mobile network funding is negligible, and the money exchanged is immaterial to both parties.

The important issue here is to know what Google is actually paying for. Before knowing that, everything we write and comment is pure speculations and jumping to conclusion is not the right thing to do.
Being a native french speaker, I did watch the Interview (http://youtu.be/-_g2zB-TUtk). What Stephane Richard is saying is the following ” The proportion of traffic which is generated by Google on our networks and which is subject to some sort of monetization is about 50%”. He also said that Google was not the only traffic that Orange was monetizing.
This could mean a lot of different things. For example, it could be that Google has Google Caches installed in Orange network and that Orange is charging Google for Colocation and Bandwidth. If this was the case, should Google be “ashamed” of doing so?

The Eric Schmidt analogy to an “highway” is interesting because the reasoning works only if everyone is driving at a similar speed and respects the road regulations. If you start to have lots of Ferraris and Lamborghinis on the fast lane then nobody else can use the fast lane until an additional fast lane is being built. The question being: “who pays for the additional fast lane?” some would argue that the Ferraris owners should fit the bill.
Will wait on your update on this on-going story.