Google making the internet costlier for others and costing taxpayers about $7 billion a year.

• Google has been charged with using 21 times more bandwidth than what it pays for, thus making the internet costlier for others and costing taxpayers about $7 billion a year.

• Google in defence says that the report has been authored by someone being paid by phone and cable companies like AT&T, Verizon and Time Warner to be "a full time Google critic."

• The study estimated that Google has used 16.5 per cent of all US consumer internet traffic this year and it is estimated to grow to 25 per cent in 2009 and 37 per cent in 2010.

• However, the company's payment to fund the US consumer broadband internet segment is estimated at $344 million for 2008, which is just 0.8 per cent of the US consumer's flat-rate monthly internet accesscosts of $44 billion.

• "Thus, Google's 16.5 per cent share of all 2008 US consumer bandwidth usage is about 21 times greater than Google's 0.8 per cent share of US consumer bandwidth costs -- on an implicit about 6.9 billion dollar subsidy of Google by US consumers," Cleland wrote in the study.