Actually, you are. From the testing that myself and some others have done on PC, it is in fact the bots that are (at least in part) causing the lag. When a real player joins, the Bot he replaces goes into Spectate, which means when you have a full server of players, you also have 16 bots in Spectate that the server is running, for a total of 32 players. I'm not saying this is the case for everyone, or the only source of lag, but in the games I've played, when the admin boots the bots from spectate, I have better ping on an EU server than I do on a NA server. I'm located in Quebec Canada.
Can confirm that i think.
Yesterday i joined a server but didnt get that there are more bots then real players on it cause i didnt watched to scorescreen so i played 10 minutes on CC and then it started lagging like [censored].10 meter back,10 meter forth,10 meters to the side,10 meter to the other side.
That was the first time i had such lag in Brink.After that i joined a game with only real players and there was no lag whatsoever.Yeah,i had bad FPS but lag,no.