When attempting to download the first chunk of a 0 byte file googleapiclient.http.MediaIoBaseDownload() throws a googleapiclient.errors.HttpError. Modifying the default chunksize does not help.

However, if you remove the header entirely (downloading without chunking) a 0 byte file can be downloaded without receiving a HTTP 416 error.

I'm not sure what anyone thinks of this solutions but currently we're checking for HTTP 200 and 206 response codes before writing the content to file, should we add a condition for 416?