Much weeping and gnashing of teeth has taken place in the blogosphere today over this WSJ article which pretty unambigiously claims Google is moving away from past support for net neutrality in favor of agreements with ISPs to prioritize its content:
The celebrated openness of the Internet — network providers are not supposed to give preferential treatment to any traffic — is quietly losing powerful defenders.
Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Google has traditionally been one of the loudest advocates of equal network access for all content providers.
At risk is a principle known as network neutrality: Cable and phone companies that operate the data pipelines are supposed to treat all traffic the same — nobody is supposed to jump the line.
This would indeed be bad news, if the 800 lb. internet gorilla were abandoning support for net neutrality. Fortunately, Google says “nuh uhh“:
Google has offered to “colocate” caching servers within broadband providers’ own facilities; this reduces the provider’s bandwidth costs since the same video wouldn’t have to be transmitted multiple times. We’ve always said that broadband providers can engage in activities like colocation and caching, so long as they do so on a non-discriminatory basis.
All of Google’s colocation agreements with ISPs — which we’ve done through projects called OpenEdge and Google Global Cache — are non-exclusive, meaning any other entity could employ similar arrangements. Also, none of them require (or encourage) that Google traffic be treated with higher priority than other traffic. In contrast, if broadband providers were to leverage their unilateral control over consumers’ connections and offer colocation or caching services in an anti-competitive fashion, that would threaten the open Internet and the innovation it enables.
Despite the hyperbolic tone and confused claims in Monday’s Journal story, I want to be perfectly clear about one thing: Google remains strongly committed to the principle of net neutrality, and we will continue to work with policymakers in the years ahead to keep the Internet free and open.
Google is going to foot the bill for putting servers directly on ISPs networks so web surfers’ requests for a video won’t have to go from A to B to C to B back to A, they’ll just have to go from A to B to A. And they are not demanding that any other content providers be prevented from having the same access.
It’s not 100% net neutral, because content providers lacking Google’s mad cash can’t afford to colocate servers in this manner, so Google is getting the benefit of being such a huge company with deep resources. But then again, Google gets a lot of benefits of being such a huge company with deep resources. That’s one of the features of capitalism.
The real nightmare would be if a major content provider were to cut a deal with the ISPs to get exclusive rights to X% of the pipe. That would squeeze all other content into a smaller piece of the pipe and privilege the major provider in a very unfair manner. This doesn’t strike me as being such a deal. And Google remains adamant that they are opposed to such deals being struck.
