Has Google turned it back on Net Neutrality?
Google is by far leading the way for all things search and as well as many applications that people have simply began to 
view as a necessity – tools which computer users can simply not do without – well Google has been at the forefront of many of these innovations, and continues to grow accordingly, however has Google become a super giant in its own right?
An article in the Wall Street Journal said that Google” has approached major cable and phone companies” with a plan to “place Google servers directly within the network of the service providers”, in obvious encroachment of the company’s long-standing catchphrase that Net neutrality means everything-must-be-treated-equally.
Google has offered to “co-locate” caching servers within broadband providers’ own facilities; this reduces the providers’ bandwidth costs since the same video wouldn’t have to be transmitted multiple times. Google has always said that broadband providers can engage in activities like co-location and caching, so long as they do on a non-prejudiced basis.
All of Google’s co-location agreements with ISPs, which they’ve done through schemes called OpenEdge and Google Global Cache, are non-exclusive, meaning any other body could employ similar arrangements.
Also, none of them entail (or encourage) that Google traffic be treated with higher priority than other traffic. If the broadband providers were to influence their unilateral control over consumers‘ connections and offer co-location or caching services in an anti-competitive fashion, that would threaten the open Internet and the innovation it enables.
In a post, February 2008, Google said that some major broadband service providers have threatened to act as gatekeepers, playing favourites with particular applications or content providers, indicating that this threat was all too real.
Google includes the obligatory disclaimer that anyone else should be able to enter into deals with broadband providers for co-location or caching as well. But if one of the justifications for Net neutrality was to protect the ability of the next Google or Yahoo or Facebook to become popular without cozying up to AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast, well, that specific justification seems to have dissolved.
This is hardly the end of Net neutrality regulations. This episode should reveal that some of Net neutrality’s most dynamic proponents may not like it when those same vague and open-ended rules apply to them.
I would thus like to quote in conclusion:
“Just as drivers who share the road must also share responsibility for safety; we all now share the same global network, and thus must regard computer security as a necessary social responsibility. To me, anyone unwilling to take simple security precautions is a major, active part of the problem.” — Fred Langa
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