| What Google is doing matters a lot. What Google is doing is extremely anticompetitive. You just have to take off the doctrinaire glasses of the "network neutrality" crowd, who are myopically focused on the pipes, to see why.
Think about this for a second. Google is likely to be able to place an edge cache at the site of any ISP it wants. Probably for free, because Google is big. Google, YouTube, and its related services consume SO much bandwidth and are SO wildly popular that no ISP would say no. But could the ISP afford to allow just ANYONE to get free hosting by putting a cache at their sites? Doubtful. Caches take up space and power and require access for maintenance. And of course, would-be competitors won't be able to buy space on Google's private edge caches. So, in what way is this neutral? Google can get its servers into places where CoolNewInternetGarageStartup.com can't. Google is still getting preferential access to infrastructure -- it's just co-location space instead of pipes. |
