Is Google really abandoning Net Neutrality? Or just spending its cash to improve performance?
The Wall Street Journal says Google's OpenEdge project is designed to give Google content bandwidth priority over other websites and paints the firm as abandoning Net Neutrality. Cable and phone companies are supposed to treat all traffic the same (check). But broadband providers say that content companies should "share" (i.e. pay for) their network costs.
The not-so-subtle difference here is that Google is not asking for its traffic to be treated the same, but it is going to put caching servers within broadband providers' own facilities, so the most frequently accessed data stays closer to the end user and doesn't have to be resent a gazillion times.
Is Net Neutrality allegedly violated if you are paying money out of your (deep) pockets to put servers into broadband provider's facilities? Not really.
If it does, the decade-old content delivery network (CDN) business should have been shut down about the time Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael K. Powell was climbing on his soapbox on Net Neutrality,
Can the WSJ spell CDN? Here's another tough one: Akamai. No? Limelight Networks?
For more:
- Google buys speed with telcos. Article.
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