

Google is taking some heat this morning from a Wall Street Journal piece that argues the company is abandoning its support of network neutrality in an attempt to make sites like YouTube faster than the competition.

The WSJ claims Google has approached major internet service providers "with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content."

That would seem to fly in the face of the company's long-standing support for network neutrality, but Google has called the WSJ's article "confused," and says that it remains committed to network neutrality.

The contention comes from the varying definitions of network neutrality. The simplest version of network neutrality says all internet traffic should delivered at the same speed over the same network. Unfortunately for supporters of the everything-is-absolutely-equal version of network neutrality, the concept has always been an ideal, more of a myth than reality.

The problem lies with what are known as content delivery networks

(CDNs) that use so-called edge servers, located physically closer to you, to cache and deliver content faster. When you request the content from, in this case YouTube, it can be transmitted from the proposed edge servers rather than from Google's central servers.

That means faster downloads for YouTube, but it also means a significantly less strain on bandwidth for the rest of the web. For example, imagine you download a YouTube movie, the next time someone on the same network wants to access the same file, the network can simply pass through the cached (and therefore faster) version. Edge servers reduce the need for ISPs to handle traffic outside their networks, which is one of the primary bottlenecks for internet speed.

Services like Akamai, Limelight and other CDNs are a common, if expensive, way for larger sites (with the money) to ensure that their data is transmitted faster (for instance, this page you're reading right now is cached and served by Akamai).

The WSJ article refers to a Google project known as OpenEdge, which (as Google explains on its Public Policy blog)

is a plan to put its own edge-cache servers directly inside ISP

networks. The idea of the plan is that downloading a YouTube video or Picasa photo album is faster.

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.

What's more, Google and other net-neutrality supporters have long made a notable exception for edge caching and believe that such practices actually make for faster overall internet.

Consider the web as we know it: the vast majority of it is text, which doesn't require a tremendous amount of bandwidth. But then there are video and streaming services which do require massive amounts of bandwidth. Without edge caching, the video traffic would, as the joke goes, "clog the tubes" and effectively slow down the web.

Defenders of Google's plan argue that the company is doing nothing different that what Akamai does.

But there is a difference. Akamai has no content of its own and therefore it's always in Akamai's best interest to ensure that all its traffic is treated the same. Google, on the other hand, does have its own content and, obviously, it has a vested interest in making that content faster and more accessible than its competitors.

Google caches within an ISP's network could make Picasa twice as fast as Flickr, Orkut faster than Facebook and so on.

Of course, keep in mind that Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo and others also have various deals with ISPs to speed up their content through edge servers. In fact, Amazon recently launched CloudFront, a pay-as-you-go CDN.

Google hasn't said much about its goals for OpenEdge, but it wouldn't be a stretch to imagine the service will eventually lead to some APIs that create a Google competitor to Amazon's CloudFront service.

So is the WSJ right? Well, while it seems logical to argue that edge caching gives those that use it an unfair fast lane on the web, the reality is that, without edge caching, the whole web might be quite a bit slower.

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