Google Starts Working Against Network Neutrality

Many different articles, starting with the Wall Street Journal have mentioned Google's recent actions against network neutrality.

Of course, typical Google fashion, it sounds nice, but it still breaks network neutrality. Paul Thurrott tells it nicely:

Google notes that its collocation agreements with network providers are not exclusive, so these companies could strike similar deals with other companies. But that doesn't obviate the basic criticism of this plan: It completely bypasses Net Neutrality by ensuring that only the biggest and richest Internet services companies can offer speed advantages to consumers. Such a practice will harm competition and innovation because smaller service providers will be artificially unable to match the performance offered by Google services.

So even though it does help the network providers reduce costs, and traffic, it breaks network neutrality, a golden rule with the Internet. If Google wants to get local servers to speed things up, it should be putting them outside of the ISP's compounds (the edge network thing). Gaming servers are setup like this all the time to defeat latency. Or it can pay ISPs, but not break network neutrality.

Here is how:

Since Google is already trying to do the same thing proposed in Mass Effect, albeit half-heartedly, it should by all means try it. (Mass effect had faster then light travel and communications, but the networks bottlenecked between planets. The way to defeat this was to cache data locally, much like Google is doing right now; however it was done neutrally based on what people accessed.)

Except, it should follow network neutrality by working with other companies (wow a network neutrality group!) to make a cache protocol for commonly used data (all the while keeping privacy standards, and only saving public data like videos, not passwords and bank transactions) to ISPs, and then getting ISPs to adopt this by subsidizing caches inside the ISP's compounds - neutrally of course.

This might take some work, and may also require the traffic sources to prioritize to it, but it should speed things up, like Google wants (especially for Google since it's data is commonly used), but without hurting network neutrality or upsetting consumers, competitors and regulatory experts.

Since Microsoft and Yahoo! have also started to step away from network neutrality as well, this is a big problem. A neutral protocol is the only right way to deal with traffic. As per my blog:

Feature Request: A neutral caching protocol that retains privacy and speeds up and reduces traffic on the ISP end, while retaining network neutrality amongst websites.

Another Thurrott snippet.

My take on this is simple: Google needs to be strongly committed to the letter of Net Neutrality, not the principle. Its current "edge caching" strategy is one that will cut out smaller players entirely, and create a less useful and expansive Internet, and one that is dominated only by the biggest Internet services providers on earth. If Google is successful, the Internet as we know it will disappear and be replaced by the Google Internet. That must not be allowed to happen.

Now replace Google with Yahoo!, Apple, NewsCorp, Microsoft, Amazon, eBay or just about any corporation with a big Internet presence. That is the risk if this is allowed to continue.

A congratulations to the ISPs and telecos that said no to Google's network neutrality breaking caching scheme.