[ NNSquad ] Re: Google response to WSJ 12/15/08"Fast Track on the Web" story

["nick hatch" <nicholas.hatch@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 6:55 PM, travis kalanick <travisk@gmail.com> wrote:

[...]
It's not clear to me whether Net Neutrality is a realistic goal, but Google's hypocrisy does need to be called out.  

I fail to see how this is hypocrisy. Even in a focused forum like this, we all have different definitions of network neutrality, but I've never heard a definition that would exclude content delivery networks from the neutral net. 

You state that Google will see better performance from this type of arrangement, but I don't think that is the case. They're obviously either going for Akamai's lunch (as you allude to later), cost savings, or anticipating future expansion. No user is going to prefer YouTube because latency is 20ms better for them because of Google's free-market arrangements. 

Is there really a difference between Google going to Comcast and saying, "Hey, want a box?" instead of, "Hey, want a cross connect?" In either case, the goal is mutual cost-savings, reliability, customer satisfaction, and improvements in legitimate metrics. (Latency, jitter, etc.) This sounds like a neutral net to me. 

-Nick