Shift? What shift?

The Wall Street Journal reports some bad news for supporters of Net Neutrality.

The celebrated openness of the Internet -- network providers are not supposed to give preferential treatment to any traffic -- is quietly losing powerful defenders.

Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Google has traditionally been one of the loudest advocates of equal network access for all content providers.

[...]

The developments could test Mr. Obama's professed commitment to network neutrality. "The Internet is perhaps the most open network in history, and we have to keep it that way," he told Google employees a year ago at the company's Mountain View, Calif., campus. "I will take a back seat to no one in my commitment to network neutrality."

But Lawrence Lessig, an Internet law professor at Stanford University and an influential proponent of network neutrality, recently shifted gears by saying at a conference that content providers should be able to pay for faster service. Mr. Lessig, who has known President-elect Barack Obama since their days teaching law at the University of Chicago, has been mentioned as a candidate to head the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates the telecommunications industry.

Sounds bad, right? Only problem with the story is that Lawrence Lessig says they totally misrepresented his position.

Missing from the article, however, is the evidence that my view is a "shift" or "soften[ing]" of earlier views. That's because there isn't any such evidence. My view is the view I have always had -- whether or not it is the view of others in this debate.

For that matter, Google is saying the same thing.

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.

All of Google's colocation agreements with ISPs -- which we've done through projects called OpenEdge and Google Global Cache -- are non-exclusive, meaning any other entity could employ similar arrangements. Also, none of them require (or encourage) that Google traffic be treated with higher priority than other traffic. In contrast, if broadband providers were to leverage their unilateral control over consumers' connections and offer colocation or caching services in an anti-competitive fashion, that would threaten the open Internet and the innovation it enables.

Despite the hyperbolic tone and confused claims in Monday's Journal story, I want to be perfectly clear about one thing: Google remains strongly committed to the principle of net neutrality, and we will continue to work with policymakers in the years ahead to keep the Internet free and open.

P.S.: The Journal story also quoted me as characterizing President-elect Obama's net neutrality policies as "much less specific than they were before." For what it's worth, I don't recall making such a comment, and it seems especially odd given that President-elect Obama's supportive stance on network neutrality hasn't changed at all.

Wired goes through the story point by point, and comes up with a pretty good explanation of what this is all about.

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 [Content Delivery Network].

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.

Well, at least I feel like I understand the issue better now. Hope it helps for you, too.

UPDATE: Firedoglake has more.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on December 15, 2008 to Technology, science, and math