December 19, 2008 by Matt Thomas
Google is currently poised to, in some people’s opinion, abandon its commitment to net neutrality by artificially speeding up the loading times of popular content. This has annoyed a few purists – one of the sacred cows clung to by many old school web users is the fundamental principal that everything that travels through the internet is treated the same by it – whether it be porn or government white papers.
I don’t buy it. Mainly because a similar argument could be made the other way – another historical rule of the internet is that there are no absolutes. Nobody could have predicted, for instance, the rise of Facebook, You tube, the web 2.0 movement in general, or that a company that essentially only sells advertising space, would become one of the richest and probably the most powerful companies in the world.
That very same company intends to pull off their ‘internet fastlane’ trick by implementing a technique they’re calling edge caching. It essentially means storing popular content closer to the people who want to view it regardless of its point of origin. For example, if a US website (with a US server) was to post a video of an Australian celebrity online and a lot of Australians wanted to view it, Google would place a copy on an Australian server so that the video would load quicker.
It’s highly controversial and it’s going to take a lot of international cooperation so don’t expect this to happen overnight though Google seems, for now at least, willing to push this particular agenda. Check back for more information on this, I have a feeling it’s going to run and run.
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