Another fake Google story: what's next, microwaved kittens?

The latest outrage concerned what we once thought was a reasonably venerable organ - The Wall Street Journal - which has just published an entirely misleading story about Google seeking to tie up a secret deal so that its content might get priority with ISPs.

The story was a long one covering many aspects of the neutrality debate, but its lead angle was clear: Google's 'secret' agenda, it alleged, was to pull off a latter-day Hitler-Stalin pact of breathtaking cheek and hypocrisy. While arguing strenuously for Internet neutrality, Google has been supping with the devil (made flesh as US cable companies) and was putting together a deal with Old Nick to have its content 'fast-laned' in clear contravention of its own, oft-stated, neutrality principles. 

The story, of course, is complete and utter cobblers and there are no secret anti-neutral goings-on.

Instead, Google is involved in an edge caching program with ISPs. This is where it spends large amounts of its own money to cache it's own content near the edge of the Internet where it's made more easily available to users who request it.

Everyone wins.  ISPs don't have to transport so much Google data through their own core networks (the ones some claim are being swamped by 'exafloods' of data). The fact that Google does lots of its own fibre and caching means it has been able to offer better, more responsive Googling and YouTubing services. The fact that you and I can type 'Google', 'neutrality' and 'WSJ' into the thing and get 318,000 references in 0.15 seconds is a testament to how well it actually works.

And in fact there's nothing new here at all - Content Delivery and Caching (the techniques apparently at issue in the WSJ story) are now whiskery old approaches first introduced way back in the 1990s and there is no link with neutrality... none.

The very best authority on this argument is David Isenberg, who wrote a 'seminal' (another word that leaps into an accustomed position - but this time can stay because it's accurate) paper 10 years ago on the rise of the 'Stupid Network'.

Isenberg has been "banging the drum" (his words) on Internet neutrality ever since, to the point where his arm must be aching and tinnitus setting in, but his arguments are so concise and compelling - through repetition and refinement - that they're worth using.

Isenberg in his blog dispatches the WSJ story and elaborates on why it's rubbish and why caching is a perfectly neutral and natural activity.

"Net neutrality only becomes an issue [in these circumstances] when a carrier picks and chooses which cache to supply pipes to," he reasons. Like you and I with our few megabit connections, with its edge caching Google is buying 'access' to the Internet, not 'delivery'. This is the key distinction.