On Dec 16, 2008, at 1:17 PM, Bill Lear wrote:
On Tuesday, December 16, 2008 at 12:38:20 (-0500) Shane Mage writes:
...
But that's not what Google says it's doing. Whitt explained that
Google is simply talking with ISPs about a technique called edge
caching that is commonly practiced by other Web companies, including
Net neutrality proponent Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN).
A cache has a limited size, and correct me if I'm wrong, but if Google
is a very large portion the traffic, it will more frequently displace
other entries in the cache, making Google appear more "responsive".
I think you may be thinking of the cache in your browser. The "edge"
cache is something run by providers like Akamai (and Google has their
own deployments, IIRC) that puts servers with large disks at the
"edge" of ISP networks. Hundreds of these systems are co-located at
ISP POPs which are one or a few network hops away from the end user.
Google and other content providers then replicate their content from
their central servers into these caching servers (this is becoming
true even for somewhat dynamically generated content, but I won't get
into that). With such a setup, a user's browser is redirected to the
cache nearest to him/her rather than to the central server, affording,
in theory, a faster response.
Your second comment about neutrality are quite appropriate. Techniques
ranging from caching, server-side bandwidth aggregation, multi-homing,
etc, help corporations with deep pockets beat out other purveyors of
content w.r.t response time. For the ordinary Joe independent content
producer, "net neutrality" effectively is nothing more than a last and
feeble nod. For the ordinary Joe consumer, I am not sure the argument
proffered by the pro-net-neutrality crowd makes more than a marginal
difference. However, a small gain is a gain nevertheless, and net
neutrality is a good thing to have.
--ravi
--
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