Get ready for a mea culpa: The Wall Street Journal has been put on notice for a report it has published claiming that Google Inc. is abandoning its long-held net neutrality stance in favor of seeking preferential delivery for its applications from broadband providers by putting Google servers directly in carrier data centers. It’s a report that is distorted and untrue, Google says.
Richard Whitt, a Google telecom lawyer, said in a blog on Monday that the report is confused. He stopped short of calling the report spurious, instead intimating that the WSJ author simply didn’t know his technology.
Whitt explained that what Google would like to do is a process called edge caching, which caches content locally as opposed to further in the cloud, hence making service delivery speedier. He noted that the process is common and that Google is in no way looking for the exclusive right to edge caching.
"Broadband providers — the on-ramps to the Internet ― should not be allowed to prioritize traffic based on the source, ownership or destination of the content," he wrote. "Our commitment to that principle of net neutrality remains as strong as ever."
Others came out to defend Google, including Gigi Sohn, president and co-founder of the Internet advocacy group Public Knowledge. "The practices described in the article, known as 'caching,' are commonplace and have been for many years,” Sohn said, in a statement. “Caching in no way is a part of the net neutrality issue of preventing discrimination by telephone and cable companies.”
