http://the-anti-google-baloney.blogspot.com/2008/12/different-spin-by-citizenanon.html

It is fine for the networks to charge extra for this placement, but only as long as this does not slow down those who cannot pay.

Think about it. It’s obvious that Google will be able to place an edge cache at the site of any ISP it wants, probably for free. Why? Because YouTube and its related services consume SO much bandwidth that the ISP would be crazy to say no. The ISP would surely save big on its backbone connection. Terabytes per month on YouTube alone. That’s money in the bank right there. And service would be faster, too.

But would an ISP allow just any content provider to put a cache at its sites, for free or even for money? Doubtful. Caches take up space and power and require access for maintenance. The ISP needs to be strongly motivated, by big bandwidth savings, even to consider it. And only big companies like Google have that to offer. If a small Internet startup were to call your local cable company and ask for “co-location space,” the person there would probably say, “That’s not a product we sell to the public.” That is, if the person who answered the phone at the cable company even knew what it was.

And of course, would-be competitors of Google won’t be able to buy space on Google’s private edge caches.

So, in what way is this neutral? Google can get its servers into places where CoolNewInternetGarageStartup.com can’t, and can make its services more responsive than the startup’s. Therefore, Google is indeed getting preferential access to infrastructure. It’s just that the infrastructure happens to be co-location space instead of pipes. And it has a big advantage there, because co-location is much more difficult to obtain than bandwidth. You can get any Internet carrier to sell you a pipe. But co-location space at ISPs, which is more cost-effective than buying pipes, isn’t necessarily even available to you unless you’re Google. So this is really, really anticompetitive. And how could anyone say it was “neutral?”

As its apologists contort themselves in logical knots trying to square Google’s move with all that they hold to be true, Google has in fact done us all a great favor. It has exposed the lie behind net neutrality.

Whether Google ever really believed in net neutrality or just saw it as a useful means to foil competitors is immaterial. And while Google’s spokespeople will no doubt continue to toe the party line, Google itself will continue doing what it has been doing since it achieved search domination–leverage its enormous data center and fiber infrastructure to obtain a disproportionate advantage over would-be competitors. Nothing wrong with this dog-eat-dog capitalist behavior but for quite some time that behavior has been cloaked in the feel-good fabric of net neutrality. Now the cloak as been removed.

The laughable part of this whole episode is that many in Washington (both outgoing and incoming) actually believe that important traffic, especially video, travels over the internet. Does anyone think that Apple would trust the delivery of high-definition movies to “the internet”? Of course not. Most of that traffic, from Apple, Yahoo, Google, and others, is distributed to remote storage or caching points over high-speed fiber connections that come with service quality guarantees. In many cases the only thing traveling over “the internet” is the DNS lookup.

What is wrong with investing in more servers and putting them closer to the users? With Google/YouTube handling such a huge traffic, it is normal that they want to cache as close to the users as possible to make the service better.

Net Neutrality is not about let’s forbid anyone to improve their service over others because they invest more.

Amazingly, a former FCC economist at the conference suggested quite blithely that content owners would soon be in the pipe business (i.e. broadband networks). He was right, of course, but his nonchalant attitude shocked me. This is a serious issue, and one that really needs to be discussed. Especially since many people don’t understand how the system works today and how it’s going to work in the very near future. The Internet was a great democratizing force, but, like with anything else, power is now consolidating. Clearly we have to figure out new anti-trust rules for the Internet age.

Unfortunately donating servers is not part of Google’s plan. Neither it should be.

akamai has started experimenting with this ad-injection technology and the content will come from their media partners. all the details are in the link to akamai story. hope that helps.