The Wall Street Journal's Vinesh Kumar and Christopher Rhoads have written an article called "Google Wants Its Own Fast Track on the Web" that implies that Google is attempting to limit the availability of others' content in favor of their own. Don't worry. This isn't the case. The article fundamentally misunderstands and mischaracterizes Google's proposal to implement two common technologies used to more speedily deliver content online as a move to slow the delivery of content from others. As a result of the article's publication, a quick flurry of follow up posts appeared on various sites questioning if Google—a long-time proponent of net neutrality, a principal meant to prevent internet providers from limiting or restricting access to online content—was now working against net neutrality. We're going to take a few minutes to unpack these conversations for you, to help you understand what net neutrality is and why you should care about it.

You turn on your computer and connect to the internet, check your email, and browse your favorite websites, like Obsessable. It sounds like a simple process, but actually your computer contacts your internet service provider who connects you to the internet. Although this sounds like a simple process as well, it's actually quite complex. Sites like Obsessable actually live on a server, or several servers, that sit somewhere out there in the real world, connected to the internet via their own internet connection and using their own service provider. All the information that is downloaded from Google's servers to your browser pass through all the different connections that stand between your physical location and Google's physical location.

Without a policy in place like net neutrality, Yahoo, Google, or any other company could go to your internet service provider and strike a deal so that all requests to search via Microsoft Live search were routed through their search engine. Without a policy like net neutrality in place, your internet service provider could also disable any searches for competing internet service providers in your area. Net neutrality ensures that online content cannot be censored or limited by other online content providers and protects against technologies developed by large corporations interfering with the ability of anyone with access to a computer to publish information online.

The Wall Street Journal article looks at documents that Google had sent to various internet service providers proposing implementation of Google's OpenEdge and Google's Global Cache as an indication that Google was attempting to strike a deal with these service providers that would limit access to other content. This is simply not the case. Google's proposal is about using edge caching and server colocation to improve the delivery speeds of its content without interfering with the delivery of any other content from any other resource. How does it work?

Imagine that Obsessable was hosted on a server that was sitting in Texas and that you lived in New York. In order to access our site, you have to pass through your internet service provider and all the other connections between New York and Texas in order to access tour information. Someone who is in Texas and using the same internet service provider as Obsessable will undoubtedly have our site load slightly faster for them than it will for you, because there are less hoops for the data to jump through. Edge caching is a technology that makes a cached copy of Obsessable's content and keeps that information stored in various servers spread out (colocated).

In an edge cached scenario, each time we publish a post to Obsessable or add a new product page that is saved to our server, a copy of that data is sent out to several colocation servers spread out across the U.S. and cached in those locations. That way rather than having to access the data from our servers all the way in Texas, the next time you try to access our site from New York, you would instead grab a cached copy of our data from the closest colocated server to your location and our site would load as fast or nearly as fast as it would for someone living next door to our servers. Although this would speed up the arrival of our content to your computer, we'd be paying for the service and it wouldn't affect the speed or availability of any other content from any other content provider.

That's all that Google has proposed. They want to pay for cached storage of their content with ISPs so that when someone tries to access something like a YouTube video, that video will load from a local colocation server hosted with the ISP rather than from their main servers elsewhere. According to Google, this doesn't prevent or slow down access to any other services and is in no way an exclusive deal, which means that any other content provider could pay for the same or similar caching of its data.

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