Google indicated that it remained committed, as strong as ever, to Net neutrality. In this regard, Richard Whitt, Washington Telecom and Media Counsel, said that “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.”

“Broadband providers should have the flexibility to employ network upgrades, such as edge caching. However, they shouldn't be able to leverage their unilateral control over consumers' broadband connections to hamper user choice, competition, and innovation.”

According to Whitt, Google remains a supporter of a variety of methods to enhance Web performance, including edge caching, a process that involves temporarily storing data in a manner that streamlines access to information. Whitt indicated that placing frequently stored data on servers as close to end users as possible did not violate the concept of network neutrality.

“Edge caching is a common practice used by ISPs and application and content providers in order to improve the end user experience. These solutions help broadband providers by minimizing the need to send traffic outside of their networks and reducing congestion on the Internet's backbones. In fact, caching represents one type of innovative network practice encouraged by the open Internet,” Whitt stated.

The Mountain View-based search giant pointed out that it had nothing against broadband providers that engaged in collocation and caching. However, Google made it perfectly clear that it expected such activities to be performed on a non-discriminatory basis. In this context, the search giant was willing to collocate caching servers with the broadband providers in order to help them reduce costs.

“All of Google's collocation agreements with ISPs – which we've done through projects called Open Edge and Google Global Cache – are non-exclusive, meaning any other entity could employ similar arrangements. Also, none of them require (or encourage) that Google traffic be treated with higher priority than other traffic. In contrast, if broadband providers were to leverage their unilateral control over consumers' connections and offer collocation or caching services in an anti-competitive fashion, that would threaten the open Internet and the innovation it enables,” Whitt stated.