Google And Facebook Rewire The Internet As FCC Dithers

[Commentary] In their earliest years, Google and Facebook tolerated the same Internet architecture that suffices for all the rest of us. But as Google and Facebook got bigger, they began to develop their own proprietary workarounds -- so they could get unimaginably big volumes of data to individual users as quickly, reliably and cheaply as possible.

Think of Henry Ford, in the 1920s, building his own steel mills and buying up his own iron-ore reserves, so that he could achieve fuller control of everything needed to make his cars. For the Internet’s biggest content companies, the modern-day version of controlling the whole value chain involves creating an Internet backbone of sorts, installing thousands of servers in locations closer to customers, and, in Google’s case, rolling out direct-to-customers Internet service. Right now, Google and Facebook are focused mostly on making the Internet work better for their own services. But it wouldn’t surprise me if, a few years from now, one or both companies aggressively marketed their Internet-infrastructure expertise to others, for a price. Articles have expressed surprise that Google and Facebook are saying almost nothing about net neutrality these days. Is that really so surprising? While everyone else is shouting about last decade’s problems, the big guys are quietly creating the next decade’s solutions.