While your concerns are legitimate - content should not control infrastructure; look at cellular carriers for the case study - there are also wins that are worth thinking about.
Not to be Pollyana; Google needs to be watched. So we all keep each other in check. The following disruptive moves benefit Google _and_ your average Joe:
1. Reduce bandwidth costs. Google pays to send data and we pay to receive it. This is just your classic elimination of the middleman, in this case the anti-competitive backbone and last-mile carriers. In theory the first to benefit from this are the startups with large bandwidth bills today.
2. Reduce delays associated with new tech. Google wants new tech like a larger TCP Initial Congestion Window [1], IPv6, SPDY / HTTP 2.0, or Strict Transport Security [2] to happen faster. As long as your average Joe has a fast enough pipe, these are a win-win. The lag in adoption comes from slow-moving risk-averse players, such as incumbent backbone providers.
3. Reduce mobile bandwidth costs. Google is already heavily invested in mobile broadband clients. In especially congested areas like New York, anything to reduce mobile broadband costs benefits Android first: the top tier of customers who don't feel the costs are probably using iOS.
There are more win-win situations but those are my top 3.
Not to be Pollyana; Google needs to be watched. So we all keep each other in check. The following disruptive moves benefit Google _and_ your average Joe:
1. Reduce bandwidth costs. Google pays to send data and we pay to receive it. This is just your classic elimination of the middleman, in this case the anti-competitive backbone and last-mile carriers. In theory the first to benefit from this are the startups with large bandwidth bills today.
2. Reduce delays associated with new tech. Google wants new tech like a larger TCP Initial Congestion Window [1], IPv6, SPDY / HTTP 2.0, or Strict Transport Security [2] to happen faster. As long as your average Joe has a fast enough pipe, these are a win-win. The lag in adoption comes from slow-moving risk-averse players, such as incumbent backbone providers.
3. Reduce mobile bandwidth costs. Google is already heavily invested in mobile broadband clients. In especially congested areas like New York, anything to reduce mobile broadband costs benefits Android first: the top tier of customers who don't feel the costs are probably using iOS.
There are more win-win situations but those are my top 3.
[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-tcpm-initcwnd-00 [2] http://dev.chromium.org/sts