What an amazing press hit for the telcos. They just completely pwned the WSJ. So badly, though, that there's a chance the paper will turn against them once they realize how they've been used.
The way I see this, Google wants to put servers in the edge ISPs, aka the telcos, in an effort to save everyone money including those telcos. Google becomes a paying customer, the ISP in question uses a lot less Internet bandwidth and a lot more internal bandwidth, for which Google will pay. This is probably a power play by the ISPs to try to get the highest price from Google that they can.
I doubt it's a latency play, if you were already colo'd at the right places you're talking about sub millisecond benefits here. This is about money, and lowering the load on the Internet's backbone, which translates to time and money to upgrade it, which leads us back to money.
So I agree, the telcos used the WSJ here. But not to block Google, to command a higher price.
I think that was the first time I saw you write the word "pwned."
Hopefully the WSJ fixes this article (they considers edge caching as a violation to network neutrality, clearly it isn't because it doesn't slow any other sites down).
"... Lawrence Lessig, an Internet law professor at Stanford University and an influential proponent of network neutrality, recently shifted gears by saying at a conference that content providers should be able to pay for faster service ..."
