FWIW, stories like this are one of the reasons Google maintains a high level of secrecy. While there I asked Urs Hoezle, "Why not brag about it? Isn't that good?" and his response was "It just makes us a target." And he is/was correct, if your enemies don't know the extent of your strength they can't adequately prepare and attack, if your friends don't know the extent of your strength they have no reason to be afraid of you.
That said, this article is based on observing peering traffic -- "It’s impossible to get a total picture of the internet, so Deepfield’s numbers are a best guess based on the traffic flowing through its internet service provider partners." -- and you know they have their own fiber in Kansas City (heck they even bought into some transoceanic cables). You need only look at their quarterly earning reports on their capital investment to get a sense of what we're talking about. And unlike the Government, when Google spends $4B/year on something they get a lot of bang for their bucks.
Would you use a Facebook ISP? How about a Facebook mobile operator? Facebook handset? Remember: Apple partnered with Motorola to make the Rokr device and Facebook partnered with HTC to make the 'First' device (both of which were flops), so it is so far-fetched?
Facebook makes no consumer hardware, but neither did Google until recently.
I never understood Google's desire to keep things like GGC tight to the chest. Another search engine isn't going to win or lose based upon their ability to run caching http proxies in ISP data centers.
True but I always felt that GGC telegraphed Google's move into richer data streams (like video, and potentially telephony) so having the information out there would cause people to understand they were a competitor not a partner. Looking at it from the outside, both the challenges in the Google TV project and the Apple TV project stem, in part, by vigorous roadblocking on the part of the content providers. So you partner with Xfinity for the last might, great, but you have the capability to pump better content over that pipe than they do? Not so great.
The bottom line seems to be the less you know the harder it is to guess what they can and cannot do.
Putting a GGC server at your ISP is one step closer to having you as a direct customer (like in Kansas and other Google Fiber test markets), and cutting out the middle-man entirely (in this case, your current ISP).
That said, this article is based on observing peering traffic -- "It’s impossible to get a total picture of the internet, so Deepfield’s numbers are a best guess based on the traffic flowing through its internet service provider partners." -- and you know they have their own fiber in Kansas City (heck they even bought into some transoceanic cables). You need only look at their quarterly earning reports on their capital investment to get a sense of what we're talking about. And unlike the Government, when Google spends $4B/year on something they get a lot of bang for their bucks.