Craig Labovitz, Chief Scientist of Arbor Networks, announced on his company’s blog, “If Google were an ISP, it would be the fastest growing and third largest global carrier. Only two other providers (both of whom carry significant volumes of Google transit) contribute more inter-domain traffic. But unlike most global carriers (i.e. the ‘tier1s’), Google’s backbone does not deliver traffic on behalf of millions of subscribers nor thousands of regional networks and large enterprises. Google’s infrastructure supports, well, only Google.”
These observations are pretty big and Labovitz gave some more interesting information when he wrote, “Based on anonymous data from 110 ISPs around the world, we estimate Google contributes somewhere between 6-10% of all Internet traffic globally as of the of summer of 2009.”
Google does have the ability to change how the industry works and the company could even do this without, well, “breaking a sweat.”