Google wants a private lane on the super highway. According to the Wall Street Journal. Google has been talking to cable and phone companies about getting preferential treatment for traffic to their site.

What’s surprising about this is that Google has been a huge champion for Net Neutrality. Hmmm.

According to Google the rumors of their great shift have been exaggerated. They claim that they are still advocates for Net Neutrality but that they also support “edge caching” ( temporary storage of frequently accessed data on servers that are located close to end users). So it sounds as if they were contacting big ISPs to collocate servers that cache Google pages/services so that the ISP customers could access the services closer to home.

So they’re not really asking for a personal lane – they’re buying up mini-me sites so that they’re never more than a hop, skip and a jump away from the visitor. (Maybe saying they’re never more than a Network Access Point (NAP) away from any potential visitor is more apt.)

I’ve said before that I have mixed views on net neutrality. I’ve also said that I think the ISPs have to take a page from Google’s book and get creative about how they generate revenue. Maybe this is a step in that direction or maybe edge caching is just a different kind of net neutrality. Google points out that their arrangements are not exclusive, which is good and in line with net neutrality. But I wonder if they aren’t exclusive in that you have to have some serious capital to edge cache all over the world (or even the US).

Also according to the WSJ, Google isn’t the only one to have a change of heart, “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.” President-Elect Obama has been a huge proponent of Net Neutrality – but clearly we have to wonder what will happen when his inner circle starts changing their mind on the topic.

Well Lessing didn’t love the article either. He points out that no shift has been seen from the official Obama team. Also he says his views haven’t changed. He does believe that ISPs should be compensated so long that it does not involve exclusive deals.

So is it much ado about nothing or are people starting to really look at net neutrality or are opinions changing? It’s tough to say.