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Comment by darkerside | Hacker News Reader

> Unlike most wide-area networks, and especially the public internet, Google controls the entire network and thus can ensure redundancy of hardware and paths, and can also control upgrades and operations in general

I know this is a single system, but I'll still say it. This seems like another step in a scary trend for our internet.

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I am an employee, and have my biases, but I’ll always prefer a customer's data stay on our backbone and not be passed through the public internet. Our customers also prefer it, and it's not something other Cloud providers can fully cover.

That probably came off as more offensive than I intended. I just feel a more decentralized internet is a stronger one. Not assuming any nefarious intent.

Why is it a scary trend that Google has made their part of the internet more resilient?

because we keep giving up more and more control to a single Ad company.

The parent comment author seems to be disturbed by the phrase "controls the entire network." Setting aside his unwarranted paranoia, it does make me wonder which organization has the largest and most reliable corner of the internet. Google certainly qualifies by sheer volume of hardware and network infra.

This is no different from a myriad of other companies that have private networks on private fiber that span large geographical paths. Google's is probably bigger than most (both in terms of geography and throughput), but it's nothing new to have private fiber to ensure latency/throughput/reliability.

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