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If Google (News - Alert)were an Internet service provider, it would be the fastest growing and third largest global carrier, says Craig Lebovitz, Arbor Networks chief scientist.

“Based on anonymous data from 110 ISPs around the world, we estimate Google contributes somewhere between 6 percent to 10 percent of all Internet bandwidth globally as of the of summer of 2009,” Lebovitz says. 

That data excludes business virtual private network traffic or entertainment video provided by cable, telco or satellite service providers, data moved between servers within data centers, but only inter-domain traffic moved between ISP networks. 

Over the last two years, Google has stopped relying on purchased “transit” services for a majority of its traffic and now moves its bits largely over its own internal networks. 

In 2007, Google primarily bought transit services. Today, more than 60 percent of all Google traffic flows directly over its own networks. 

Over the last year, Google also has deployed large numbers of Google Global Cache servers within consumer networks around the world. Anecdotal discussions with providers, suggests more than half of all large consumer networks in North America and Europe now have a rack or more of GGC servers. 

In case you are not sure what that means, Google now operates its own content delivery network, intended to speed delivery of packets to end users. So should any application provider ever be able to make its own bits arrive faster, and more predictably, to end users? 

Google not only thinks this should be possible, it does so. If you want more proof of how nuanced the network neutrality debate actually is, consider that Google itself is spending lots of its own money to make sure its bits get to their destinations faster, with less latency, to offer a higher end user experience.

If you watch video over a low-bandwidth or lower-bandwidth connection, run your own test. Watch any video clip not on a Google network, and then watch anything on YouTube (News - Alert). You will see the difference.

Gary Kim is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Gary’s articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Michael Dinan