The step after that is technical obstructionism -- traffic shaping and other techniques to disadvantage the Yahoos and the Googles. That's where those shipping container data centers come in. Parked at the peering point, sitting on the same SONET ring as the local telephone company, Google will have done as much as it possibly can to reduce any network disadvantage. By leveraging its own fiber backbone Google not only further avoids such interference, it has a chance to gain a step or two through better routing or more generous backbone provisioning. What's stored IN the data centers is important, but how they are CONNECTED is equally important.

Already happening!