In a recent WSJ article, Google's efforts to create effective "fast lanes" for their content are uncovered a bit further than they have been in the past. Despite previous calls for net-neutrality and the company's early mantra of "Don't Be Evil", Google is making strategic decisions that more closely mirror the behavior we'd expect from a highly monopolistic "mega-corp" than the company that slaps a beta logo on everything and gives it all away in the name of selling keywords. On the surface its divergent from their past moves to democratize both content (putting books online for free) and applications (docs, spreadsheets, you-name-it), but perhaps they are just showing some early cards in the next phase of the strategy for world domination. If Google's ultimate mission is accomplished, will they will evolve from being synonymous with the Internet to being the Internet? This particular issue is around net-neutrality, and Google's discussions with broadband providers to prioritize their traffic. I'm not going to spend time arguing for or against net-neutrality here, but what motivated me to write this post is the underlying significance of the leading content and search platform trying to buy an even further advantage with consumers. Google is already the #1 search engine, and more importantly has achieved the brand-mindshare of the public when it comes to finding information online. To many, many web neophytes (and experts alike I suppose), search=google. Here's the reason this needs to be carefully watched; broadband penetration is now over 90% in the US, and the majority of us get our broadband from the top 3-5 cable/telephone providers that Google is talking to. While this may be good for us as consumers (faster page loads, snappier Gmail, etc.) it will also drive us to use more and more of Google's services because they are faster then their competitors. Knowing that one company's webmail and online docs will load faster than the other guy's will drive a lot of web users to those services.