This is an attempt to standardize the tracking of users hosted on every site not hosted by Google. I do think its up to the author to decide where they host and

This is an attempt to standardize the tracking of users hosted on every site not hosted by Google. I do think its up to the author to decide where they host and this MUST include the page's dependencies! I don't mean they can't have 3rd party dependencies, but no specific 3rd party should be required, especially if they don't support graceful degradation in the case where the 3rd party is unreachable. And on the CDN, it's run by Google, just read the whois data: Registrant Organization: Google Inc.