The follow-up article should be about Google. Google saw the bandwidth glut (global fiber deployments were over-provisions and under-utilized) and took advanta

The follow-up article should be about Google. Google saw the bandwidth glut (global fiber deployments were over-provisions and under-utilized) and took advantage of this. While earlier starts were in a "bandwidth is expensive" mentality, Google designed in a "bandwidth is cheap" mentality. It gave them a big advantage both in cost of operations and ability to design large scale systems differently than previous competitors had been able to. There was also a datacenter/colo glut. Google was buying up every datacenter square foot they could find. They could get it at pennies on the dollar just like bandwidth. This lasted until around 2009-ish when both gluts were exhausted. Google turned to running their own fiber and building their own datacenters just in time. TL;DR: Google's insight into the economics of global bandwidth and datacenter gluts became an advantage in the early years.