Terrifying, like the stories parents tell their children

The biggest network provider is probably China Telecom (or some accountancy-friendly variant, thereof). Arbor's "commercial reasons" for not divulging that fact probably relate to the huge contract, Arbor has, for maintaining network monitoring and filtering hardware within the China Firewall.

As for the "commercial reasons" for Arbor bigging-up the threat from Google? Google don't buy any of that kind of kit from Arbor, probably, and Arbor probably suspects Google of building that sort of hardware for itself. If that's true - and the Google network stays dark and keeps growing - Arbor will lose its place as 'snoop-supreme' of the Internet.

Everyone with a story to tell, has a reason for telling their story. The reason Arbor want to tell this story, is to encourage a big government-sized axe, to be taken to the Goggle network. Arbor have been doing deals with governments, for years, and would probably rather keep it that way. Governments are good customers - not like these threatening new pan-national corporates, like Google.

So, in a way, this story is as much about trying to maintain the status quo.

Anyone who thinks his enemy's-enemy, is his friend, has clearly never been in a Mexican stand-off, and none of the participants in this current stand-off over the control of the public Internet is called 'Robin Hood'.