Of Dumb and Smart Pipes

Holman Jenkins Jr. writing in WSJ (sub required) praises telcos and the "smart pipes" they are investing in.

Ergo: "..despite the media euphoria over Google and its stock price, it has neither the business experience nor the lobbying clout nor the logical arguments to rewrite a world in which the legatees of the old Ma Bell have such a strong position."

Robert Cringely on the other hand speculates  "Two years ago Google had one data center. Today they are reported to have 64. Two years from now, they will have 300-plus. The advantage to having so many data centers goes beyond simple redundancy and fault tolerance. They get Google closer to users, reducing latency. They offer inter-datacenter communication and load-balancing using that no-longer-dark fiber Google owns. But most especially, they offer super-high bandwidth connections at all peering ISPs at little or no incremental cost to Google.

...For the first time, Internet TV will scale to the same level as broadcast and cable TV, yet still offer something different for every viewer if they want it."

and in his world view the pipes are dumb

"ISPs, which we've thought of as a threatened species, won't be touched, but then their profit margins are so low they aren't worth touching. After all, Wal-Mart doesn't try to own the roads its goods are carried over."

Readers, which side would you align with?