Linking things small and big

I *love* to see patterns and make connections between seemingly disparate things. It makes all the reading, thinking and education seem worthwhile. (Perhaps these patterns are sometimes illusory, but as long as they keep me smiling....)

This is today's example:

When I try to publish this blog, I often find it unresponsive. I used to think something was wrong with Proton's FTP server but at such times, I began to find that www.blogger.com was itself inaccessible. And that has nothing to do with Proton's FTP server.

So I checked further and found that at such times, even Gmail was often unavailable. But there was no corresponding online uproar. I don't think Gmail is down that often. So it was a local issue. But other sites (like the New York Times) were opening just fine.

Then I read in the Economist that Barack Obama is a proponent of keeping the Internet free of controls. For example, he does not want to let US ISPs reduce the bandwidth available to users to access data-heavy sites such as YouTube. Access should be uniform, he believes.

Then yesterday, I put two and two together - the problem I see is probably because Indian ISPs are limiting the bandwidth going to Gmail, Blogger and other Google sites because that is where much of the traffic is. When there is a bandwidth crunch, these must be the sites to become inoperational first. If India were to adopt what Obama proposes, this would not happen - all sites would slow down together.

Anyone know if this is true? It is an interesting theory.