Google is the world’s second largest Internet Service Provider?

Arbor Networks, a software company that sells network security and network monitoring software, ranked Google as the world’s second largest Internet Service Provider. Earlier this year the company brought the idea of considering Google as an ISP, and determined that the search giant would actually be the third-largest carrier in the world. Now Arbor Networks has revisited the concept believing Google has expanded to reach the second place.

Craig Labovitz, known as Chief Scientist at Arbor Networks, says: "This month, Google broke an equally impressive Internet traffic record - gaining more than 1% of all Internet traffic share since January."

Labovitz also wrote in a blog post: "Google now represents an average 6.4% of all Internet traffic around the world. This number grows even larger (to as much as 8-12%) if I include estimates of traffic offloaded by the increasingly common Google Global Cache (GGC) deployments and error in our data due to the extremely high degree of Google edge peering with consumer networks."

However, many observers treat these statistics exaggerated and hyperbolized because no company could be responsible for so much traffic worldwide. Furthermore, it remains questionable how a company could both pull that off and still be growing.