Google is pressing forward with its efforts to speed up the Internet. Early this morning, the company launched Page Speed Service, which is designed to automatically speed up Web pages when they load. The service intervenes between Web servers and users, rewriting a Web page's code to improve its performance and applying other related tricks.

The service improves on previous offerings from Google. Page Speed began as a diagnostic tool and then as software that developers could install and configure for free. With every step, Google has increased the ease and automation of the service. This is in keeping with the strategy the company described to me when we discussed Google's Make the Web Faster Initiative. I sat down with Richard Rabbat, a product manager for the initiative, and Arvind Jain, its technical lead:

The best solutions of all, Rabbat and Jain realized, would spread with as little human intervention as possible. As Rabbat puts it, "Instead of telling people what the problems are, can we just fix it for them automatically?"

In fact, Ram Ramani, an engineering manager for the Bangalore team that worked on Page Speed Service, emphasizes that Google is primarily interested in seeing faster websites, however that's achieved. If people want to steal tricks from Page Speed Service, they're more than welcome to it, Ramani says. The service is there, however, because in reality many developers have trouble maintaining good Web performance as sites grow and change.

Jain says, "Making your site faster should not become a burden to a developer."

According to Joshua Bixby, president of Strangeloop, a Web optimization company, the service is important, but probably insufficient for enterprise customers. He wrote in a blog post:

Page Speed will be a handy resource for smaller sites with little to no complexity, whose owners don't have developer time to pour into hand-tuning their sites, or the money to put into investing in an advanced performance automation solution. It fills an important gap in the market, and while it may not solve every performance pain, it should solve some — hopefully giving small business owners a chance to level the playing field by speeding up their sites enough to remain competitive in an increasingly brutal online marketplace.

The collective Internet is reluctant to move on from the dying Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4), according to Akamai's newest State of the Internet quarterly report. Every piece of hardware connected to the Internet—such as Web servers, PCs, cell phones, or printers—gets a unique number assigned by this protocol, which lets devices locate and contact each other.

For the past several years, we've been warned that IPv4 was running out of numbers. The protocol's successor, IPv6, provides an enormous pool of new numbers, but adoption has been very slow.

The official exhaustion of IPv4 came and went earlier this year, when every possible IPv4 number had been generated and allotted. Many unclaimed IPv4 addresses have clearly now been assigned; Akamai reports that there are 5.2 percent more unique IPv4 addresses in use than there were in the fourth quarter of 2010.

Internet-focused organizations strongly advised that providers stop handing out the unclaimed IPv4 addresses and make the inevitable switch to the roomier IPv6. The Internet Society even sponsored a worldwide test run for IPv6, which they hoped would encourage others to update their hardware and networks and make the switch.

But according to Akamai, which routes between 15 and 30 percent of the world's Internet traffic, only about 0.25 percent of the top one million websites (as rated by Web analysis company Alexa) can be reached through the IPv6 versions of their sites. And the Internet security firm Arbor Networks says that IPv6 traffic volumes only account for between 0.1 and 0.2 percent of all Internet traffic.

This isn't all that unexpected. Adoption of IPv6 can be tedious and expensive. And although IPv6 addresses will eventually cheaper than IPv4, they aren't yet. Google and Facebook can roll out their IPv6 websites, but users might not be able to access them if their Internet service providers don't widely support IPv6 connectivity.

Consumer-side hardware is also a problem since many older modems don't have IPv6 support. "For the most part, customers buy off-the-shelf home routers and modems and use them until they break," says Leo Vegoda, Number Resource Manager at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). "Providing IPv6 to most customers is going to mean replacing a lot of networking equipment that was never designed with IPv6 in mind and will never be upgraded to support it."

The European Commission is looking into how mobile Internet providers are managing data across their networks, opening up a new storm of debate around the idea of net neutrality. The review is in part gearing up for a new European telecommunications law, which takes effect May 25.

Ars Technica's Nate Anderson writes that there's a reason for interested parties to be concerned about the issue,

As today's Commission report noted, throttling of file-sharing and video streaming traffic has been reported in France, Greece, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, and the United Kingdom. Blocking or charging extra fees for VoIP has been reported on mobile operators in Austria, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Romania.

It's not clear that the new law will give sufficient guidance. PCWorld's Jennifer Baker writes,

There is no set definition of "net neutrality" in the European Union, but it will be a legal requirement when the new Telecoms Package comes into force on May 25. This new law, which sets out rules on transparency, quality of service and the ability to switch operator, must be applied in a way "that ensures open and neutral Internet principles are respected in practice." However, it does not specify how member states may achieve this, leading to confusion in some countries about how to adopt the law.

Some companies and organizations are complaining that there are already big problems with how European carriers treat data traveling on the mobile Internet, writes the New York Times,

Advocates of network neutrality criticized the inquiry as insufficient, saying that the fact-finding mission was superfluous and ignored obvious, continuing problems with the mobile Internet. Operators, for example, do not connect Skype calls over their networks because the Internet calling company's services would siphon revenue from their own businesses.

"The European Union appears to be alone in the developed world in tolerating on such a wide scale these types of arbitrary restrictions on Internet use," said Jean-Jacques Sahel, the director of government and regulatory affairs for Skype in London. "It has to cease and we look to European authorities to unambiguously protect consumers."

Though the European Union is well known for the hard line it took with Microsoft in its antitrust investigation, it's not yet clear how the Commission will position itself in this case. In a press conference, Neelie Kroes, European vice president for the digital agenda, toed a careful line between the interests of the operators and those of their opponents, saying,

Today's report shows a general consensus that traffic management can be useful. For example, it is important to keep video calls running smoothly even if that means an email is delayed by a few seconds. Consumers have the right to choose services, and operators have the right to deliver services, that can meet these expectations. I do not like the blocking or degrading of certain services. But if there is such blocking or degradation, then the customer needs to be clearly informed in advance so that they can make an informed choice about the operator that gives them what they want. It is clearly not OK to block or degrade lawful services by stealth, without informing the customer.