Well, the cloud - as used by google, yahoo, MS and others - is supposed to make the net more stable and fault-tolerant. The downside is that there’s central cloud-controllers who have to cool down excess use by dropping heavy amounts of load, over short time, to large nodes run by folks like that Jap global isp. One of those is right near FR and you have to go through it.
So when interesting news make people use google and yahoo, they suck up half the web.
You clearly have a better grasp on this than I do. My networking skills are not large. I long for the days when this was simple. Simple works. Complexity kills performance and at times people. Things that are more complex than necessary are generally because someone else benefits from it.