Running your own servers for Internet checks is what you're supposed to do -- when you don't, you cause problems for other people (e.g. if Google decided to sell an address block or change its DNS name or if someone decides to deprecate an NTP pool server).

For example, look at the document made by the NTP Pool: http://www.pool.ntp.org/en/vendors.html. Microsoft has time.windows.com, Apple has time.apple.com, and Canonical has ntp.ubuntu.com.

I recall reading a story where someone checked network connectivity by pinging a DNS name with a known but invalid IP address, and relying on the exact error message. When a sysadmin later removed the "invalid" DNS entry, ping would return a different error message, which caused the network connectivity check to fail. People do strange things for connectivity checks -- what Belkin did here seems pretty "by-the-book" by comparison.