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Google Seeks to Develop Parallel Internet?
KhanReaper writes "As reported on On the Media and Business 2.0, Google appears to be purchasing dark (unused) fiber optic cable across the United States with the intention of building its own alternative parallel internet that would presumably be called GoogleNet. Possessing such a thing could allow Google to offer internet access in the form of free wifi or other means and create a powerful captive marketing audience which Google could monopolize. Outside of these marketing opportunities, such a development in infrastructure could help reduce Google's long-term content delivery costs were it to take on more bandwidth-intensive activities in the future."
Its to connect datacenters together so that all of Googles search databases have the same information. Just maybe that is the reason the would need a high speed internet of their own.
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Free Wi-Fi.... It'll be free, but think of Gmail and AdWords and privacy.
Be careful what you ask for. You just might get it.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Yes, how dare they obey the laws of a land they are opperating in. I suppose you also think Google is evil for complying with DMCA takedown notices in the USA or the anti-nazi laws in Germany or the competition in advertising laws in France?
May be at First. After they have consolidated required market share, charges will apply to anything you do. It is a corporation, you got to think of shareholders and their profits.
We are seeing another monopoly happening.
Couldn't be just that they need cheap conection between their computing nodes?
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If there is one thing I have noticed as of late, it is the fact that the Slashdot audience as a whole, especially those in charge of posting stories, have had a sudden swing in viewpoint about Google. Now all of the stories about Google have negative undertones, and there's always a hint of disdain in the way the story is worded.
The gradual making of a new evil entity, and new Slashdot scape goat is nearly complete! We're all being set up to hate Google now. Gotta love it, Google has not charged me for a single thing. They provide me with excellent free email, outstanding search, a nifty map site, and even a suitable chat client now. And how much have I paid them? Nothing. I for one still love Google, say what you want about them buying the world.
What it would do is create more competition in the backbone internet connectivity market and internet market as a whole.
However, Google presumably decided it was cheaper to buy entire fiber links between datacenters in the long run than renting capacity from existing network providers. And who is to blame them? I'm sure that Microsoft own lots of fiber, I'm sure that lots of 'evil' and 'cuddly' companies own fiber, it doesn't mean they are making 'Intarwebnet Two' or whatever, and you don't get stories about it here.
It is just random speculation because Google are newsworthy.
Google to create its own Internet? Unlikely.
The whole reason that Google is an important company is that it crawls through the publicly-accessible parts of the Internet in order to index its contents.
If Google is to retain its premier position in the search engine market, then it will very much so remain firmly connected to the existing Internet.
This is why I agree with the parent post: It is quite reasonable to believe that Google might require this bandwidth for its own purposes.
There is nothing at all wrong with this. The Internet, after all, is merely a network of networks. All this means is that behind Google's accessible IP addresses lurks a mammoth network of its own.
Yo, Eric Schmidt*, let me tell you about this little debacle called "Iridium", wherein a once proud US technology titan, name of "Motorola" [you might have heard of 'em - back in the day, they had this bitchin' little CPU called the 68000 series], thought they could dominate [maybe even monopolize] the US communications bidness, by launching a whole mess of satellites into geosynchrynous orbit; invested billions of dollars in the thing, which, at one point, was widely believed to have been the largest privately financed infrastructure expenditure in the history of mankind.
Care to venture a guess as to the return on their investment? A big fat goose egg, that's what. Actually even less than that, if you factor in the fees that the bankruptcy lawyers must have charged them.
*It's a real testament to Novell engineering that this moron didn't drive them into bankruptcy, as well...
Free wifi is getting bogged down in court because it is the government competiting with companies, and you can see the point of the companies who want to make a livelihood from these services.
Google is a company. There is nothing wifi providers can do if suddenly GoogleWireless is free or cheap across the country. Google is hardly a monopoly, just a rich company, and if this expansion of services will lead to longer term benefits to the company (there will be a few duds, of course) then they should be doing this stuff.
What I'd do if I was a company is offer free wireless whereever you can, but rate limited to 5KB a second or so unless you are subscribed to the service. If you are poor yet somehow have a wifi enabled computer/PDA/phone/toaster, then you will still be able to get wireless access everywhere, which is the point of these free metropolitan networks.
Yeah... last time I read about this (maybe 18 months ago?) it seems like the theory was they were going to offer free telephony and put Ma Bell outta biz. The truth is: these articles are scarcely more than conspiracy theories... we'll know their intentions when they annouce them.
Google may also be more geek friendly with their TOSs too. They have a track record of not being dickheads, so you never know.
All I want is 3-5Mb/s down and 1-3Mb/s up...and an ISP where I can say what protocalls/ports get open or blocked and where I can run some basic servers (no, I do not want to run a website from an ADSL, but too damn many things fall under the "Non-permissible server" title as defined by most ISPs.)
Well, yes, I think a strong case can be made that obeying an evil law (and I do think censorship is evil) is itself evil. Interesting that your short post should mention the existence of Nazis, as I do believe that in Nuremberg, it was decided that in FACT obeying evil laws was still a crime. Now, before I have to pull 10 people out of my throat because they jumped down it, I am not saying that censorship is as bad as say death camps. But that doesn't make censorship not evil, just because something else is more evil.
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In all honesty, and it's been talked about already in this topic. That Google is simply buying fibre to connect their networks.
Now with the amount of fibre they could be buying, why not put up free access points and come up with a good advertising delivery mechanism behind it. Could well be the targetted location based internet advertising that so many marketing companies have wanted to do for so long. "Buy a coffee at Joe's! Mention this ad an get a free donut!"
As well, could you imagine the communication costs that they are incurring as we speak? The amount of data that would be traversing their network at the moment would be out of control. Why not just buy some fibre now, setup another company to manage it and slash your comms costs? Especially if they are ordering in the hundreds of gigabits of data which I am guessing they probably are (Think about it for a second)..
Gmail going live, there's another few terabytes worth of data burnt each week having to store all that... All the extra internet content that gets loaded on each day, and they have to index it... Site redundancy.... The lists go on and on...
So what if they setup a second internet? Let them! If it encourages competition, why the hell not? MCI and AOL and everyone else isn't exactly going to sit on their hands and let their market dissapear in front of them are they?
In all honesty though, what are the chances of them making a change in business tactic from being a content search facility and marketers to being an internet service provider.. I don't think it fits in with their business model.
The only thing I think they could be doing is connecting datacentres and possibly (Not having seen WHERE they have bought fibre) they could quite easily be trying to get peering arangements with all the major ISPs to try to distribute the input load onto their network as it could quite well just be getting beyond the point of stupidity and manageability.
BTW, how much are they paying Akamai at the moment?
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
It's funny to watch Slashdot. A single article said Google is evil, now, reading the posts, according to Slashdot Google is evil.
What was Google guilty of? Raising salaries for software engineers (heaven forbid we should make money comparable to our corporate masters) and draining talent (which just means that people want to work there). Oh, and it's hard to get venture capital because venture capitalists want ideas that can compete with Google. I guess that I'll have to put off getting hired by some lame website that sells toe-nail clippers.
Get a clue. Seriously. Tell me what they are doing that is evil.
The moment Google 'forks' the Internet, they lose value because less people can use their services. The fact is that Google is one of a handful of companies that knows that they NEED open protocols. They have a corporate culture document that says 'do no evil' because doing evil would detract from their bottom line, and top management wants everybody in the company to know it.
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What if this turns into a 'private' network, with Google in total control
They control TLDs, they control access, they control content..
Dont laugh, it could happen.. Remember Compuserve?
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Why would their buying of dark fiber necessarily mean they're going to carry VOIP over it? Can you imagine the amount of data they need to synchronize between data centers for their index of pages, and for Gmail? Seriously, buying 10Gbps of fiber capacity and one-time CapEx for the equipment must be cheaper than buying 10Gbps of transit from a major carrier.
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How's this for a conspiracy theory then:
- Free/cheap WiFi for all
- All HTTP requests transparently proxied through Internet Accelerator
- Content cached, indexed, etc at each of these proxies
Suddenly the need for regular spidering has been quite dramatically reduced.
Glenn
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