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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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At least there's never any confusion over what google's inventions are going to be called.
Curious to see exactly what they have in mind..
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Hey, if it's free internet, I don't care if it's from SCO, sign me up!
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... "Google Seeks to Develop Parallel Universe?"
Google hires an operating system engineer.
Clearly Google is writing the operating system to a super space robot that will be used to eradicate Microsoft!
Google buys a company that makes photo organizer software.
Clearly Google is doing this so that they can recreate iPhoto, as a preliminary step to creating competing products to iCal, iDisk, Apple Mail, and finally Mac OS X itself!
Google hires a janitor.
Clearly that janitor is secretly a superhero with super-strength which Google will use to eliminate all crime on earth!
Google buys up some disused fiber-optic cable.
Clearly Google is going to make their own internet!
There would be no bigger prize than GoogleNet. Like the internet and Internet2 before it, GoogleNet will be hacked and polluted with porn, movie uploads, warez and viagra spam.
I don't give it a month before it loses its virginity in the back seat of a Cisco router.
This GoogleNet idea is an interesting one, but I expect such a proprietary internet would lack would be shunned by the hackers and outlaws that bring true innovation to the technology world.
That being said, Google is much more open to developers than the other monopoly we're familiar with. And they have been collecting money and PhDs at an alarming rate -- they have something big planned.
Clearly Google realizes (like Microsoft before them) that he who owns the platform wins. By building a "better" internet, GoogleNet could be the next Win32 API enabling Google to have an earth-shattering money machine. Perhaps Google's stock is not over-valued afterall.
Sam
"GoogleNet" sounds a bit too much like "SkyNet" for my sensibilities. Of course, if any company were to bring about Armageddon, I'd trust Google to do it in the most efficient, user-freindly and non-evil way.
In Soviet Russia, backwards is everything.
As much as I love Google as a search engine, I do have to say that this one is just a little bit scary. Can they really create their own internet, and still do no evil?
So what if they do. Just because Googlenet shows up doesn't mean the old internet ceases to function. If it becomes a draconian mess, no one will use it, and it will slip into irrelevance like Gopher.
Of course it is. After all, Google does no evil [/sarcasm] If this is truly the purpose they have for the fiber optic, they have truly taken Microsoft's "embrace and extend" to a whole new level (and would officially be evil, let the google apologists begin). Having said that, this is all speculation on why they want the fiber optic, it could just be they want to open up an ISP or to create an intranet only for their own data centers (and not for the public).
...They get it right.
In my opinion, what Microsoft seems to suffer from is getting things to market as fast as possible to remain (or at least appear to remain) competitive. The problem is, that once a product is in the wild, a lot of bugs and security flaws turn up which results in patching the software for the remainder of the time you own it.
The release and patch process is what the Mozilla Foundation seems to be falling into lately as well.
Google, on the other hand, seems to take a more "future use" approach to what they do, giving their products better longevity and as a result, a better experience to their users.
If they (Google) can "get it right" with a parallel network, they basically trump everyone in the market today who has laid claim to making the Internet better. If Google applies their anti-spam engine to network nodes, spam virtually faces extinction. And you know, if they watch what I surf and how I surf and it results in a better experience for me then I for one welcome our new Google overlords.
R(k)
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.
I'm indifferent on the matter
Behold the glorious bragging rights
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.
I think that some of us are not paying too much attention. All the buzz lately, in technology communications industries, the USPTO, the FCC, and just about anywhere you turn on the Internet, has been about broadband, wired, wireless, mesh, all kinds of broadband... for Google to buy up a small part of the worlds existing as-yet-unused-broadband infrastructure only means that Google wants to still be relevant in 3 years time. I don't think it means anything more than that... it is what every telecomms company should be doing to ensure relevance in the comming All-IP all the time world.
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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.
Why not. Perhaps it's better if all of the Googleness, including all of the breathless press coverage, could be confined to a stand-alone network. All of those that have been Touched By The Googly Appendage will live blissfully within a completely self-containted universe where all news is about, and reported by Google. CommanderToogle's new site, slashdot.goo, will have new and improved moderation choices:
1) Completely About Google
2) Mostly About Google
3) At Least Somewhat About Google
4) Funny, But Not At Google's Expense
5) Troogle
6) Undergoogled
7) Overgoogled (very rare - can there be too much Google?)
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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.
afaik, dark fiber refers to a rented optical fiber without any service attached to it, the customer must deal with light transmitters and receivers, as opposed to a fiber that is live with some IP/tunnel/data/whatever service. Dark fiber does not mean "unused".
That's the obvious and reasonable interpretation, yep.
:P
However, it might not be particularly unrealistic to suspect that Google might be considering starting an ISP.
Right now the ISP market is kind of shrinking because last-mile issues are effectively preventing anyone from providing broadband service unless they already own a high-bandwidth wire going directly into your house. However if 802.16 and similar technology delivers on its promises, it could remove this obstacle-- meaning that you'd be able to break into the ISP market with little more than the kind of purchases Google is making right now.
This theory is most definitely a stretch! However, unlike Business 2.0's "make a second internet and provide free access for some reason!" theory, at least it isn't stupid.
Also, who's to say Google even has a plan as to what to do with this dark fiber? As even Business 2.0 notes, now is a really good time to buy this stuff; you can get it cheap. Anybody ever heard of buy low, sell high?
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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.)
You appear to be the only person in this universe to hvae read it that way, but several thousand people in a parallel universe where the only difference from this one is that the universe is known as the "interverse" made this mistake.
Letter To Iran
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
Most Geeks will attest to their dislike of the Sun (not SUN MICRO), this will work better as public acceptance grows. No more will we have to waste money on Foreign oil to light our internets.
And most important of all, on a dark internet nobody knows your downloading porn.
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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.
Makes sense along side all of the other specualation of Google's wireless wantings and Google's recent stock selloff. Along side Google Talk's VoIP play, Google is the single corporation responisble for connecting everyone in America for the second time around.
I wouldn't worry about Google being evil this time around, though. Those anti-trust laws that broke up Bell are still right in place, and Google apparently doesn't want to go it alone (trying to bring in other VoIP services).
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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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Iridium satellites are not in geosynchronous orbit. If they were, you wouldn't get 'Iridium flares' in the morning and evening when the sun glints off the solar panels of satellites in the constellation. The system was so named because it was originally supposed to have as many satellites as there are protons/electrons in an atom of Iridium, with the constellation resembling the orbits of those electrons. In reality, they launched a few fewer, so it should be named after a different element, but they stuck with Iridium. Iridium largely failed because the implementation was crap. It was analog/voice only, $5000 phones, $8/minute, etc. Now that it's been bought up, people have figured out ways to use Iridium for data telemetry at cheaper rates, and it's actually seeing some use.
Gspot... no?
As I recall Bank of America owns a ton of dark fiber that they use to trasmit private data because the fiber was a lot cheaper then renting capacity. That doesn't mean that Bank of America is going to be opening BOANET and giving away free Internet access tomorrow.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
They're buying up all this dark fiber to connect all of their data centers, and possibly implementing IPv6 on all of their networks.
My guess is they're jumpstarting the migration to IPv6 with their own backbone. Offer free WiFi, but it'll be IPv6. Not only does everyone (possibly) get free WiFi, but they also get their own net block.
*scratches chin*
Now THAT would be something.
I don't know where people got the idea that Google was creating InetDos...Om Malik's article talks about dark fiber and free WiFi hotspots, not internet backbone. He even goes so far as to mention the fact that Google has been working with Feeva, a company that provides free Wi-Fi hotspots and suggests that Google build a large broadband network. He never says replace the Internet.
"What if Google (GOOG) wanted to give Wi-Fi access to everyone in America? And what if it had technology capable of targeting advertising to a user's precise location? The gatekeeper of the world's information could become one of the globe's biggest Internet providers and one of its most powerful ad sellers, basically supplanting telecoms in one fell swoop." -Om Malik
If you think about it, replacing the Internet makes no sense for Google. Not only are they not an infrastructure company they aren't set up to service this kind of business. Have you ever tried to get customer service from Google?
Besides, Google's model works better the more open an environment is. More pages = more space in which to display their advertising inventory.
It seems to me that Google's real play is voice...advertising subsidized voice.
Think about it; you just signed up for GoogleTalk via SMS. Google now has your cellular number and knows everything you search for.
What would you say if they offered to subsidize your cellular calls in exchange for LISTENING to brief targeted messages served to your phone prior to placing a call? If the ads were relevant and the exchange was fair; say 10 minutes calling per ad served don't you think a few million minutes of calls would be delivered this way?
I wrote more about this here: http://www.mobile-weblog.com/50226711/images/googCertainly it is obvious that Google has recognized the significance of the small screen to the future of search. They understand the value of connecting an advertiser to an interested customer and vice versa. They've created maps and mapping tools to help you locate what you want. It only makes sense that they take themselves off the PC and into the MOBILE in the most pervasive way the consumer that will allow. You watch; turn by turn directions over your cell phone to the location of your choice, all courtesy of GoogleNav is not far away.
There is no "I" in B-O-R-G.
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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I am surprised no one has brought up Epic or Google 2014. The predictions when this came out were cool. Watch for a similarity :-D
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