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Google Explains ISP Rumors
WindozeSux writes to mention a Wired article explaining why Google bought all that dark fiber, the event that spurred rumors they were planning an ISP. From the article: "When asked by Wired News whether Google was buying up dark fiber, a company spokesman replied that 'Google has and will continue to invest in the equipment our company needs to give our users around the world the best and fastest search results.' Rumors of Google as an ISP were also fueled by the company being granted a large block of new IPv6 addresses last year." They plan to restrict their role as an ISP to the Mountain View and San Francisco areas.
"They plan to restrict their role as an ISP to the Mountain View and San Francisco areas"
Don't think of this as a restriction to that area think of this as Google ISP Beta, which will be rolled out around he world within the next 3 years but will stay as an invite only beta
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
I wonder if this is partly a response to sugestions that Google is trying to do too many things and not enough of them are working well (in a money making sense) which was mentioned here http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/30/125221 5. If I was an investor I would want to see that they could start getting projects like this right first before I would be happy to keep my money in a company trying to become an ISP... (even if the story mentioned is FUD - which some people sugested it was - it won't stop google wanting to be cautious about it, perception is everything)
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
All right, giggity giggity...
The machine unmakes the man. Now that the machine is so perfect, the engineer is nobody. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
Local businesses are cooncerned when Walmart sets up shop in much the same way. Gooooooooogle could be formidible competition to established ISP's and they know it based on a track record of success. The consumers generally win though.
You have to network the AI's computing nodes somehow.
Here's to super-intelligence!
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
So first they rename mountain view to "Google Land," then Google Land continues to grow untill it covers the entire planet and we all have Google Internet.
Well, with a better name, I hope.
Scott Swezey
google found a way to not pay to others if the whole net neutrality thing goes along, their becoming "one of the guys" with the big badass routers
Maybe this has to do with some contingency plan for dealing with the impending doom to net neutrality. And why would they want to get into the ISP business if all they need to do to cut telecom at the knees is lower the barrier for entry for ISPs?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
They say no current plans and that can mean anything in business-speak. And Google has and will continue to invest in the equipment our company needs [...]
What if another 'need' is to become their own ISP? Could be a very good reason for it, e.g. the fact that the connection to them could be cut down, because TelCo's want to get money twice.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Google is in a unique position to expand its own infrastructure required to provide the best overall search capabilities around. In fact it can turn around and overdevelop that infrastructure then sell things such as off-site backup (reliable mass storage), Internet services that compete with other ISPs offerings, and (distributed) supercomputing power for companies that wouldn't or couldn't dream of using a supercomputing facility.
I've mentioned elsewhere that with the telecoms and cablecoms doing everything they can to protect their ability to make Internet users pay twice (or more) for bandwidth that has already been paid for at both ends of every 'Net connection, Google ought to look into competing in the global ISP market -- one way for it to do so would be to offer fiber connections to people's door. How would that get paid for? Well, I imaging that they could do just what the cablecoms do with their fee-based subscriptions, but provide more reliable service (fibre doesn't care about electrical storms as much as copper wires do).
All Google need do is be as good as current telecoms and cablecoms are at delivering content and providing N-way communications (all kinds of phone services) to convince increasing numbers of people to switch to equivalent services from Google, if Google delivers those services via fibre and charges competitive rates. People talk. Most people I know hate their current phone companies. Many aren't thrilled with their cable services. (My ISP is a cablecom and they do a good job, IMHO, but I'm not so loyal I wouldn't switch if I got fiber to my home as part of the deal.) If it starts in a few cities on the Left coast, I can't blame it. They are close to home. If things work out well at those "beta sites", it will probably have other cities begging it to compete with telecoms and cablecoms in other locations.
The problem would be "the last mile". Most of us have four or more physical connections to our home from outside organizatons: power, gas, water, sewer, telephone, and CATV are the main ones that come to my mind. Is there room for another? Yes, especially if it replaces two existing ones with better technology. The rights of way are already in place everywhere that matters, but Google (or anyone else wanting to run fibre to the doors of everyone in your neighborhood) would have to gain access to (permission to use) them.
"You're young, you're drunk, you're in bed, you have knives; shit happens." -- Angelina Jolie
Personally, I'm not sure how much I'd like to trust Google as my ISP. Considering that deleting email from my gmail account doesn't automatically mean it disappears from their servers, I'd be interested to see how long they'd store my browsing habbits.
Maybe I'm being overly paranoid, but I just don't like the idea that my browsing habbits from today could bite me in the ass in a few years time.
Yes, Google are still riding on the backs of their 'do no evil' mantra, but something has gotta give. Given the current political climate in the US, I'd rather not leave a nice handy log trail for someone to follow.
That said, I think I trust Google more than anyone else right now.
I think it's a smart hedge against current infrastructure owners who are trying to make certain ones and zeros cost more than other ones and zeros. They say buying bandwidth isn't enough, they also want more money for certain ones and zeros depending on the aggregate meaning of certain groups of ones and zeros.
Google, benefitting in general from flat-rate fees for bandwidth regardless of content, only naturally would like to keep this from happening. In the event that they fail in the courts and in congress, it would make a whole lot of sense for them to simply own a LOT of the basic infrastructure themselves. This gives them leverage in two ways - first, they can sell this bandwidth at whatever fee structure they find fair, enhancing their business by catering to their customers. Second, they can use their infrastructure as a bargaining chip to ensure that other carriers do not levy additional content-based and company-specific fees. Try to charge google and google customers extra fees, and get cut out of google's search engine and lose access to their fiber.
The carriers have been entrusted with a national resource and have benefitted from huge government concessions and subsidies for decades, but now that they have a little wiggle room they're turning around and trying to gouge more money out of both the average consumers, but also content providers on a deliberately biased basis. Some customers are simply going to be charged more for their bandwidth than others, and some customers will find themselves throttled or cut off entirely if they don't pay the proper extortion fee.
The phone system was supposed to be equally accessable by EVERYONE in the nation. That's why the govt set up the telcos the way they did from the beginning. Minor variations by region and based largely on actual costs aside, it cost about as much to get a phone in new york city as it did in the middle of Arizona. And calling from California to Nevada or California to Maine cost the exact same amount per minute. But now the data carriers are going to take this nationally funded infrastructure and make it inherently unequal.
That's abuse of a national resource, but knowing that congress is hopelessly in the pockets of lobbyists and big business, it makes complete sense for google to bank away some insurance against this sort of thing.
Why not start with exploring a Google Worldwide Proxy. Google said they want to entrance to the market as high as possible, so you can't be beat by, say, two students with a good idea like concentrating on search alone.
So what if they offer everybody faster surfing experiences? I have a broadband connection, but don't enjoy full speed across the globe, because there's only that much my isp can do in peering arrangements. Google has the muscle to offer full speed everywhere and the brain to offer excellent pre-fetching and caching techniques. There's not much new about this, but then again Google never does something new, and my ISP's proxy is a real sucker.
Ah, and think of the price for Google. Everybodies exact surfing behaviour.
I hope Google catches the telcos with the same timing they took on Microft. Everyone was starting to get irritated with IE6, the Microsoft Monopoly, all of the little M$ gotchas. Then a savior, GOOGLE and open source! Hurrah! Now they get the same opportunity. Telcos getting greedy, making front-page headlines on cnn, the Telco Trigopoly (or whatever), charging my ass 60 bucks a month for cable internet alone. Time for Google to step in again. Can't wait to see the telcos try to fend them off like M$.
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Becomeing an ISP might give them more standing for law suits on the net-neutrality frount. Small and local ISP have as much to loose from neutrality being taken away as google does but for different reasons. This might allow google anouther avenue for law suits against the big carriers and a seccond chance to stop all this BS in the courts, before congress gets a chance to really screw things up.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
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lets see they have gmail google maps google world. googleos in the works and now a isp. thery defently grew from a search engion.
Signing up for Google as ISP? Don't think so... They'll peek into your traffic to better get a picture of what kind of personality you are, so that they can more accurately target ads. And did I mention handing out a nice dossier about you when your favorite government agency asks for it.
Cheers to Google Skynet.
One thing that the might Google will need to address is their (lack) of Customer Service.
Totally ignoring people just does not fly.
The folks they have assigned to Google Adsense are a prime example.
"I'm not ashamed I can't function in society like I'm supposed to." - Paul Westerberg
Google hasn't beaten MS in anything but search. Google is just the latest in a long line of media-proclaimed MS killers including Lotus Notes, Netscape, Java, Network computers, Linux etc.
In order to do and end-run around the telcos, who will scuttle net neutrality.
it's nice to think about, but it won't happen soon enough, for me. i mean, think about it, i may be able to choose between a whole 2 broadband companies...some day...
Google continues to encroach on the services that their advertisers are supplying. They will need to get a strategy that will support a long-term downward spiral of those advertising dollars from this cannibalism, and are recognizing that recurring revenue is the way to go. It is pretty clear that they will turn to service to accomplish this, but there will certainly be a revolt in the process, and they WILL suffer deeply. The ancillary services are clear indicators that they are concerned about "stickiness"--well warranted concern.
It is just a matter of time before two kids with a Packard bell in a garage set there sights on the 10,000 pound gorilla and do more damage than Google could have ever thought they could.
At least, not if they're any good.
The reason's pretty sound too - Backups. A mail provider that cannot ensure that its users can pick up their mail reliably will quickly be deserted, and the easiest way of making sure that noones email gets lost is to make sure that you have both backups and audit trails of all the mail that comes through your servers.
Deleting your email from the 'live' servers will tag those emails for deletion, but what about the backups? Either those continue to exist until the backups are destroyed (if the provider keeps them for a set timeframe), or the live servers have to delay deletion until the next time the mirror is updated (if the server only keeps one 'complete' backup), so that it can keep track of what needs removing from the mirror.
Remember, you don't want to store data once its no longer needed as it only takes up space that you can use for other things, and drives up your operating costs. So far as google goes, they make their money on advertising, and with that in mind they're unlikely to keep full logs beyond a few months (unless required by law to do otherwise). People tend to be fickle, and whats in fashion this month may not be in six. Any long-term interests will keep cropping up over any given period, hence never drop from the records, and if they thought they needed records going back further they could probably save a lot of resources by storing reoccuring searches as aggregrate keywords (Eg, X visited N pr0n sites, M webcomics, O movie review sites, and P technology relates sites - they don't need to know exactly which sites you visit to keep tabs on what interests you have.).
Fibre
Fibre, Fibre, Fibre.
Well, if google is running a "beta" ISP somewhere I can quickly imagine them becoming a real ISP. I mean, look at google mail. It is still in "beta" but it functions 100 times more usefully than most of the webmail services I have used, and is quickly becoming popular. Just because google claims something is beta doesn't mean it isn't actually working, is what I am trying to say. I am also not sure of the needs that google has with fiber to begin with. I work at a small private college (5k students) and we use thousands of miles of fiber. I would imagine google would need a little more than us. How much did they actually buy?
Google continues to encroach on the services that their advertisers are supplying. They will need to get a strategy that will support a long-term downward spiral of those advertising dollars from this cannibalism, and are recognizing that recurring revenue is the way to go.
If Google (or any large IT company) obviously can (or ought to) go somewhere to make a profit, it is foolhardy to make that place your market niche, assuming that getting there first gives you some sort of dibs on the spot or that Google (or other major player) won't notice it. Google is not omniscient, but it is run by smart people who take note when others spot an opportunity created by Google that it could easily take advantage of itself. Google has nearly cost many small business owners their livelihood when it tweaks its PageRank algorithm to correct for click-fraud or other problems. At one level, it is clear they are foolish to presume that an algorithm Google guards zealously is going to remain carved in stone, forever unchanging. If your firm happens to be thriving because of Google and you haven't asked yourself exactly how and why that is, don't go blaming Google for improving its system overall without worrying about trivial (to it) side-effects, such as the impact of those improvements on your business.
In practice, Google would have far fewer complaints from people who pay for AdWords if Google would send them (advance) samples of what the results of the queries they have been pinning their hopes on will produce once the PageRank scheme has been adjusted. Unless I'm grossly mistaken, this would be extremely easy for Google to do, although it would also give click-fraudsters some advance notice too.
You are describing the result of poor communications on Google's part, and it looks heartless, callous, or even gasp!> EVIL, when Google makes a minor adjustment in its operation that causes many business owners to fear for their survival, as they drop from the top of the ranks for their pet queries into the abyss of obscurity. Why Google doesn't pay more attention to its paying customers puzzles me.
If Google was more forthcoming about the likely effects of basic changes it is going to make, its present customers would have no rational reason to whine when they suddenly lose traffic generated by Google. Google could (and should be able to) say, "We told you this change was coming, you were given the option to change your AdWords (or whatever) but you either did nothing or goofed -- you and your competitors are all free to use our services as effectively as you can and we try to keep you abreast of what you need to know to use our services to your benefit."
Google is a very young business. Developing a good business communications plan is not easy. If you believe "the Google story", it was a research project that grew into an Internet service into an entrepreneurial venture in search of a business model into a wildly successful public traded corporation to whatever it is today. That is not an excuse (I'm not paid enough to to be a Google apologist!) but merely an observation.
"You're young, you're drunk, you're in bed, you have knives; shit happens." -- Angelina Jolie
I was reading a few places and calculated bandwidth at a cost of $0.16 per gigabyte of data transfer it costs an ISP to deliver it to your door. I pay $45ish per month, so thats 281.25 GB / month until they break even. To do some quick math that is the equivalent of 3 or 4 of today's modern hard drives, 70 DVD movies or 401 music CD's... and who knows how many iPods!! And to think they want to charge extra for data transfer :o
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