18 November 2005 Blog Home : November 2005 : Permalink
The same follows for the rumor that Google, as a dark fiber buyer, will turn itself into some kind of super ISP. Won't happen. And WHY it won't happen is because ISPs are lousy businesses and building one as anything more than an experiment (as they are doing in San Francisco with wireless) would only hurt Google's earnings.
So why buy-up all that fiber, then?
The probable answer lies in one of Google's underground parking garages in Mountain View. There, in a secret area off-limits even to regular GoogleFolk, is a shipping container. But it isn't just any shipping container. This shipping container is a prototype data center. Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We're talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid.
[...] The advantage to having so many data centers goes beyond simple redundancy and fault tolerance. They get Google closer to users, reducing latency. They offer inter-datacenter communication and load-balancing using that no-longer-dark fiber Google owns. But most especially, they offer super-high bandwidth connections at all peering ISPs at little or no incremental cost to Google.
Where some other outfit might put a router, Google is putting an entire data center, and the results are profound. Take Internet TV as an example. Replicating that Victoria's Secret lingerie show that took down Broadcast.com years ago would be a non-event for Google. The video feed would be multicast over the private fiber network to 300+ data centers, where it would be injected at gigabit speeds into each peering ISP. Viewers watching later would be reading from a locally cached copy. Yeah, but would it be Windows Media, Real, or QuickTime? It doesn't matter. To Google's local data center, bits are bits and the system is immune to protocols or codecs. For the first time, Internet TV will scale to the same level as broadcast and cable TV, yet still offer soemthing different for every viewer if they want it.
The fascinating question is what happens when google collides with censoring states such as China or Saudi Arabia. Do they implement required censorship or do they ignore the market or do they somehow subborn the rules? One difference between google and the network inrastructure providers (Cisco, Nortel...) is that google benefits directly from greater information avilability whereas the infrastructure providers don't. For them the fact that censorship requires large and complex firewalls means that there is no clear business advantage for openness beause what they might sell in extra transmission equipment is countered by what they fail to sell in censoring equipment. Google is different. Short term I imagine Google will attempt to comply with the censorship but in the longer term I think it will subvert the regime because Google's business is to subvert gatekeepers.Update: Ann Althouse and her commenters have related thoughts about Google Print which are well worth reading. I think the following part of a comment there is particularly good:
I think therein lies the fear of the publishers -- they fear 'the long tail'. It's no secret that publishers are not happy about what the Internet has done for the used book market. Already, you can easily, instantly find used copies of books for less than new (and publishers, of course, get nothing from used book sales).
GooglePrint goes another step in this direction because it will make it much more likely for people to discover older books by text searches that they never would have found and known about otherwise. But finding these older books won't result in a gain to the publisher in most cases, because the book isn't even in print anymore--so if there is a purchase, the purchase will be of a used copy and, worse, the purchase may be instead of a new, in-print book.