Google is from the future

1. We must save the net

Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes

Are you ready to see the Net privatized from the bottom to the top? Are you ready to see the Net’s free and open marketplace sucked into a pit of pipes built and fitted by the phone and cable companies and run according to rules lobbied by the carrier and content industries? “Do you believe a free and open market should be ‘Your choice of walled garden’ or ‘Your choice of silo’? That’s what the big carrier and content companies believe. That’s why they’re getting ready to fence off the frontiers….

Google’s timing is impeccable. What if Google 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 upplanting telecoms in one fell swoop. Sounds crazy, but how might Google go about it? First it would build a national broadband network–let’s call it the GoogleNet–massive enough to rival even the country’s biggest Internet service providers. Business 2.0 has learned from telecom insiders that Google is already building such a network, though ostensibly for many reasons. For the past year, it has quietly been shopping for miles and miles of “dark”, or unused, fiber-optic cable across the country from wholesalers such as New York’s AboveNet. It’s also acquiring superfast connections from Cogent Communications and WilTel, among others, between East Coast cities including Atlanta, Miami, and New York. Such large-scale purchases are unprecedented for an Internet company, but Google’s timing is impeccable. The rash of telecom bankruptcies has freed up a ton of bargain-priced capacity, which Google needs as it prepares to unleash a flood of new, bandwidth-hungry applications. These offerings could include everything from a digital-video database to on-demand television programming.

Full Article – http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8673

2. The net will become ubiquitous

UN predicts an ‘internet of things’

Changes brought about by the internet will be dwarfed by those prompted by the networking of everyday objects, says a report by a UN body. It would seem that science fiction is slowly turning into science fact in an ‘Internet of Things’ based on ubiquitous network connectivity. Today, in the 2000s, we are heading into a new era of ubiquity, where the ‘users’ of the internet will be counted in billions and where humans will become the minority as generators and receivers of traffic. This is part of what we call Web 2.0, a web of services that communicate with each other in real time over the net without human intervention, and Google is a pioneer in the development of Web 2.0 technologies. In a sense the internet will become the world computer, the world’s largest super computer. A massivly parallel system of interconnected machines that spans the entire globe with a total processing power much greater than any single super computer today.

Full article – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4440334.stm

3. Google at the center of ubiquity

So whats the plan for all the dark fiber Google has been buying up? 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. While Google could put these containers anywhere, it makes the most sense to place them at Internet peering points, of which there are about 300 worldwide.

Maybe Google will end up becoming the first sentient AI, if storing and finding association patterns between data is the essence of conscious thinking. The amount of information that Google has at its disposal is staggering, and poised to continue its growth with the introduction of Google Mail. What makes Google more than an extra-big database is the software that sits under that database, and its ability to continue scaling up. Google’s focus is human activity and the relationships between trillions of interactions. When I think about that , and then think about how much the daily use of the web has come to rely on Google, my joke about the system becoming sentient, by intent or by accident, seems a little less funny.

Full article – http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20051117.html