In a recent-ish column John Naughton argues that “Google wants world domination”, and discusses how some of their recent business actions can be seen as an attempt to build and control a large, and perhaps controlling, share of tomorrow’s internet infrastructure.
Is it time to be nervous? Are there possible anti-trust issues at stake? Or is this simply bright, well-funded people making smart business decisions?
The column in question is “Microsoft first – then Google wants world domination”, from 25 Feb ’07. I think the link will require that you go through a complex and annoying registration system to read the piece, so I’ll try to summarize the key bits here.
The short version is the Google has a lot of cash at their disposable and they’re using it to “purchase colossal amounts of network bandwidth – the fibre-optic cabling that forms the backbone of the net.”
PBS columnist Robert Cringely reports a recent conversation in which a bandwidth broker – someone who buys and sells bandwidth on fibre-optic networks around the world – told him that Google now controlled more network fibre than any other organisation on the planet.
OK, that’s pretty darn remarkable in its own right. But it also turns out that Google is also building large number of “server farms”
with tens of thousands of computers in each – and locating them all over the US and elsewhere in the world.
Google’s not saying why they’re doing all this (big surprise), but Naughton notes that this is exactly what one would do if one was planning to serve up large amounts of data on demand. Say, for example, internet distribution (“broadcasting”) of television and films.
YouTube (now owned by Google) has amply demonstrated the popularity and demand for on-line video. The trick now is to deliver high quality TV and film in a manner that won’t wipe out the existing network infrastructure (much of which was built to support small message items like e-mail and text-based web pages).
How might you do that? You’d have a lot of high speed, high capacity fiber, and big data centers scattered around the world so that requests could be routed to the nearest data center, minimizing the load on the network and on any specific data center.
Hmmm….
And the worry? To quote Naughton again:
Any company which had built such an infrastructure could effectively dictate its own terms, because only it could deliver what consumers had learned to crave. Such a company would, in effect, control the world.
If that comes about, we will have been well and truly Googled.
In the “everything old is new again” department, this smells like a classic example of vertical integration to me. Just as Carnegie controlled the mines, the railroads, and the steel mills, here we have Google controlling important tools that allow people to create content (YouTube, Blogger, Google Apps), the primary tool people use to find content (their search engine), and (if Naughton’s right) the physical infrastructure used to host and deliver that content.
I’m not a lawyer or an economist, so it’s not immediately obvious to me whether there’s an anti-trust case to be had here. If there is, I’m sure it would be a tough sell, since it would seem pretty difficult to argue that Google’s interests are (at this point) exclusionary, and there are certainly plenty of other content generation systems and search engines out there. The network infrastructure could be trickier down the road, however, especially if people can show that Google’s control of those resources is denying them access to markets and opportunities.
Tip of the cap to my lovely wife for originally bringing this column to my attention.
An interesting local twist to this story is that Google is locating one of these facilities at The Dalles, Oregon. The unique thing about The Dalles is The Dalles Dam, a major hydroelectric facility on the Columbia River. Those computer farms are going to use a lot of energy. The operations most known for siting in The Dalles previously were the very energy intensive aluminum processing industry facilities.
In the Pacific Northwest, apparently we can use paper and kill trees, or use computers and kill salmon. When The Dalles Dam was built in the late 50s it created a reservoir that flooded over the former native fishing grounds at Celilo Falls.
Do no evil?